All sparkles may not go on to shine...

There are many thoughts just sitting in my head that I have never found the right words to verbalize. They only take on life in the spoken world when some very intelligent person expresses a thought of their own that in some way parallels mine, and in doing so, provides me with the language I was lacking. If you couldn't guess, that happened to me this week. Thanks to my supervisor, I can now express to those of you who read this blog one of my greatest concerns when it comes to education...

This entry focuses on students who lose their sparkle.

What is a student's sparkle? Many of you can probably guess. It is that enthusiasm to learn, that natural curiosity, that eagerness to explore and discover which every child possesses at birth. However, somewhere along the line, many sparkles lose their refractive power. They fade into dull gray dots of apathy.

I have many dull gray dots amongst the juniors that I teach. The way they drag their feet into class, slump down in their chairs, and immediately put their heads down causes me to wonder, when did they loose it? When did they lose their sparkle?

Did it happen in a moment? The first time a teacher shot down a question? The first time someone said they were stupid? The first time they got called a trouble maker? The first time they were compared to a "more intelligent" child?

Or did it happen gradually? Was it simply the accumulation of multiple academic and life frustrations that after 17 years just forced their bright and beautiful sparkle into a dull submission? Either way, my apathetic students are my greatest frustration and my deepest heartbreak.

Which leads me to the question that has driven my academic pursuits since I became interested in education...

Can you re-spark a sparkle?

Can you undo 13+ years of academic discouragement? Can you fight unfortunate life circumstances and devastating events that have nothing to do with school, but that do gut wrenching damage to children?

This post has a lot of questions and not many answers. Personally, I would like to think you can re-ignite something in the mind of an apathetic student. Especially if you are willing dedicate yourself to doing so. With time and patience, sometimes you can get the blood flowing through a student's scholarly vein again. The question is, how? Showing students you believe in their abilities is great. Setting high standards for all of your pupils is admirable. Going the extra mile to ensure they understand the concepts you are teaching by staying after school, catering to their individual learning needs, and getting to know them personally is extraordinary.

But what about the ones that are so far gone that even all of that is not enough? Do you just let all lingering hints of a glimmer die? How do we as teachers reach the students who lost their sparkle so long ago, they have forgotten what it feels like to care?

Please let me know what you think. I am really interested in other people's insights and experiences with this particular challenge.

A Bronte Tutorial in Attitudes Toward Behavior

I find that when I am struggling with an issue, inspiration comes from most surprising places.

My most recent befuddlement rises from the complete disregard that many of my students, especially in my third block class, show for basically everything we do. Some (not all) of them possess the unique skill of being able to maintain a steady stream of dialogue, that has nothing to do with 20th Century Global Studies, for the entire 80 minutes we are together. All efforts on my part to refocus them have been successful for 15 minute spurts, but nothing I have tried so far has had any lasting hold on the behavior in my classroom. By the end of class Friday, I was feeling very frustrated and a bit personally injured by their apparent lack of respect for me and the other students in the class.

Before going to bed Friday night, I took some time to continue my literary journey through Charlotte Bronte's master work Jane Eyre. So far, I am very impressed with Miss Bronte's writing style and character development. I am especially impressed with Helen Burns, a school friend of Jane's, who provides many deep insights into human nature. At one point in the story, Helen gives her thoughts on the darker side of human behavior,

"...with this creed, I can so clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime, I can so sincerely forgive the first while I abhor the last; with this creed, revenge never worries my heart, degradation never too deeply disgusts me, injustice never crushes me too low..."

So lofty words for so young a person, and the point they drive home is so important. Especially for my current situation. This concept of admonishing the behavior instead of the individual, of maintaining disdain for the act, but forgiving the person who committed it is one that I am constantly forgetting and rediscovering.

My students do not exist only for the 80 minutes that I teach them. On some level I realize that, but on days like Friday, it is the first thing I overlook. So much more is going on in their lives than I can possibly see from my position of authority at the front of the room. While my mind is on how to convey the connections between Imperialism, Industrialism, and World War One, while I am up nights obsessing over how to make the world of 1914 Europe come alive in my classroom, my students are dealing with a million other issues that range from, "Does he/she like me, cause I definitely like him/her." to "I think I might be pregnant."

Therefore, by laying aside my perspective of my students as disrespectful people (which they are not) and instead viewing their behavior as disrespectful (which it is), I might be able to get further. Perhaps by treating them like respectable and mature adults, I can gain more cooperation. It may be time to have a discussion with the class about proper classroom behavior and reasonable classroom expectations and why they are important. This conversation should have happened earlier, but better late than never.

Talking to my students about my expectations may very well have absolutely no effect on anything. In which case, I will have to be a bit more firm. However, I would like to give my them the benefit of the doubt and at least afford them the chance to be the kind of students I know they are capable of being.

I think I will probably write Bronte's excellent insight on some scrap of paper and add it to my wall of inspiration. No matter how wronged I may feel, no matter how disgusting or disrespectful an act committed against me may seem, I feel it is essential to my life philosophy that I am able to divorce that behavior from not only my students, but all the people that hold essential places in my life. That is most definitely more difficult to do than it is to say. Generally speaking though, I function much better when I am able to remember that there is more to people than their ugliest parts.

We all have within us the capability to be both extraordinarily inspiring with our acts of selflessness and bravery and destructively harmful with our acts of selfishness and cowardice. It is easy to see all the ways in which we can be the latter, but sometimes it takes someone else's undying belief in our ability to be the former to help us realize that we are also capable of making a positive difference in this world.

Benchmarks

I am guessing there is a decent chance that most of the people reading this blog have at some point in their lives encountered the Robert Frost poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." But in case you have not, here it is.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

The first time I interacted with this creation of Mr. Frost's, I was in an eighth grade English class. Something about it immediately grabbed my attention. Like most things that grab my attention for reasons I can't explain, this poem stuck with me. I mulled it over in my head for days, but no matter how many times I wrote the poem out, no matter how many times I recited the lines in my head, I could not summon forth the deeper meaning belonging to Frost's words.

My senior year of high school I encountered this poem again. We read it in an English class I was taking shortly after being dealt the most devastating blow I have ever endured. This time, I came to a conclusion about the poem's meaning before we had finished the first read through. It seemed to me that Frost was contemplating death, and more specifically, whether or not it was time for him to die. In the end, he decided that even thought death seemed "lovely" and quiet and peaceful, he still had miles to go before it was his time to die.

Now, I am a senior in college, and Frost's poem about a silent evening in a winter wonderwood has been very much on my mind. Perhaps because it has been snowing so much, but I think there is another reason as well. My understanding and interpretation of this poem has again been altered. Frost's woods make me think of contentment. They remind me of moments in my life when everything is beautiful and I am at peace. Like the traveler in the poem, I am tempted to try and suspend myself in those moments forever, or you could say, I am tempted to stay in the woods.

However, at this point in my life that is not something I can afford to do. Like that man in those woods on that calm and snowy night, "I have promises to keep." I have promises to keep to myself regarding places I want to go and things I want to do. I have promises to keep to other people about the kind of person I am going to be and the level of commitment I am going to have to the causes I believe in. These promises make it so that, at least for now, I cannot slow down, and I cannot be content. I have to leave my comfort zone and push the limits. Mostly, I need to find out how much of a person I am capable of being and how much that person is capable of doing, because right now I do not feel like I have a very good grip on what I am actually capable of.

I love that I have these re-occurring themes in my life. By that I mean certain songs, certain movies, certain literary works, certain people that reappear from time to time. They act as important benchmarks that provide me with valuable insights regarding my personal development. It never ceases to amaze me how experience and current life situation can influence my perspective on the world. Is Frost's poem about death? Is it about contentment? Is it just about appreciating beauty but realizing that we must return to reality? Or is it supposed to be about all of those things? I don't know. But in the end that is not what matters. "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is valuable to me because it is so subjective, and because that subjectivity makes it so easy to relate to my life no matter how old I get or how much my situation changes. Considering the fact that I am only twenty-two, and my life is only just beginning, it is safe to assume that my interpretation of Frost's words will continue to experience many additional alterations in the years to come. After all, I still have "miles to go before I sleep."

I hope you realize, this means WAR!

Today, my classes started a war. I say classes because as of 9:00 AM today, I am the sole instructor of both of Mr. K's 20th Century Global Studies blocks. I say we started a war, because that is literally what we did.

Before I go any further, I need to introduce you to a famous education scholar that is near and dear to the Education Department here at Swarthmore. His name is Bruner, and many of you have probably heard of him, but for those of you who have not, here is his basic philosophy. Bruner believed that it was important for children to interact with new material that they were expected to learn in a way that allowed them to form their own conclusions and come up with their own answers. In doing so, they would interact with the material they were studying on a deeper level. Thus, Brunarian activities often focus on helping students understand a concept before they get filled in on all the nitpicky (though still often important) details.

The activity I created was called Project CubeWorld. For this project, I placed students in 5 groups and gave each group a country (Country #1, Country #2, etc.). Next, I handed them each a packet that contained background information on all five countries and the various treaties between countries. Students were asked to read the materials in the packet and then list their country's basic traits, most prevalent concerns, allies, and adversaries. This project was called CubeWorld because I also provided and map (which was on the board as well) that depicted the countries in the shape of squares.

I should mention that the five countries in the activity were actually the five main countries involved in WWI (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, France, England, and Russia), and all of the treaties included in the packet were the actual treaties created between these countries, but with the real names taken out and replaced with numbers.

Once we had established all of the alliances, the nature of the alliances, and the adversaries, I read a series of events that happened in CubeWorld in 1914. After reading each event, I asked each group to decide what position their country would take with regards to the event. The first event was the construction of a railroad from Country #4 (Germany) to Country #8 (The Balkans), which consequently was also one of the first events that led to tensions between the European Powers in 1914. We continued all the way through the assassination of Franz Ferdinand (also known as the heir to the throne in Country #3) and the invasion of Belgium by Germany.

The activity worked very well, and both classes ended up going to war in the right order at the right time. Many of the groups ineven figured out what we were doing before the game was through, which was fantastic in my opinion.

I still need to think more critically about how to design group work that more readily ensures engagement on the part of all group members. I had some students today who did not contribute very much, if at all, and instead spent most of their time talking about other things or just simply doing nothing. Some things that might do more to ensure accountability are assigning roles to each group member and holding students accountable through grades for their participation from time to time. If anyone else has other suggestions, I would love to hear them.

Overall, I am very excited to be starting my own Unit. Today was so much more fun and so much more fulfilling than that last couple of weeks have been. I feel much more in my element even though there are still plenty of areas from improvement. Tomorrow we fill in the details of how The Great War began, and then we start talking about the leaders from various countries.

Wallpaper

I spent a lot of time as I was walking around my school today looking at the walls. They are covered with the kind of posters pushing positive thinking that you might expect.

"There is no "I" in team."

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." - Eleanor Roosevelt

"Be the change you wish to see in the world." - Mohandas Gandhi

I remember reading similar quotes in my own high school and being deeply touched by some of them. One in particular was written on a marker board in my 11th and 12th grade English classes (taught by the same remarkable teacher).

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. That is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." - Henry David Thoreau

When I saw a quote such as that hanging in a teacher's room, I knew it was a space where dreaming was allowed. I felt more comfortable sharing ideas and exploring curiosities because I knew I was in a place that embraced dreams and encouraged mistakes.

As I was leaving my classroom today, I noticed a quote hanging above the door that I had never seen before.

"Good is the enemy of Great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life." - Jim Collins

Initially I was very impressed by this quote. However, as the day wore on, I found myself more troubled by it.

I do not believe that the great people whose words and actions end up plastered all over high school hallways set out to be great. Gandhi probably did not wake up one morning and think to himself, "I am going to be the greatest champion of peaceful protest the world has ever seen, and people will remember me forever." Eleanor Roosevelt did not, I am guessing, look across the dinner table and say to her parents, "Mom. Dad. Someday I am going to marry a man, and he is going to become president, and when he does, I am going to change the role that the first lady plays in this country forever. I am going to give women a strong role model that they will look to for years and years to come."

I could go on, but I think I've ingrained the point I am trying to make. The greatest and most inspiring people in our world did not end up in their respective roles by setting out to be great. Instead, they found an issue they were passionate about changing and they pursued it with all of their heart, soul, mind, and spirit. They refused to rest until they saw their dreams of a better world realized. In the end, this meant that they never rested.

Therefore, while I can truly appreciate the intention of this quote, I believe it misses the mark ever so slightly. Instead of inspiring our youth to be great, I believe that we should inspire them to be passionate about making the world a better place. True greatness comes not from a place of selfish ambition, but from a place of selfless vision.

The Meaning of Life

In addition to student teaching, I am also running a group for 7th-9th grade girls in the Chester Children's Chorus. This chorus is made up of 2nd-12th grade students from the city of Chester, PA, which is notorious for its struggles with education. The official name of the group is the Young Women's Power Hour, but they truly hate that name, so we have a secret one for ourselves. I'd tell you what it is but...(I really should not have to finish that sentence for you).

From time to time, I want to talk about them in this blog as well. Now is one of those times.

The YWPH is considered a "total wellness" group. What this means is that we focus on developing healthy bodies and minds. We meet twice a week, and we exercise for about thirty minutes, and then we have discussions. Last semester, our focus was concentrated on the Penn Resiliency Program. This program was originally developed to prevent the development of symptoms of depression in adolescents. However, I used it with my girls because it has activities that help develop problem solving skills, assertiveness, and that give students a vocabulary useful for talking and thinking about emotions and how they affect our actions. We had some great conversations, but I felt that my girls were a bit too cognitively mature for the curriculum.

So this semester, we are doing something completely different. We are exploring the meaning of life. My hope is that by exploring the general question, "What gives peoples' lives meaning?" the girls will gain some insight into what makes their own lives meaningful.

I did not design a curriculum for these discussions right off the bat, because I decided it would be more meaningful if the girls came up with their own ideas of how "the meaning of life" should be explored. At the beginning of our first meeting Saturday, I wrote the question "What gives peoples' lives meaning?" on the board and asked the girls to take a good 15 minutes to really think about the many different areas of life where meaning can be found. After adding their ideas to the board, I asked them to do their best to organize the ideas they came up with into more finite groups. Here's what they came up with...

Loving Relationships: Family, Friends, Romance

Beliefs: Religion, Faith, Morals and Values

Ambition: Power, Money, Respect, Employment

Passion: The Arts, Learning/School, Creativity, Service Work

Taking a Break: Travel, Chill Time, Food, Hobbies

I was very impressed that they were able to construct such a meaningful curriculum for the semester. It made my life easier to be sure :) They are an amazing group of young women and I love them all dearly. I am so excited to hear what they have to say about how we find meaning in life!

From the Mouths of Babes

Today I had the privilege of witnessing a student deliver one of the most thoughtful interpretations of Starry Night that I have ever heard in all my years of interacting with that painting. It was completely beautiful. My lesson for the day was on the way society influenced art and vice versa in the late 19th and early 20th century. We started with Realism, worked our way through Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and ended our conversation with Cubism. The main objective of this activity was to point out how society became less about conformity and more about individual expression at the beginning of the 20th century. As the eras of art progress, the artists within the same genre get more and more distinguishable from each other.

The students got very interested and involved in discussing the works of art, and they especially enjoyed Van Gogh's Starry Night. One boy compared it to what the reflection of the night sky might look like in a puddle of gasoline, which I thought was clever (even if not totally thought out). However, the comment that stopped me dead in my tracks came from one of the quietest students in the class. The only time she had opened her mouth the whole period was to say "here" during attendance, but she made up for quantity with quality.

We were talking about what emotions the painting provokes. Students were saying things like anger, sadness, depression, confusion, which were all perfectly excellent answers. Then Silvia (name changed) raised her hand and cautiously suggested, "I think that the painting shows very conflicting emotions." Of course I asked her to explain why she thought so. She replied, "Well, the sky is very swirly and violent looking, but the town in the background is very still and calm looking, so I think when Van Gogh was painting this, he was experiencing conflicting emotions about something."

For a moment, all I could do was stand dumb founded, but I quickly collected myself and asked the rest of the class what they thought about Silvia's interpretation. Overall, I was very impressed with their level of maturity and their engagement in the conversation today. I am especially proud of my group of students because they have been labeled "CP," or College Prep. This is just a nice way of saying you guys will probably go to college, but you are not quite smart enough for honors.

Many of the teachers I have interacted with at my school prefer teaching honors classes and do not get any joy out of teaching CP classes. They complain that CP kids have more behavior issues, more difficulty grasping advanced concepts, and a wider range of ability levels. That may all be true, but I tried to go in to my first days of teaching with an open mind and high expectations. The conversation we had today definitely required my students to deal with advanced concepts, and they handled it brilliantly.

I believe that teaching can take on many different forms. Yesterday, I tried to be brilliant, eloquent, witty, and captivating with an 80 minute lecture that would leave them wanting more of my fabulous teaching abilities. That failed miserably. Today, I tried to uncover the brilliance lying inside each and every one of my 23 students. That brought me much closer to success. It seems then, that my passion lies in helping students find their own voices and establish their own opinions about the world they live in and the information available to them in that world. Hopefully I can keep that in mind in future lessons. All around, it was a wonderful day that reminded me of all the reasons why the prospect of teaching fills my heart with so much joy.