Tag Archives: Students

Broken Record, or School is Not a Path to Wealth

I feel like a broken record, but I have to say it again: when education is being discussed we should refrain from focusing on words like: grades, academics, work, success, and achievement. I think it best to frame our conversations around words like: growth, change, reflection, understanding, honesty, curiosity, and yes love.

As a middle school teacher, I work with students who are still quite fresh and just put into the oven. They are dealing with identity creation, understanding of social norms and expectations; in short they are messed up. I know because when I was thirteen I felt no one understood me, and now 23 years later I am still trying to recover.

I feel this is a critical stage in helping kids understand how to express themselves and feel comfortable in their own skin. This pastoral care guides much of what and how I teach. For the second time in a week, I have been reminded how right I am, and to be honest the validation feels great!

A few students from my old school in Doha are still blogging. I know because I have stayed subscribed to their blogs and continue to get updates. I think it is so amazing that these kids have found a voice and use their blogs for more than completing homework. Anyway, I opened this post from Nadia today and was moved to tears:

Two special people kept me calm and happy. One was my old English teacher. He was an amazing, inspiring person. He helped us to express our emotions, put them on to paper. He reminded me that lots of others have it much worse than we do, and we should be happy about what we have, everyday of our lives. He left us last year but I wish he could have stayed. He helped me become a better person and express myself, I wish he was here to help me now.

Education has a much bigger impact when we are focused more on creating kind beautiful people than collage applicants and corporate job seekers. For the record, I can “teach” a mean set of skills and convey large amounts of content and knowledge when needed. Go on and leave Nadia some advice…show that she has many teachers who care.

I Want The World To Know

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At the end of every year, I select five students who I have had a profound connection to and give them a copy of Letters To A Young Poet by Rilke. I know the book is over most of their heads, as I usually teach Middle School; I didn’t discover the book myself until I was well into my twenties, but there is something about the simple passages that I feel resonate with the big ideas I try to convey in my classes. If you are not familiar with the book, here is what Wikipedia has to say:

The letters were originally written to Franz Kappus, a 19-year-old student at the Military Academy of Vienna, of which Rilke was an alumnus. Discouraged by the prospect of military life, Kappus began to send his poetry to the 27-year-old Rilke, seeking both literary criticism and career advice. Their correspondence lasted from 1902 to 1908. In 1929, three years after Rilke’s death, Kappus assembled and published the ten letters.

I share this book with the five kids who have shown some appreciation for art, learning, and living life to the fullest. They are not necessarily the “best” students or the most academically successful, but they get “it.” I think it takes a special person to understand passages like this:

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”

I woke up today to a very pleasant email. One of the students who received a book from me last year was James. James is an interesting story. Let’s just say he had/has a difficult time being a “good” student. He reads well beyond his grade level and can contribute some of the most insightful ideas I have ever heard at his age in class discussions, but ask him to sit still, write something down, work on one thing for a long period of time, or to simply calm down-forget about it. He is all over the place, off the wall; if you are into letter clarifications he probably has a few A’s, D’s and H’s somewhere in his file.

At the beginning of last year, I saw something in James. I saw that he was smart, curious, and hungry to learn. His problem was that school was not the place where he could do these things. I knew instantly that his inability to play the school game would be a challenge for him and his teachers. I sat him down early and talked to him about what the year might look like.

Throughout the year James would come into my room to chat during break, we sometimes had lunch; he would tell me personal details about his life and what he was thinking. In short, we built a relationship based on trust and respect.

I was open, honest and frank when it came to my frustrations when he got in a fight over a girl, but I also commended him on getting the lead in the school play. James had a fantastic year in my class. But what did that mean?

Did he score well on assessments? Not really, he continued to skate by with mediocre work. Did he learn a list of skills and new knowledge? Maybe, but nothing compared to how some of his peers performed throughout the year. So how I can I claim he had a great year? Because he went from being a socially awkward seventh grader who couldn’t care less about school or grades to a person who wrote me this:

Hi Sir,

First week of school is done and i am ready to go on holiday. You know that book that you gave me last year i have fingered out what “it” is. Well to start “it” is different in every person. So “it” is the driving force of life your soul your DNA the molecules the seed that starts your life. “it” is with you your whole life even after and before life. You will never find out what “it” is. “it” can hide itself in you forever in your body. But “it” will be somewhere so simple you will just look over it. Now i know that this is a very simple description but i am going to find where “it” is and what “it” is and tell you cause i see this as a mission, a mission that i will complete whatever it takes. this is cause i want to know i want the world to know. And most of all cause you gave me the idea and i am thankful to every thing that you gave me last year and will give me in later on in my life.

Buy for now hope to hear from you soon.

You may be asking yourself, who this kid’s English teacher was. Sure the paragraph could use some love and editing. Yes it would score very low on a rubric, but my point is that sometimes school should be a place to ignite the lingering passion in young people. So many times we extinguish every ounce of excitement these kids have with our curriculum and assessments and grades, when all they really want is for someone to listen to them, respect who they are, and help them find “it.”

I have shared this post with James, and want to ask him at this time- if you are here and reading James, let me say thank you. I am so glad that you are here and alive and connected and curious and searching. That was the whole point of the book, my class, my life. Life is beautiful and perfect and always looking for people like you to join and move the parade forward. Please remember that, I am an email or a blog post away. Let me know how else I can help you. The classroom is not the only place we can learn from each other; we have the whole world. Have a great year and keep in touch. How is our garden doing by the way? You may need to start a new plot! Do it now before it gets too hot. There is interest, but ideas need leaders, and there is no reason why that can’t be you.

School Should Not Be Considered Work

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Last night wmchamberlain sent out a link to an exemplar student blog about learning. I agree with Wilt that commenting on student writing is an important practice for teachers who preach the powers of blogging, and I was about to comment on the post, when I stopped myself and felt the need to hash out my ideas out on my bog first, tone them down a bit, and then perhaps, send off the filtered version for this young writer.

I know her intentions are in the right place, but reading her points, I felt that she was missing the entire point of her “school” experience. She is not alone. Many students, teachers, and parents are still caught up in the “success/ achievement” model of school. I wanted to shed some light on other possible models.

I will write as if I am commenting on her blog, but I did not publish these thoughts there for fear of confusing her. I will allow her teacher to share these ides should he so wish.

I Promise to be a better learner by starting to dedicate more of my free time to school-related things.

What are these school related things? Are they subjects? Are they ideas? Do you like them? Do they excite you? Are you curious? Will forcing yourself to spend more of your precious free time on math exercises making you a better learner? How about you spend more of your school time on free time related things. Search for what interests you at school and do it on your own. Ask questions. Explore. Are you interested in art, dance, science? How can you use your time away from the classroom to further learn about these topics? Learning can and should be done all the time. Do not separate free time and school time. Try to learn about what interests you all the time.

By doing so, I could get a better chance of actually fully understanding what they’re teaching me at school than by not making any use of what I’m being taught if I don’t really understand the material.

Don’t worry so much about material but focus on ideas. Your school is not trying to teach you material, but help you find out how to learn about what you love.

I Promise to be a better learner by having a more one on one relationship with my teachers. This way, when I have a question over my school work or need some help, I could have the confidence to ask one of my teachers for help instead of being afraid, and not ask at all, which could cause me to not understand what I’m learning and probably fail in that class.

Yes! Yes! Yes! Make use of your teachers. Let them help you. You should never be afraid to ask questions. That is what teachers want. We live off of questions.

I Promise to be a better learner by taking school a little more seriously. Using this strategy, I could have a way better chance of being successful in the future than by wasting my free time messing around an not caring that much over school, knowing I could give a little more effort in my school work for a better future.

Here is a suggestion: Let’s not think about the future and how school will help you down the road. Let’s think about right now. Your life! Will taking school more seriously help you right now? If not? Why not? How can we make a plan to have what you learn in school be important to your daily life now? That way you have no choice but to take school seriously. You will love what you learn, because you see it effect your life now, not in some distant future shaded with ideas of college and success.

I Promise to be a better learner by really making an effort to actually understand the material I’m learning in every class. This way, I could actually get something out of what my teachers are teaching me, and I could use that knowledge later on in life when I actually need to use it.

Again, you can use that knowledge now! Ask your teachers why learning biology will help you now! If they don’t have an answer, keep pushing them. You should come up with an answer together. Don’t let them tell you that you will need it in college; that is not good enough.

I Promise to be a better learner by getting more involved in class activities. I will participate in class activities so not only could I share what I learned on the subject, but so I could also hear the other different ways that the same question was answered and that way maybe I could change my way of thinking on that particular question.

There you go! You got it now! Use your friends and classmates and tools for your learning. Share what you learn. Do science experiments at home, design maps write books, create a magazine, make films…bring your school “work” home and make it play, share what you find and you will see that you are learning more than you ever knew possible.

I will leave it to wmchamberlain to see if he wants to share this post with the writer. I don’t want to over step my bounds, but we need to start guiding kids away from “school work” and learning. They are two very different things. In my humble opinion.Let me end by saying great assignment. I love the idea of metacognitive view of learning, and I thinking allowing kids to be reflective learners is crucial to their growth.

Dazed, Amazed, and Determined

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Every teacher probably has their own unique reason for getting into education. Somewhere our motives our probably interconnected in some sort of inspirational lattice, but I am not here to conjecture on why you teach. I want to share a story that elucidates why I got into the business.

Every once in a while, a student does something, or says something that shows the teacher that the hours spent wondering if anything he/she said made any difference in the student’s life. We speak so much about learning and where to find it, and what it looks like, and how to assess it that we have lost touch with any sense of what it means to the life of the children we are dealing with everyday. So consumed are we with skills and content and curriculum that we have forgotten that learning is a long slow process with results we may never see. We plant seeds and tend them the best we can a few hours a day, a few years and then hope that sometime in the future they will bear fruit.

I am here to say that one of my young seedlings from last year just blossomed. James was always mature beyond his age. I always had a hard time understanding how his brain works the way it does, seeing he just finished the seventh grade. Understanding, kind, and deliberate with his learning, he was a pleasure to work with.

In class this past year we struggled with certain themes regardless what we were official meant to be studying.

We looked at the environment and the relationship humans have with it.
We looked at class and how it dictates our relationships.
We looked at how we can work to make the world a better place.

You tell me; how can you assess to see if a 7th grader has learned anything about these insurmountable ideas? Is there a standardized test that can show growth in the field of developing an environmentalist consciousness? Is there a I can give to see if my students are learning that their lives are tightly interconnected with the lives of people spread across the planet? Can we assess the understanding that the way we view the most mundane aspects of our lives is what poetry was meant to do?

Well, today I got a clue. James wrote his first blog post upon returning to his homeland, Nigeria. The fact that he has chosen to carry on with his school blog makes me so proud. It demonstrates that he understands that writing is more than an exercise made monotonous in school. He understands that when faced with emotions that may appear difficult or euphoric it is natural and important to write.

But what did he write, you may ask? The post was not simply a teenager writing about the minutia of his day. You can read the entire post here, and I encourage you to leave him comments. I was also very pleased that he used a CC image and cited it correctly. Without further ado I will share my favorite lines:

I am sitting at the table with the soft music of nature- the wind, blowing in through the windows. I wish I can share in detail how much nature is showing her wonders. From the rustling of the trees up above to the cry of the insects down below. From the whistling of the wandering wind up above, to the hypnotic voice of the woman as she chants while she works, down below. These things cannot just be told, to be understood. They need to be felt to appreciate the remarkable wonders nature as got.

I feel sad and dazed of how much life has changed. Looking back to where I came from and then looking right now to where life’s journey has brought me, there are definitely some differences. I have been here for just a short while and already, I can see the different social classes and their style of living.

Trying to answer that, I started changing my perspective of where I am. Then I started to see the hidden beauties it has. Every time I look outside the car’s window, there are stories all around, stories just around the corner. Stories shown by the way people live, the way people bustle about the streets with emotions that can’t be explained in a thousand words. Stories waiting to be told.

I nearly cried pasting these passages above. Here is a young man who is thinking critically, asking important questions, using a fluid and simple prose to help guide him through his emotions. He sees the poetry in his life and understands it is wrapped in politics and art.

Thank you James. Thank you for listening. Please stay in touch we have important work to do in the years to come…