The year I became an educator, a close friend bought me a book titled, 1001 Pearls of Teachers’ Wisdom. And every weekday morning, while I am having my tea and eating oatmeal, I randomly flip through a few of the pages and read a couple quotes. Truth be told, I flip through the quotes just long enough to find one that seems “tweetable” – and then I tweet it, followed by a few hashtags about motivation, all in the hopes of getting a few more followers. I would be lying if I said the quotes I read every morning were my inspiration for the day. But every now and then I read a quote like the one that opens this blog, a quote that lingers in my psyche throughout the morning only to be revisited by my mind at some point hours after the school day is complete. “Every student can learn, just not on the same day, or in the same way”. It is a saying so simple yet complex; so direct yet completely metaphoric. Every year, we teach a group of students and every year, we face our challenges with just how to get through to every single last one of them. And in their 10 months with us, we fail a lot.

But it is the way we fail that is most interesting to me. That is because uncovering the ways in which educators fail to help all students learn may be arguably more important than analyzing the ways that select teachers succeed in their classrooms and with many of their students. I say “many” and refrain from using the term “all” because outside of the movies, I have never seen, heard, or read about a real teacher who got all of her students to learn everything she wanted to teach them. In reality, we rarely work in totalities.

But because we are comfortable in acknowledging that we never do quite work in totalities, we take a quote like, “Every student can learn, just not on the same day…” and pass the buck. We either chalk up a student’s lack of engagement to their maturity that given year, the classroom dynamic, or the child’s “inabilities”. We rarely slide the notion that perhaps that child isn’t engaged and subsequently isn’t “learning” to our side of the table. Even when we hold that child who isn’t learning in high regard, we still tend to, in an omnibenevolent gesture, “hope” that they will “figure it out” and wish them luck on their next 10 month stint with education the following year. I know that I have done this. I am not convinced that even doing this is enough.

I’m not convinced because the students who spend those 10 months with us are real people, like actual human beings with hopes, desires, and goals. 99.9% of them will, at least, live into their 40s – the question is, what will they be doing at that time? And more importantly, who does the burden really lay upon? That teenage kid who you “taught” and perhaps gave up on because you looked at their life in 10 month stints, or you, the adult who gets paid to teach every student on your attendance roll?

In the 10 months with us, I have witnessed students who would come to school without binders and pencils eventually become A and B level students who eventually came prepared to class on the daily. Sadly, I have also witnessed the reverse. Yes, we are only with these children for 10 months, but that amount of time begets a certain amount of power that we solely hold. So, remember that yes, you are only with your students for 10 months and every student can learn, just not on the same day, or in the same way – but, 10 months is also plenty of time to get all of your students on a page that leads them to writing their own story where the main character triumphs.

[share title=”Share this Post” facebook=”true” twitter=”true” google_plus=”true”]

The post 10 months with us appeared first on Matthew R. Morris.

Let’s take (the majority of) the boys for starters. Most of them rushed through the gingerbread house making activity. They were not patient enough to set the walls in place. They used too much or too little icing on parts that were supposed to connect the house together. Some hastily unpacked their pieces which subsequently led to the gingerbread being already broken before they even started. A few made a diligent attempt to construct the house, but when a piece would eventually fall or slide out of place, instead of having the resilience to re-set the falling piece, they grew frustrated and impatient. End result: maybe two out of fourteen boys went home that day with an intact gingerbread house.

After observing and laughing with the boys for quite some time, I went over to see how the girls were doing. (For this activity, we organized the class by pushing the desks into two long groups and I let the students sit wherever they wanted; so naturally, all the boys went to one table and all the girls went to the other). On the contrary to where you think I was heading with this piece, I observed much of the same things that I saw over at the boys’ table. Some of the girls made elegant gingerbread houses equipped with amazingly designed and perfectly distributed icing. Some had so little patience that after fifteen minutes their gingerbread house was a pile of broken cookie pieces with icing layered all over it. A small group of girls, instead of making the actual house, sat and ate the icing and candy that came with it while chatting. Out of sixteen girls, maybe nine went home with a pristine house.

How does this story tie into themes of teaching and education? One activity, as fun and engaging as it might be, is never going to speak to the unique abilities and strengths of every student in the class. Most of the students didn’t mind going home with half crushed, falling apart gingerbread houses. But when we take the gingerbread houses and replace them with grades and tests, we can start to see the flaws in teaching to a one activity, one assessment approach. If building the gingerbread house was a test, eleven out of thirty would have passed. Now, some would have done better if they got to see someone else model how to make it. Others would have done better if they could work in a quiet environment. You get the basic point here: a cookie cutter, one box approach to teaching and learning is a faulty way of going about our job as a teacher. We’ve got to mix it up, add a little icing so to speak. Yeah…these were just some thoughts as I watched my students having fun on a cool winter day.

[share title=”Share this Post” facebook=”true” twitter=”true” google_plus=”true”]

The post Gingerbread Houses and Cookie Cutter Approaches to Teaching appeared first on Matthew R. Morris.

We tend to forget that these “students” are also “human beings”. The education system tries to present itself as an institution based on objectionable judgments and merit-based standards, but behind the semantics, there is still the reality of human (again, often middle-class and white) teachers teaching human (in many districts, lower-class minority) students. It is hard to be faithfully objective when your culture does not align with a student’s culture. Many disregard the cultural discrepancies through logical rationale about the dichotomy between the student vs. the teacher. Teachers are the adults, students are the kids – so in the greater scheme of things, the adult opinion, impressions, and subjectivity will always prevail. So when a student demonstrates that he is “not prepared for class” by not bringing a pencil, to the teacher it indicates an apathy towards school and towards that teacher in general.

Teachers often forget that school is just a portion of a student’s lived experience. Teachers place homework, tests and attitude towards school on a pedestal while forgetting that kids spend the majority of their time away from school – at home, with family, tending to situations that do not require a pencil and paper.

Teaching requires an open mind. Not only to new pedagogies, teaching methods, and curriculum, but to an understanding that being a teacher requires an open mind to education through validating each and every student experience. If you, as a teacher, are willing to look beyond Malik as a student an actually think of him as a person, then maybe you would understand why he didn’t bring a pencil to class today.

[share title=”Share this Post” facebook=”true” twitter=”true” google_plus=”true”]

The post Students are People First appeared first on Matthew R. Morris.