When I actually got around to teaching, though, things started to change. I began as an 8th grade Language Arts teacher. I taught (then as now), almost entirely lower level students--struggling or even beginning readers. Students who, for a multitude of reasons (lack of parental involvement, the "entertain me" culture of the generation, the abhorrent effects of social media and texting on the English language), hated writing. I was shocked to discover my first year as a teacher that most of my 8th graders didn't even know their parts of speech (I distinctly remember learning these in 4th and 5th grade). Further, students were now openly anti-education. Perhaps I wasn't paying attention, but I don't remember students bragging about how little school meant to them, when I was receiving my education. Now it seemed it was almost students' Raison d'être to demonstrate their disdain for the system as a whole.
After four years, I finally received a position teaching Freshman English. The situation was not much different. I was banging my head up against the wall. Students willingly took zeroes on assignments that could fail them for the year. I screamed, begged, and bribed. Ultimately, I did make a pretty chilling discovery; these kids hate school because:
A) In most iterations, it isn't real-world applicable. I'm not just talking about kids asking "When will I ever need to know what iambic pentameter is?" I'm more speaking to the process. These kids have parents, older siblings, family members and friends in the workforce. They talk. They know that in the working world, very rarely will you be asked to sit in a 18x24 inch desk and individually write something on college-ruled notebook paper.
B) They're not engaged, cognitively or physically, and as it turns out, the two are linked. Long story short, there is now a preponderance of evidence demonstrating that if you want kids to learn, their butts need to get out of their chairs. They need to move. What I found is that many students today will gladly oblige a teacher who demands sitting in nice, neat, orderly rows in a calm, quiet, orderly fashion. It's just for the wrong reasons. They'll sit quietly; that's the best way to sleep.
C) School fails to take advantage of the fact that students are social animals. Schools (again, by and large) tell students that the classroom is for work and the hallways are for socializing and collaborating. We, as educators, miss out on a pretty powerful tool by failing to make our classrooms collaborative.
And finally
D) Students just don't learn "that way" anymore. Maybe we can talk about how they should learn, or how they used to learn, but what good does it do to simply complain about the effect Call of Duty has on learners? We have to meet kids where they are, and not as they should be.
And so, near the end of my sixth year of teaching, I decided to change what I was doing. My classroom next year will be different. It'll have permanent collaborative learning groups, where students are grouped in mixed ability teams. Assignments will be more inquiry-based. Instead of simply knowing how to identify a subject and a verb, a group will be solving problems (for instance acting as editors, researchers, grant-writers, screenwriters, boards, CEO's, et. al.). Finally (and what I'm most excited about), IdeaPaint, a paint which turns any surface into a dry erase surface, will stretch wall to wall, and will even cover the activity tables, which will take the place of individual desks.
My next blog post will detail the hows and whys of my classroom. In the meantime, peruse this video, and tell me how cool it would be to walk into a room and know that no matter where you were within that room, you could write, fully unconstrained.
