A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress. I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.
The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in. Would love to hear from you.
As I look back on my recent blog
posts, I notice that while I briefly touch on what kind of school I teach at,
there isn't much in there about the actual students. Sure, all of the collected speech comes from my
students, but there's something wrong with the way those words are floating
free, anchored to nothing, no body out of which they came. Maybe that's partially do to the fact
that this is a public blog and the high school where I work has pretty strict
privacy standards. So in one
sense, a blog like this can't replace a private journal. At least not in my case. But there's another aspect to it. What I'm most interested in is ideas. I groove out to know that failing really does lead to better learning
or that a certain level of background noise is optimal for lip reading. And I love to take these ideas into my
classroom. But in all that clutter
of ideas, maybe sometimes I'm not paying the kind of close attention to
students that I should.
Today I did a "Make A
Museum" class with my students.
I thought it would be fun for all of us to put together a history museum
of our school. So we wandered
around the building and asked to borrow anything that caught our eye. We snagged a piggy-bank in the shape of
a Rira-Kuma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rilakkuma) from the principles desk,
A bowl of goldfish out of room 302, the school's name written in calligraphy on
a faded scroll. We had a good
haul. Two of the students, a first
and a second year student, were laughing most of the time as they picked things
up. Lets call the second year
student Juri and the first year student Riki.
When we got back to the classroom
with all our stuff, I passed out some examples of exhibit identification cards and
curatorial comments. At this point Juri started to explain to everyone that the goldfish weren't actually goldfish
at all. They were actually the
souls of graduated students. These
students didn't want to leave their high school behind them so they turned
themselves into fish. Some
students laughed. One student said
it was a creepy idea. One student
wrote it down on the identification card.
And that is how our history museum turned into a museum of the strange
and wonderful. The scroll with the
school's name became a "piece of ancient toilet paper found in a Chinese
castle." The wooden tops
became, "Hypnotic Counseling Instruments to turn bad boys into good
boys."
At the end of the day most of the
teachers had come through our museum.
The students were guides and read the curatorial comments to the
teachers. And the teachers laughed. Not out of obligation, but with the
kind of surprised laugh you can't fake.
And I could see the pride the students were feeling in the way they
guided the teachers to the next exhibit and the one after that. But then the chime for the last class
rang. It was over.
Most of the students were pretty
worn out and took off. But Juri
stayed in the room. Juri always
stays in the room. Tomorrow
there's an entrance exam, so all the students had to be out the door earlier
than usual. Still, Juri took a
long time to pack up her bag. Juri
always takes a long time to pack up her bag. She thinks she forgot something, opens and closes pockets,
finds what she is looking for, zips up the bag, unzips it again and starts the
process over. Usually I watch her
and think, "Why is she so slow?
Why can't she just pack up her stuff?" Most of the time as I wait for her to pack, I
think. I think I am thinking about her, but actually, I am thinking about
me. I am thinking about me waiting. Not today. Today, as Juri was not getting ready to
leave, I realized, as clearly as if she turned to me and said it in RP English,
she loves school. She loves to be
in school and she wants to stay in school as long as she can. So instead of waiting for her, I just
talked to her while she was packing up.
I told her how grateful I was that she had taken the activity to a whole
new place. How much more
interesting haunted goldfish were than humdrum history.
It
was raining today in the city.
Juri didn't have an umbrella and she said she didn't need one when I
tried to give her one from the teachers' room. Two years I've been teaching Juri. Two years and only today did I take the time to walk her to the door. So I think I've got a while to go when
it comes to this reflective teaching thing. Wish me luck.
