In elementary school, teachers taught in contained environments. We all sat in the same desks for 6 hours. We had recess twice a day, a chance to get outside and play, alone, with our friends, in organized games. You knew that every teacher knew your face, watched out for your safety, monitored the rules.
In junior high we rushed from class to class amid traffic jams and insults and fights. We stayed locked within a building for 6 hours. No one knew your face, no one watched out for your safety or monitored the rules except running wasn't aloud and neither was tardiness. Every day teachers watched indifferently as kids punched and tripped each other, turned a blind eye when kids kicked your books, stole your homework, spit on you, and threw food at you.
What experience prepared you for this?
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Learning Journeys
I'm reading Ken Bain's book What the Best College Students Do. One of Bain's interests is how students handle failure, how they deal with a lack of success. How students navigate failure, Bain asserts, determines their ability to stretch and grow as learners.
Using that premise, it seems to me that a great assignment might ask students to account for the failures in their education, then examine the who what where when why and how of those instances.
We create learning narratives that are based on our successes. I was a model student, I got good grades, I looked for advanced study opportunities, I sought out the best schools. I am a direct result of my academic successes and accomplishments.
Success breeds success.
But what happens when we fail, and how doe we respond to that?
What if you made an inventory of your failures in school, and then accounted for those. What do those look like, and what do they say about us as a learner? Also, how do these shape and influence our learning journeys?
In seventh grade I struggled with math, geography, art, English, and science. I was utterly lost in those classes. I'd been placed in the Honors track and so was surrounded by the smart students. That was a year of almost absolute defeat. I was a year younger than everyone, and they were far more physically and intellectually mature than I was. I was plagued by headaches and fear -- fear of the noise and tension, fear of the collective anger, fear of the crowds, fear of the expectations -- the insider's knowledge that I seemed to lack. My listening was awful. I missed assignments. My notebooks were a mess. Everyone around me seemed to be speaking a different language, a language I couldn't translate. I don't recall getting past the insult of the school's scale and scope--after 7 years of an intimate schooling in a community of teachers that cared, of learning in integrated classrooms, the middle school model seemed hostile, almost like a nightmare I expected to waken from. Headaches every day.
My only solace was band, and Home Ec. In band we played music and expressed emotion. In Home Ec I felt comfortable in what I'd learned at home: cooking and sewing.
I want to write in more detail about specific past learning failures. I'll end here with a list of my everyday experiences that filled that first year: being late for classes, getting my books out from my arm (so that they sprawled across the hall while people walked across them or scattered them even more), getting punched in the arm, breaking my glasses, getting insulted, getting tripped, discovering pens that leaked on my shirt and pants, serving detention, and headaches--headaches from the noise, headaches from the violence, headaches from the strain, headaches from the hormones and tension. There was never a moment when I breathed, relaxed, felt comfortable. Except band. Band brought moments of lyricism and feeling. Home Ec brought textures of cloth and smells from cooking. These classes served as islands of comfort and intimacy, brief respites of a feminine understanding in a chaotic madhouse where teachers and students and learning itself seemed bitter, needlessly arcane, encased in unreadable textbooks, purposeless, even hostile.
Using that premise, it seems to me that a great assignment might ask students to account for the failures in their education, then examine the who what where when why and how of those instances.
We create learning narratives that are based on our successes. I was a model student, I got good grades, I looked for advanced study opportunities, I sought out the best schools. I am a direct result of my academic successes and accomplishments.
Success breeds success.
But what happens when we fail, and how doe we respond to that?
What if you made an inventory of your failures in school, and then accounted for those. What do those look like, and what do they say about us as a learner? Also, how do these shape and influence our learning journeys?
In seventh grade I struggled with math, geography, art, English, and science. I was utterly lost in those classes. I'd been placed in the Honors track and so was surrounded by the smart students. That was a year of almost absolute defeat. I was a year younger than everyone, and they were far more physically and intellectually mature than I was. I was plagued by headaches and fear -- fear of the noise and tension, fear of the collective anger, fear of the crowds, fear of the expectations -- the insider's knowledge that I seemed to lack. My listening was awful. I missed assignments. My notebooks were a mess. Everyone around me seemed to be speaking a different language, a language I couldn't translate. I don't recall getting past the insult of the school's scale and scope--after 7 years of an intimate schooling in a community of teachers that cared, of learning in integrated classrooms, the middle school model seemed hostile, almost like a nightmare I expected to waken from. Headaches every day.
My only solace was band, and Home Ec. In band we played music and expressed emotion. In Home Ec I felt comfortable in what I'd learned at home: cooking and sewing.
I want to write in more detail about specific past learning failures. I'll end here with a list of my everyday experiences that filled that first year: being late for classes, getting my books out from my arm (so that they sprawled across the hall while people walked across them or scattered them even more), getting punched in the arm, breaking my glasses, getting insulted, getting tripped, discovering pens that leaked on my shirt and pants, serving detention, and headaches--headaches from the noise, headaches from the violence, headaches from the strain, headaches from the hormones and tension. There was never a moment when I breathed, relaxed, felt comfortable. Except band. Band brought moments of lyricism and feeling. Home Ec brought textures of cloth and smells from cooking. These classes served as islands of comfort and intimacy, brief respites of a feminine understanding in a chaotic madhouse where teachers and students and learning itself seemed bitter, needlessly arcane, encased in unreadable textbooks, purposeless, even hostile.
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