*UPDATE* Putting Into Practice

It's been quite a challenge seeing how many of the ideas I picked up from my summer reading could be applied during my early experience and winter block as a student-teacher. There's always the question of how effective a theory or method read about in a book actually works in the real world, or at least the world you are familiar with. Yes, it's easy enough to get excited reading about fresh, exciting strategies for success in the classroom, but when you actually try to put them to use yourself in your respective environment...well, that's when you encounter the real struggle.

It didn't take long for me to become a full-fledged champion of Alfie Kohn's cause for community in matters of classroom discipline. Our administration office tells us that we as teachers need to be rigid and firm when it comes to attendance, ID cards, and tardies. To drive this point home, one of the assistant principals will make a daily stroll down the hallway five minutes before the tardy bell sounds. Bullhorn in hand, he'll bark warnings to the students lingering in the halls that less than five minutes remain to get to class, and for teachers to lock their doors and not admit a tardy student. In other words, make them sit out in the hall for the opening fifteen minutes. I guess the idea is that they'll think twice before daring to show up late again.

While I can certainly understand the need to reduce the number of students lingering in the hallway, especially when you consider the sheer amount - 2400 students - that makes up our population, I still question how much good it does for the community in which we stake our belief. Students need that time to be around each other, taking part in conversation, moving about in a sense of freedom without adults barging into their realms with all the force of a siren blast. Yes, we want them to be in classes by a certain time, and yes, there are times when they'll offer no reasonable excuse for tardiness other than the fact that they were tardy. But are there not alternate ways of handling the issue that don't strip the humanity out of the whole process? After all, how can we expect students to respect our time enough to show up for class before the bell if we fail to show a modicum of respect for their time in-between periods? Some give-and-take there would be nice to see.

I find myself envious of the lucky classrooms that are built in such a way to allow for a variety in seat organization. In other words, I speak of classrooms that are fortunate enough to not be bound to the default "row" structure with student desks. Few of those exist at my school, but those that have them - I'm not sure they know how blessed they are to have the liberty to experiment with the make-up of the room. For me, the default system of rows for students' desks serves only to reinforce the idea that the playing field is tilted to their disadvantage once they set foot into the classroom (and we wonder why we have a problem with tardies). The rows are seen as the students' void, whereas the narrow space between the top row and the board is the teacher's personal space - it may as well be a castle for all the grief we give students with "invading" it. The separation need not be so nakedly pronounced - my vision of a more ideal setting (as unlikely as it may seem with such an overwhelming population) is a huge, expansive circle, similar to the design of my English courses at Furman. The classroom thus takes on the look of a forum for discussions, and the teacher merely occupies one of the same spaces as his charges. This way, no single student has a "physical" advantage or disadvantage. It's easier to see everyone, and the teacher can more readily slip into the role of facilitator because the structure helps diminish the "David and Goliath" illusion upon stepping inside.

Without knowing I was doing so, I tried to implement Barbara Kingsolver's naturally organic flavor to my students' writing. When I posed questions for our morning bell ringers (I find that when I give them different names like the "Discombobulator," it tricks students into thinking we're doing something strange and foreign. This way, if a student doesn't like bell ringers, maybe he'll do better at a Discombobulator), I urged students not to think of them as questions per se, but as prompts. The main objective was to get them thinking. I wanted them to get used to composing paragraph length entries, but in a way that freed them up to be descriptive in their language. At times, I had to adjust my method because they were so trained to spot questions & then to jot down 1-2 line answers rather than the paragraphs I requested. So I snuck them into an intro paragraph of my own; that would normally work better. At times it depended on the premise, the topic. Did students find it relevant to their lives, or at least moderately interesting? Doing entries with the meaning of a name or a house almost always struck some kind of chord with many students; each one tapped a story or three inside of them that they felt compelled to write about, which delighted me.

That being said, I feel I need to take back some of my earlier criticism on Brooks' methods from In Search of Understanding. Rubric and structure need not be so rigidly nailed down that it leaves the teacher with little recourse to modify the template if it clearly isn't getting the best out of his charges. The nature of the bell ringers is so flawed because we have made it that way, and the students laissez faire attitude only shows what naturally results. If I only do bell ringers for the sole purpose of occupying my students long enough to take attendance or shut them up (not that attendance isn't important - I've since learned that I have a long way to go to become competant at it), then I shouldn't be surprised at their surly outlook. It shows that I don't care enough to inject any sense of value or purpose into the activity, so why should I expect them to care when I don't? I stand by my statement that I made when I first wrote on this topic: "As much care and passion as a teacher might bring to her subject of study, her instruction will almost certainly fail if she can not get her students to care about it."