My Goal
Develop a good system in AL / HAL to improve engagement.
Students will determine the following about themselves:
-
One core value and why that value is so important to them
- One hope / dream for their future
- One language arts challenge
Core Value
Use this as a focus for discussions, journals, writing assignments, and projects.
Honesty
- Find passages in the novel about honesty
- Bring honesty up during discussions about the novel
- Write about honesty in essays and reflections
- Explore it in a project
Future Hope
Use your future hope to guide projects, discussions, essays, the reading, your responses to reading.
- Can you read Slaughterhouse-Five through the lens of your science interest?
- What does The Color Purple contribute to your thoughts of being a parent?
- In what ways can you stretch your creativity in this infographic assignment?
Language Arts Challenge
Identify your own language arts challenge and work to practice until you've improved.
You should flag certain assignments with your language arts challenge, so and you and I can watch the progress.
Core Value
Hope / Wish
for Future
Language
Arts
The
Triangle of
Individual
Concerns
Responsibility
Helping
People
Commas with
Subordinate Clauses
The
Triangle of
Sandra Jones'
Concerns
The goal was to help the students see that they should fill the class with their own interests and goals.
They could do this in small and large ways.
Frequently and naturally include their interests in our class as often as possible.
What does Of Mice and Men say about empathy? Is this character struggling with his inability to be positive? Can this book help me be a high-school counselor?
Most literary works are about lots of things, so this would work.
When we are working on other things, like research or Poetry Out Loud, this also works.
Look for poems about honesty or healthcare or friendship/loyalty.
Do some research on how amazing middle schools teach students how to recognize fake news or how Elon Musk is influencing NASA.
Sounds great, right?
We had just read Of Mice and Men in American Lit. and A Raisin in the Sun in Honors American Lit.
So, I introduced a Self-Designed Project - a genius hour thing.
Since George or Lennie in Of Mice and Men and The Youngers in A Raisin in the Sun do not have the time or the freedom to truly pursue their interests or dreams, and since we understand how important that is . . .
We have an opportunity to spend two weeks or so learning about what we want to learn about.
This should be items you identified.
It can be related to the text or not. It doesn’t matter.
For some students, this was fantastic. For most students, however, this was quite a mess. This included many honors sophomores.
1. They struggled to think of their focus, so they reverted to what was easy or what they thought I wanted.
2. They simply wanted to be told what to do, how much to do, and how to go about it. They didn't want to make their own choices.
3. They completely did NOT understand WHY we would do anything like this at all in a literature class.
In the course of working to convince them to embrace this opportunity, I realized that students don't really see education the way we see it.
And this is really what I want to talk about today.
They did not understand why learning math is important if they aren't going to use it in a job, why understanding some concepts in art would be important to non-artists, why learning to play an instrument does more then teach you to play an instrument.
They simply told me I was wrong and the school is wrong. Good schools teach students important things and our school has us work on Bloom's taxonomy projects, practice collaboration, and get to know each other.
So, I asked them what they wanted from their school.
They want to be TAUGHT the things that they need and they said teachers don't really teach anymore. When they say "teach," they mean lecture and explain. "That's what teaching is."
The majority of students see the majority of iTerm classes as a huge waste of time, for example, because they are not practical.
What do they want?
How to do taxes
How to get a job
How to get credit cards and avoid debt
What a mortgage is
How to make their own appointments
How to change a tire
What a resume should look like
How to earn lots of money
How to get into a good college
How to invest in the stock market
ACT strategies
What Do They Want?
They want to simply be told how to do it.
"Tell us how and make us do it. Give us a grade on how well we do it."
HOW?
I am generalizing a bit, but this is the sense I got from the sophomores this year.
Frankly, I thought we had solved this problem with The Renaissance and The Enlightenment
From a survey I gave some sophomores and juniors
I tried to express to this to them:
1. If you can design your own project that's about something you care deeply about
2. If you use the resources available to you to dive deeply into the idea
3. If you actually learn something
Then, you'll are better equipped to learn how to do your taxes and how to buy a home than people who are directly taught those specific things.
If you can write good geometry proofs, your problem solving skills as a nurse will be better.
If you can read Shakespeare with very little help, there is little that will puzzle you in software manuals.
If you can play the piano in front of hundreds of people and not let a few mistakes bother you, you will be a better lawyer.
If you can read primary sources in History and use them to analyze similar issues today, you will be a better parent and a better artist.
ALSO
They didn't buy it. They don't buy it.
I told them that teachers talk about this all the time.
They did not believe me and they think I have a radical philosophy of education.
In the end, most of the students are still convinced that learning French is a waste of time unless you are going to work with or live with French-speaking people.
NOPE!
Math is important just for college and for helping their future children.
Reading Macbeth is important because most well-educated people have read it. It might come up on Jeopardy.
Playing an instrument looks good on a college resume. And it's a good break from learning.
They say that there is an enormous list of things they need to know and we waste most of our time teaching them German, Pre-Calc, dotted 1/8 notes, Surrealism, Hamlet, imagist poetry, WWI, and Buddhism.
"Get to the stuff we need and don't make us do projects about it. Just teach us."
After trying to convince them of all this, I said, "You must think most of your days at this school are waste of time!"
"Yup!"
I had them complete an assignment about how they could make their education more their own.
Here are some questions from it.
Photo by andersabrahamsson on Foter.com / CC BY-SA
This was going to be a major part of the 2nd semester this year.
Write about a time this 2nd semester when you were inspired by your own interests / passions / goals and tapped into your interests / passions /goals in one of your OTHER courses.
I envisioned this happening in a wide variety of classes: French, Spanish, Math, Chemistry, Orchestra, Ethics, Ceramics, etc.
I was also going to talk with all the Upper School teachers to make them aware that students might be trying to take their education into their own hands at times.
Because of the problems I was having with the majority of students, I started to worry that I was insane and that no other teacher sees education this way.
Rightly or wrongly, I decided to delay these steps until next year.
My Questions For You
Where in our classes do students have an opportunity to go their own way within some parameters? Does it happen often?
Do we spend time explaining why we are doing the things we are doing?
Is it possible to allow students to design / pursue their own learning to some degree in every class?
Am I putting the cart before the horse? Am I barking up the wrong tree? Am I pulling my leg?
My Goal
By Nathan Mattson
