The Grind

It's the end of a long week.  And our fifth period class exploded again today, but I think I have a better sense for why and how.  I went and observed the first two classes that many of my students attend--or sit through as the case may be--to try to get a sense for why many of them came in to fifth period so spastic and unruly.  (Besides the obvious: they are 11 years old.)

Here's what I saw.  First and foremost, two of the classes they attended were conducted by substitutes.  And that meant that they had "work" periods.  In a science class that meant looking up the definitions for (basically meaningless) words and copying those definitions onto pieces of paper and then putting those pieces of paper into the proper sections of their binders.  In a social studies class that meant drawing outlines around all of the continents, then coloring in the continents and bodies of water, then labelling all the continents.  (The outlining and coloring had already been done by the teacher on a map that was projected on the screen, so I saw quite a few dutiful students looking up at the screen, selecting the right color, then coloring in the right land mass or body of water.  It looked more like a coloring lesson than a geography lesson).  In a math class that meant picking their favorite number, writing it real big on a piece of paper and then thinking of other things that came in twos or that used the number two, and then filling in a piece of paper with that information.

The kids that could follow instructions got heaps of praise.  The kids that had trouble following instructions--or sitting still and quiet--got heaps of negative feedback.  One of the children I was most interested in, Brian, received a great deal of entirely negative feedback from both of the teachers he was with.  I imagine that by the time he got to my classroom, he had been told all day by every adult he had encountered that he was a bad kid.  Now, no one said: "Brian, you are bad kid."  But every adult I saw interact with him told him what to do, how to do it, and, more often than not, to stop doing whatever it was he was doing.

It seems to me that the kids who "succeed" in this place succeed because they can suppress whatever natural (I use the word loosely) instinct they might have.

I also heard teachers telling students again and again: "this is important."  It's important to write the HW in the planner, to take out the right sized piece of paper, to put your name in the top right corner of that paper.  I kept hearing all of these adults say to all of these children: "this is important."  And though none of the students responded to it, I could see (body language, eyes rolling, below-breath muttering) that what they were being told was not, in fact, important. 

In the time I have been at Edison, I haven't heard a single teacher ask these kids: "what is important to you?"  We ask them what they are interested in, their hobbies, but most of these kids haven't been asked what matters to them.

So by the time they get to Fifth period language arts, many of them having been following instructions to complete tasks that are, let's be honest, basically meaningless to them for four hours, with a thirty minute break for lunch (words overheard: "after we get through the lunch line, we really only have about 5 minutes to eat and then five minutes to run around the gym"), and then they have to write sentences.  And because of the math tracking at the school, most of the kids in the room hate writing almost as much as they hate math, and it feels almost unethical to subject them to more meaningless stuff that they hate, merely because I believe (and I do believe) that learning to write is good for them.

I hope they get the rest they need this weekend.  I know I'm going to try to.  More of the grind is coming at them--like a combine, harvesting wheat--on Monday.