Thursday, January 21, 2016
Morning Pages 1.21.16
While watching the short YouTube video, an idea from the reading we did in "Why School?" came back to me. Nobody ever asks students what they want to learn, how they learn, or why they want to learn. Year in and year out, teachers use the same lesson plans, same lectures, same teaching styles for different groups of students, assuming that it will always be effective. Sure, students will always need a basic elementary education to build upon; full of the classic standards. But once they move on and up into high school, they should be able to have more of a say in what they want to learn and how they want to do it. This could be why so many generations of students have come to have the mindset that hating school is "cool". If they are not interested in the topic or how it is being taught, they will never have that desire to study and follow it further. I don't think the problem is necessarily the topics being taught as much as it is the amount of freedom given to students. By giving students the freedom to find their passion and pursue it in it's entirety, you would also be filling them with the motivation and true desire to continue learning not only in school, but also in life.
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When one of my friends was student teaching, her cooperating teacher walked her over to her file cabinet (this was back in the day when file cabinets actually contained paper files!), opened a drawer, and said, "See, this is what you do. You take really good notes your first year of teaching, you keep everything, and after that, it's really pretty easy." But as my friend soon found out and all the really great teachers I know quickly learned, too, the real truth is, teaching is *not* really easy. Not if you're doing it right. Good teaching requires extraordinary creativity, mindfulness, and genuine care because no day, no class, no student is ever the same. That means that your carefully planned lessons, the ones you got up at 5am to make, can get wrecked on a fairly regular basis, and you just have to go with the flow. Yet I think that to a large extent, students expect to see teachers operating with a steady hand, and teachers work equally hard to convey that this is the case. I wonder if that's why school so often feels "the same," as you've observed. It's almost like a contract that teachers and students have silently agreed upon, though it doesn't suit either of them very well. Why is that the case, do you think? What would it look like to change that?
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