by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.
More and more I wonder: is school a good place for teachers who want to make a difference in the lives of their students, and to the future of the world? Is there a way to leave the daily farce of gradebooks, attendance sheets, tests, corporate and statist curriculum, homework assignments, grade-licking college careerist āstudentsā (and parents), fear of parents and administrators, and fear of inconvenient socio-political truths – and at the same time, to make a far more meaningful impact on the lives of the young?
Iām thinking yes. Iām thinking, moreover, obviously. Iām not sure how much longer I want to work for schools. Iād so much rather teach.
Coinciding with that discovery was 2 others:
this video, reminding me of KRS-One’s moniker ‘The Teacher’.Ā (originally found here)
Everyone has a story, every individual and every culture.
Tell yours.
Tell it in words or in sounds or in images or squishy things to touch. Tell it to yourself, or tell it to others. Be creative and unafraid. You know what to do.
But really, there are no coincidences.
My mission as a teacher has to do with teasing out the stories, with helping people find their stories – the most positive ones they can.
Like Clay, I don’t think that teaching is relegated to the classroom. In fact most real content that affects peoples lives is not found in the classroom, it’s found in the experiences that make up each of our stories.
Example: KRS-One is truly a teacher. He inspires to create a positive story.
“Today’s topic – self-construction”
“… This is an opportunity for you to rise to your highest self. There it is.”
I’m not going to tell you his story, watch the video up top, and you’ll get an idea of where those quotes come from.
The point here, is that teachers are found all over.
So why do I choose to teach in the classroom?
Classroom teaching is a unique opportunity to help young people choose their direction and write their stories. It’s like living is research, and the classroom is the lab where we get to make sense of all that cool data.
My job has so much more to do with helping kids organize the information that comes at them (the stories of the world) in a way that makes sense for them, then it does with teaching them the stories of the world, and so much more than it does with “…gradebooks, attendance sheets, tests, corporate and statist curriculum, homework assignments, grade-licking college careerist āstudentsā (and parents), fear of parents and administrators, and fear of inconvenient socio-political truths…”
Yeah, there’s some paperwork and politics. I keep my mind focused on student need and my core values of relationship and hope for the future, and the paperwork and politics don’t seem as important. Everything falls into place.
Cause this is what I am supposed to be doing.
It’s the best way I know to rise to my highest self, and to help others do the same.
A group of kids didn’t come in on the last day and, of those who did, another group left after lunch. And a couple of them played a bit of a mean joke on me. But those who did stay were troupers – helping to move desks into the gym for the exam period, cleaning up the classroom, asking questions, displaying their concerns about next year.
And I forgot to design closure into my year. I started to think about it, with this final blog post, but when our school’s Internet service decided not to cooperate, I ditched the thought.
Rather than forgetting, I’m thinking I left out closure accidentally on purpose. I’m not entirely proud of this year. I definitely felt like I was treading water much of the year – reacting rather than planning and acting. With myself, my students, and the attendant who worked in my classroom with me. I don’t think I really wanted to hear what others felt about it.
So, here is my closure. A plan for the future. I never want to feel like this again. That much I learned this year.
Time is too precious to tread water for even a moment.
I discovered Adam Hunt via his comment on my latest LeaderTalk post. When I went to peruse his blog, I was met with his review of this great (fun) interactive game resource for the classroom (click the logo to go):
I’m having fun and I’m going to test it out on my students next week.
I also like the conversations on play that are available for viewing on the site, including transcripts. Here’s a quote from the site:
āChildren are making up theories of the world, going out and testing those theories, doing experiments to explore those theories, and that testing and experimentation is what we see when we see play. Even the very youngest children are already doing some of the same things that scientists are doing.ā
–Alison Gopnik, Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, co-author, The Scientist in the Crib
Here’s a direct link to the section of the site with the videos –> Does Play Matter?
Every day 2 of our 9-day cycle at school I take my older group of students out on a travel day. We take public transportation to travel from Chateauguay to Montreal.
Each day 2 we try to go to a new place, and each time I try to incorporate a new travel skill into the day, but today was way too cold to go crazy at -18 when we left this morning! Especially after having to wait outside for 30 minutes for our bus when we missed it by about 2 minutes…
Luckily Montreal has an underground city so we opted to wander around underground instead of do the walking tour of great graffiti I had planned. We’re going to save that for a warmer day.
Things we need to work on:
One of my students has a difficult time keeping track of his money and always needs to borrow some in order to get home. Today he had to borrow 6$ from me! I know that this continues to happen because I always bail him out, so I need to plan for this not to happen next time.
I try to get my students to plan the trips, but it is difficult for them because they really do not know Montreal very well even though it is so close to Chateauguay. I have to come up with ways to motivate them to find out about different places of interest.
I felt that today’s trip was kind of dull, though, when I read my students’ posts I see that there are things to experience – even on dull days.
