Think Like a Teacher

New York Times columnist Sara Mosle wrote an insightful column about the Common Core requirements that students read ever-increasing amounts of  “informational text” and far less fiction. I have been mulling this issue for months. Mosle’s arguments that reading expository texts and long form narrative nonfiction will build students’ writing skills are certainly valid. Students also will need basic informational text-writing (and reading) in the workplace. But my gut (and my undergraduate English major) nag at me on this giant swing, even as TeachersFirst published help for teachers (e.g. this article, and this one) on ways to integrate informational texts into all subject areas and improve students’ expertise at understanding and producing such works. I know many adults could stand to improve their writing skills. And I know that writing fiction — or “stories,” as most elementary kids would call them — may not develop skills in supporting a written argument. But I cannot go as far as Common Core does. There is too much that we learn from reading all varieties of texts.

When we read a poem…

• We learn economy of language and how to listen ever so carefully
• We learn to read with our senses, not just black and white text
• We learn to pay attention to subtlety — a skill few adults have anymore (certainly not our politicians)
• We learn to question and marvel at what lies beneath instead of what the media or a “spin master” tells us to believe

When we read a novel…

• We learn to follow a life or a thread for a long time, past the end of the class period or the end of the day, noticing patterns and threads that might not even emerge until twenty chapters later. This is reading life. As adults, we eventually start to notice such threads in our own lives. We call it perspective.
• We learn to read people. Given the frightening statistics on autism spectrum disorders, the more experience we can give kids with reading people, the better off our society will be. Given the need for voters to make choices about candidates whose  informational text “messages” all sound the same, we sometimes rely on reading people to make good choices. Employers read people every time they interview. Interpersonal intelligence makes a common society work. Fiction builds it. No, there is no dollar value on it, but there is serious loss without it.

To further flip my argument around, I wonder what would happen if kids never experienced fiction?

Movies would be our students’ only fiction. With special effects that are near-real, we risk losing the ability to imagine. School takes a large enough toll on creativity as it is. Erasing imagination frightens me. In a generation or so without fiction, we might have no more movies OR fiction. Just YouTube?!

We risk losing a sense of the world. In a global world where few of us will ever see distant people who make our shoes or invest in our government bonds, the importance of cultural detail (or “status detail” as fiction writers call it) is far more than simply a view of life from another place. As we read fiction or narrative nonfiction set in other places, we notice the diverse details that define what we value vs. what those in far off places value. We see how people spend time, fill their pockets,  eat, gather into households, prioritize their money, and interact with each other. Show me. Do not tell me. I need to notice it, to see and learn it. Fiction builds global understanding. Just as travelers notice cultural detail when we arrive in a foreign country, so do we experience it in fictional tales that take place there. When I write and rewrite this blog to craft cultural detail in my depictions of school, of China, of what I do, I am trying to draw you into understanding my ideas. Fiction writers spend months crafting such details– and do it much better than I. If our students never experience immersion in cultural detail, they may never notice, see, and learn global understanding.

I wish that Common Core requirements had dimensions for reading senses, subtlety, submerged messages, perspective, imagination, people, and cultural detail. In twenty years, we may find ourselves in a world that’s a different kind of flat.

Recent events in Newtown, CT  twist a teacher’s gut. Though we have never been there,  elementary teachers* know Sandy Hook School. We know the singsong of morning announcements that echo in terrazzo hallways through the faint smell of departed bus exhaust. We know the sight of a lone child carrying an attendance slip, stopping for an extra moment to look at macaroni snowmen on construction paper posted on the hallway tack strip. We know the sameness of every elementary school.

We cannot conceive of Sandy Hook’s terror, but our minds alternately try to conceive of it and to push it away as an overlay to the fundamental sameness of every day in our schools. Sameness is safety.

Some say schools need to move past sameness. But there is reason and safety in sameness. Sameness is a first grader knowing the green triangle pencil gripper is there in her desk, just where she leaves it at the end of each day. Sameness is the third grader knowing that his math workbook is the one with gray smudges left by the pencil shavings that spilled inside his desk, dregs from the plastic Star Wars sharpener he begged for at Walmart last August. Sameness is the perfume the kindergartener expects to smell when she leans close to whisper to her teacher. Sameness is knowing Sam will ask to go to the bathroom five minutes into math. Sameness is cycle days for specials. Sameness is the smell of pizza day at 10 am. Sameness is knowing your cubby is third from the left and that your blue, fuzzy coat is there waiting to hug you home every day. Sameness is sanity.

I wish sameness to the children and teachers of Sandy Hook who will never be the same. I wish them the softness of their familiar coats, stranded in cubbies. I wish them the smell of a familiar teacher. I wish them an enveloping wave of routine when they return to an unfamiliar school with gaping holes in its sameness. I wish them their smudged workbooks and pencil grippers. And I wish the sameness of all schools will let them know that every school is with them.

*Among my 27 years as a teacher, about half were spent in elementary schools as gifted teacher or technology integrator.

During the holiday season we seek ways to give, not only to our friends and family but also to those less fortunate than we. Teachers give of themselves all year, whether it’s giving extra time to help a struggling student or volunteering as a coach, church helper, or scout leader. The one gift that is most difficult for us to give — for many teachers even harder  to come by than money — is time. I often wonder what teachers would give if they had the time. Here are my top three if-only gifts I would like to give if I had the time.

1. An afterschool club for kids in my community. I know many of the kids who get off the bus on my street go home to an empty home, the TV, and a snack. This is a solid, middle class community, and most of the parents get home well after dark this time of year. I would love to invite the kids to get off the bus at our community center multi-purpose room for a short game of (you name the game), a chance to eat their snacks together with other kids and some adults, and a chance to get the homework done in a friendly, cheerful place. After they were done, maybe we could go outside and play some more or invent silly games. A few adults could go a long way in making homework a positive thing that happens among friends and making a little physical activity more fun than the remote. Alas, I am still working when the buses roll down these streets, so I cannot give this gift– at least not right now.

2. Computer help for seniors (or not so seniors) who are embarrassed to say they need it. I know so many adults who do not know how to find great vacation places or share a link to a Google Map or write a blog post. They have so many stories to tell, but are afraid to start. If I were free at 10 am, I’d love to share Tuesday Tech Fun at Ten for an hour or so. I have a feeling we would discover many hidden talents and interests among folks who have no idea how much technology could open their worlds. But on Tuesdays at ten, I am otherwise occupied.

3. Family tech fun nights. It would be great to help elementary kids surprise their parents with the thought provoking things they can do using online tools like the ones we have feature TeachersFirst’s Special Occasion Ideas for the Classroom. This collection shares a selection from the hundreds of creative tools kids and adults can find on TeachersFirst to collect and montage writing, images, and sound into clever personal projects. I would enjoy organizing the kids as the experts to teach the adults how to  lessons without touching the mouse as the grownups make their own projects side by side with a mini Geek Squad.

It seems quite self centered to say, “I would like to, but  can’t.” Maybe in 2013 I can find the gift of just a little more time to give away. I would love to hear what other teachers’ dream giveaways might be.

If you have read my blog for long, you know that I am a former teacher of gifted students. One of the things we teachers of gifted quickly learn is that the teaching strategies and initiatives we use with gifted kids are often adopted several years later for all children, though altered in pace or depth. It is a source of pride to us, an “I told you so” that we knew what worked all along.  Many of the same philosophies behind creative teaching and learning for gifted can benefit all kids. The truly gifted, especially those my colleagues and I facetiously dubbed the “severely and profoundly gifted,”  need a hyperbolic version of these same strategies and rarely need any of the skill backfill that others do.

So I was not surprised to read a passionate post on Stephanie S. Tolan’s blog The Deep End about the politics within the National Association for Gifted Children and the irony that the children themselves were not invited to the NAGC conversation. This is the same discussion that is occurring among education reformers who seek to change education from “schools” to “learning.” Follow the Twitter hashtag #edchat for a few days to see the passion among educators seeking to rethink what learning is all about and to include students as key players and decision makers in their own learning. Ms. Tolan describes the gifted with powerful voice:

One of their major differences (at least until we squash it out of them with work sheets and grades and gold stars and tests, grade point averages, boundaries and limitations) is their rage to learn and understand, and to do something with meaning. [my boldface, her italics]

I absolutely agree that this describes the gifted kids I know.  I think it can also describe most kids. Gifted kids feel the rage in heightened fashion and seek meaning at greater depth, but all kids feel the rage to learn until we stuff the school experience into boxes that lack any personal meaning. The gifted often find meaning via their own odd connections or perceptions. Other learners may need some help discovering meaning and personal connection.

The many, many good teachers I know try to forge connections of meaning for students who do not seek them on their own or need help doing so.  The very best teachers are able to kindle the rage to learn despite institutional requirements that muffle it. I hope our current moves to build rigor in our schools will stop to allow students to join the conversation and find meaning just as Ms.Tolan asks. It’s not just good for the gifted.