What can I control?

Just a normal Saturday with some AP Lit kids watching some Gatsby at Crane's house

One of my greatest talents is my ability to criticize and rant. I’m really, really good at it. People who know me will tell you, I can spit fire. I can offer scathing critques that wither souls and melt faces, but most of the time, this isn’t wonderfully productive. In fact, it usually changes very little. 

So rather than compose another diatribe about the inherent injustice of being a classroom teacher, this post is about being resourceful, about finding a way. Changing the inertia that plagues our education system is a Hurculian task, beyond my scope and abilty. However, changing my classroom, changing those 50 minute periods,  as flawed as they might be, is well within my scope. I am the master of that universe, so what will I, what will we, do with that power?

I’m choosing to try. I recently invited my AP students to come over to my house to watch the Great Gatsby movie. It was not something I’d ever attempted before, and a choice I probably should have consulted my wife about, who is also a teacher in my building, before offering the invitation. But I wanted to shake things up. I’m trying to build a culture in my class that transcends the traditional dynamic. I want my class to be more, to be a shared experience that kids look forward to, so I took a chance, and on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, eight students sat in my living room eating brownies and popcorn and Leo attempted to do Gatsby. 

I’m also choosing to throw out my curriculum and try to revive the best project I’ve ever been part of as a teacher. Once upon a time, in a school not so far away, there was a great small schools experiment that for the most part, failed. However, there were glimmers of awesomeness, and one of those glimmers was Adventure School. I could go on for hours about what was great about it, but I won’t. Let’s just say it was pretty cool. It was the most genuine, effective teaching experience of my career. I felt we stumbled on greatness, but nothing gold can stay. 

Anyway, the project I’m resurrecting is the quarter project. My sophomore and junior students are going to choose a topic, any school appropriate topic, to learn about. It can be a hobby, a career, a phenomenon, a goal, a whatever. What would you like to learn about? Then they are going to craft a proposal detailing how they plan to go about learning. They need to develop a central question, a complex question they genuinely want to answer. They need to find and obtain a book on their topic. They need to find someone to interview about it, and finally, they need to come up with a plan to do some hands on learning associated with their topic. In the end, they will write a research paper answering their central question and give a five-ish minute presentation on what they did and what they learned. Then, next quarter they will do it again. 

This project, hopefully, will teach research skills, close reading skills, note taking skills, writing skills, presentation skills, and hopefully, life skills. I have plans for all kinds of mini-lessons (I'm committing myself to no more than 10 minutes of instruction at a time). I am braced for failures, setbacks, and possibly tears. I honestly don’t know how it is going to go. But I am striving to build a different classroom, a student centered classroom (as advocated for in in articles like After 100 Years of the Same Teaching Model It’s Time to Throw Out the Playbook ) where learning is more real and dynamic than it ever has been, at least in my room.  

We will see how it all goes, but my point is this. We have clear and substantial obstacles blocking change in education, more than we can count and more than we can move, so where does that leave us? Are we going to simply keep doing things the same way because of these obstacles, or are we going to try anyway? Stop making excuses and start trying things.