Sixth Grade the Way it was Meant to Be
While running the perimeter of the U of K-Town, you can not help but be struck by the number of students wandering aimlessly, alone, with their noses stuck in books. Memorization is the order of the day; independent thinking and problem solving is not so positively valued. Asian students are taught to respect their elders, their adults, their teachers. Beliefs are handed down from the "white beards" (old, wise ones). Everyone born here must be of one faith by legal decree. Students expect to be told what to know and what to believe. They excel at regurgitating the right answers. Someone had to be prepared to teach something completely different...
When I first started teaching in public schools in 1997, there was already an intellectual capacity to draw on; any kind of standardized test could bring in a score 90th percentile or above. And that "presentation personality" had already been developed; I could speak at length on any topic, with or without knowledge. There was a good rapport with (some) children through the RICY program, around the corner and up the street. Ready to be professional at teaching the loads of stuff in my repertoire, the children in my room would be serious professional learners, otherwise discipline would be applied consistently and fairly. None of the above would work for me in Kensington. Good material and an interesting delivery would only get me so far (maybe ten minutes on a good day). Twenty minutes later, the revelation that children who curse out their parents w/o consequences would not respond to discipline as one raised in a more civilized environment might expect dawned on me. I had so much to suffer and to learn.
Being the only non-Hispanic in the Bilingual Department at Stetson Middle School, my classes were stacked. At first, beginner level bilingual classes were my assignment. Many misbehaving students would never be evaluated as proficient at English, and so the group of them became mine. Later, I taught the more advanced bilingual classes; those years many misbehaving students were evaluated as being more proficient at English, so the group of them became mine. I learned to speak to the hearts of students instead of telling them what to do; they would move better by routine or by personal involvement. Coercion and punishments, no matter how administered, never produced positive results. Passing grades were not necessary for promotion, detentions would be an opportunity to stay away from home, and suspensions, as doled out, were unavoidable random events that simply meant a few days off - a school initiated sick day. The prevailing question in the students' souls was, "does anyone care about me?" So my classes always began with room for silliness, meeting and greeting, creative hand shaking and full body gyrations, which gave way to well established routines; it was all about motivation. Eleven and twelve year olds are remarkably unprofessional - fact that I learned to enjoy.
The term "closed-door-classroom" was invented to describe my work. Rarely would I refer a
student out to an administrator, my room's problems were solved (or not) by me - the classroom door was closed from the inside. Each new "miracle" strategy (whatever that might be at a particular point in time) for inner city education was rarely on display in my room - the administrators would keep my door closed from the outside when important people (the important people seemed to be interested in miracles and unable to identify them) came to visit. No formal observations of my class were written for the last several years. The admin did not boast of my class, nor did they ever want to split my class up and give them to other teachers. And, dealing with so many problematic youth, what I learned about pre-teens!!! The peer groups have a power akin to the Word. They can call things into being that did not exist, though instead of giving life to the dead they often deal death to the living (Romans 4:17b).
If ISK had been my first teaching assignment I would have applied discipline whenever the students were less than professional learners. The tragedy would have been that ISK students would have simply respected that and learned to absorb information as it spouted copiously forth. Yet now I know that pre-teens can not be coerced into open-heart, open-brain learning, a good teacher must always work (and play) to develop and maintain internally motivated students. Because of the rough classes I have become an expert at that. Stetson students simply would not have responded at all, they would have gone about their business as if no adult were in the room, unless they had first been drawn in emotionally. Coercion could accomplish nothing. Dad had prepared me to teach critical thinking from a position of student-felt internal motivation in K-Town. From day 1 I have been so thankful for the inner city experiences that had seemed so unfair and overwhelming at the moment. Light afflictions do indeed yield eternal glory.
Finally I showed up (three months before the sixth grade science materials) in K-Town. I decided to uphold the belief that everything in the sky moves around a stationary earth - since that's what you see every time you look up. Science is the study of things that can be seen, measured and proven. Firm, indeed, was the ground beneath me when I offered an "A" for the year in science to any sixth grader who can show, from personal observation (books can err as easily as you or I can), that the earth moves around the sun and not visa versa. (The key to the proof is the observable retrograde motion of the planets - three dimensional algebraic models, based on two dimensional observations, only tend to "prove" that the model with the earth at the center is more accurate- differential calculus had to be invented and applied in three space to prove that the sun is indeed in the middle and the earth is the body that has relative orbital motion. None of that is happening in any sixth grade class.) Now these poor kids are faced with a science teacher who, day in and day out, insists that the earth is the center of the solar system, but who is willing to listen to any evidence to the contrary. What a dynamic!!! First of all, sixth graders are so peer oriented; the power of pre-teen peer pressure and agreement is stronger than black-and-white, see-it-and-touch-it fact. Something in the air tells these kids, as a group, that their teacher is wrong. No evidence that a child could present will ever convince me, but whichever student would publicly advance a reason for a sun-centered solar system becomes an instant hero in the eyes of the class, who readily assist in any way that may be possible, logically or
emotionally. So my mostly Asian students will confidently disagree with the teacher, with their authority figure, en masse. And as none of my stone cold smug, slam dunk, black-and-white evidences of a geocentric solar system are likely to be swallowed by my class, the discussion goes on and on, in a healthy sort of way. (If the earth really rotated in space, the wind generated by the friction blow all the birds off their perches.) New books just came in - earth science; maybe we'll study weather next.
It is not so difficult to prove that the moon spins by personal observation (given that we assume a sun-centered model, I can make that concession for the moon project and then withdraw it for purposes of later discussion - sixth grade is such a magical time!) so we did it as an experimental project. Over and over again I point out that it does not matter if the original hypothesis was that the moon spins or that the moon does not spin - equal credit for both. From both positions you are drawn to follow the same procedure, and end up proving the same point (it does spin - one rotation for every revolution it makes around the earth, go out and prove it to yourself!). ZERO points for starting out with the right answer in your hypothesis. 100 points for the PROOF.
In math, a lesson on "order of operations" started like this: first I sing a song as I write on the board, each word on a different line - Please Please Mr. Don't Sing Again - all the first letters in huge caps. Then a brief intro to the topic is given, while writing Parenthesis Powers Multiplication Division Subtraction and Addition next to their respective cap letters on the board. Next, 3*5+10 = 3*5+10 goes on the other board. I work both sides of the equation with class participation, messing up the order of operations on one side, to end up with 25=45. I ask that everyone copy our example in their notes. As some students have a problem with that, I ignore them and return to my song. A minute later I explain that 25 equals 45, so that if I borrow $45 dollars, you should be happy if I return $26 since 25 is really the same as 45. My students suffer, they learn to think, they become heroes to their peers when they publicly disagree. Their teacher can be sooooooo obtuse. He who unquestioningly buys into what I (or anyone else) teaches them will end up failing - and rightly so!. Up to this point, my classroom door has remained quiet closed,
but now there is a knock from the outside. Today is the day of our grand opening celebration and the US Ambassador to A. is opening the door. He enters with three photographers who record everything. Eventually, the students discover my error and equal signs can be easily changed to not equal signs. As he leaves, the Ambassador admonishes the students with a smile, "the next time your teacher makes a mistake, make sure you pay closer attention." The ISK Director, ISK Principal and OASIS President all expressed satisfaction with the way things are going in sixth grade. Closed-door-classroom no more.
The teacher is not an infallible prophet of truth, but a fellow learner. Since we use a four step writing process, and everyone has a place on the wall to publish their work, there is also a composition written by Mr. Drew, with all four writing steps evident. The final product is a two paragraph essay about how the classroom is set up. It is written on about a third grade level with multiple spelling and grammatical errors (even after some were edited out). An honest representation of the best work I could produce, it is written in Dari using Persian Script.
Reading class started with the telling of an emotional story about the Christmas vacation in 1968 when I orbited the moon, via TV, with the Apollo 8 astronauts. After splashdown, the TV offered no more moonshots (until March), and I was ever so depressed, until at the library I discovered that books could also take me back to outer space. Those trips were even better. Then we started talking about the similarities between listening and reading (they both are controlled from the same location in the brain, you know). If you hear every word, but do not "get the message" have you really listened? In the same way, if you decipher every word, but the book takes you nowhere have you really read anything? Reading a book in sixth grade means so much more than reading a book in fifth grade; it engages all five senses as well as the thoughts and emotions of the heart. School becomes so much more fun when you really read instead of just understanding the written words.
Social Studies also is a chance to think like never before. How do we know what people who lived long ago did? No one alive today was there to see them. So we learned about artifacts from the first day. I brought in a suitcase full of them (from my own bedroom), and each group of students had to reconstruct a personal history of the room occupant based on the evidence. They did well, everyone deduced that in that room there lived a man who speaks English and Spanish very well and is learning Dari, he exercises a lot, eats dietary supplements, is a devout Christian, and has visited (or been visited by) people from Mexico and/or Central America - all correctly interpreted from the artifacts. Another day, the kids brought in their own personal artifacts and their peers deduced their personal histories, expressed by written essays. The artifacts represent primary historical sources, the essays are secondary sources. The kids got it down right.
Ramadan started this week. It does not run from new moon to new moon. It runs from when the Mullahs say the moon is new to when the Mullahs say the moon is new again. No one can tell in advance exactly what day that will happen.
Some believe that my intentions were to brainwash the kids. Nothing could be further from the truth. Intentionally, all moral authority to brainwash was relinquished in the first few lessons. No one could uncritically accept anything else that might come from a teacher who will not even accept a heliocentric solar system. It is my desire to stick around long enough to see some of these children become young adults...
When I first started teaching in public schools in 1997, there was already an intellectual capacity to draw on; any kind of standardized test could bring in a score 90th percentile or above. And that "presentation personality" had already been developed; I could speak at length on any topic, with or without knowledge. There was a good rapport with (some) children through the RICY program, around the corner and up the street. Ready to be professional at teaching the loads of stuff in my repertoire, the children in my room would be serious professional learners, otherwise discipline would be applied consistently and fairly. None of the above would work for me in Kensington. Good material and an interesting delivery would only get me so far (maybe ten minutes on a good day). Twenty minutes later, the revelation that children who curse out their parents w/o consequences would not respond to discipline as one raised in a more civilized environment might expect dawned on me. I had so much to suffer and to learn.
Being the only non-Hispanic in the Bilingual Department at Stetson Middle School, my classes were stacked. At first, beginner level bilingual classes were my assignment. Many misbehaving students would never be evaluated as proficient at English, and so the group of them became mine. Later, I taught the more advanced bilingual classes; those years many misbehaving students were evaluated as being more proficient at English, so the group of them became mine. I learned to speak to the hearts of students instead of telling them what to do; they would move better by routine or by personal involvement. Coercion and punishments, no matter how administered, never produced positive results. Passing grades were not necessary for promotion, detentions would be an opportunity to stay away from home, and suspensions, as doled out, were unavoidable random events that simply meant a few days off - a school initiated sick day. The prevailing question in the students' souls was, "does anyone care about me?" So my classes always began with room for silliness, meeting and greeting, creative hand shaking and full body gyrations, which gave way to well established routines; it was all about motivation. Eleven and twelve year olds are remarkably unprofessional - fact that I learned to enjoy.
The term "closed-door-classroom" was invented to describe my work. Rarely would I refer a
student out to an administrator, my room's problems were solved (or not) by me - the classroom door was closed from the inside. Each new "miracle" strategy (whatever that might be at a particular point in time) for inner city education was rarely on display in my room - the administrators would keep my door closed from the outside when important people (the important people seemed to be interested in miracles and unable to identify them) came to visit. No formal observations of my class were written for the last several years. The admin did not boast of my class, nor did they ever want to split my class up and give them to other teachers. And, dealing with so many problematic youth, what I learned about pre-teens!!! The peer groups have a power akin to the Word. They can call things into being that did not exist, though instead of giving life to the dead they often deal death to the living (Romans 4:17b).
If ISK had been my first teaching assignment I would have applied discipline whenever the students were less than professional learners. The tragedy would have been that ISK students would have simply respected that and learned to absorb information as it spouted copiously forth. Yet now I know that pre-teens can not be coerced into open-heart, open-brain learning, a good teacher must always work (and play) to develop and maintain internally motivated students. Because of the rough classes I have become an expert at that. Stetson students simply would not have responded at all, they would have gone about their business as if no adult were in the room, unless they had first been drawn in emotionally. Coercion could accomplish nothing. Dad had prepared me to teach critical thinking from a position of student-felt internal motivation in K-Town. From day 1 I have been so thankful for the inner city experiences that had seemed so unfair and overwhelming at the moment. Light afflictions do indeed yield eternal glory.
Finally I showed up (three months before the sixth grade science materials) in K-Town. I decided to uphold the belief that everything in the sky moves around a stationary earth - since that's what you see every time you look up. Science is the study of things that can be seen, measured and proven. Firm, indeed, was the ground beneath me when I offered an "A" for the year in science to any sixth grader who can show, from personal observation (books can err as easily as you or I can), that the earth moves around the sun and not visa versa. (The key to the proof is the observable retrograde motion of the planets - three dimensional algebraic models, based on two dimensional observations, only tend to "prove" that the model with the earth at the center is more accurate- differential calculus had to be invented and applied in three space to prove that the sun is indeed in the middle and the earth is the body that has relative orbital motion. None of that is happening in any sixth grade class.) Now these poor kids are faced with a science teacher who, day in and day out, insists that the earth is the center of the solar system, but who is willing to listen to any evidence to the contrary. What a dynamic!!! First of all, sixth graders are so peer oriented; the power of pre-teen peer pressure and agreement is stronger than black-and-white, see-it-and-touch-it fact. Something in the air tells these kids, as a group, that their teacher is wrong. No evidence that a child could present will ever convince me, but whichever student would publicly advance a reason for a sun-centered solar system becomes an instant hero in the eyes of the class, who readily assist in any way that may be possible, logically or
emotionally. So my mostly Asian students will confidently disagree with the teacher, with their authority figure, en masse. And as none of my stone cold smug, slam dunk, black-and-white evidences of a geocentric solar system are likely to be swallowed by my class, the discussion goes on and on, in a healthy sort of way. (If the earth really rotated in space, the wind generated by the friction blow all the birds off their perches.) New books just came in - earth science; maybe we'll study weather next.
It is not so difficult to prove that the moon spins by personal observation (given that we assume a sun-centered model, I can make that concession for the moon project and then withdraw it for purposes of later discussion - sixth grade is such a magical time!) so we did it as an experimental project. Over and over again I point out that it does not matter if the original hypothesis was that the moon spins or that the moon does not spin - equal credit for both. From both positions you are drawn to follow the same procedure, and end up proving the same point (it does spin - one rotation for every revolution it makes around the earth, go out and prove it to yourself!). ZERO points for starting out with the right answer in your hypothesis. 100 points for the PROOF.
In math, a lesson on "order of operations" started like this: first I sing a song as I write on the board, each word on a different line - Please Please Mr. Don't Sing Again - all the first letters in huge caps. Then a brief intro to the topic is given, while writing Parenthesis Powers Multiplication Division Subtraction and Addition next to their respective cap letters on the board. Next, 3*5+10 = 3*5+10 goes on the other board. I work both sides of the equation with class participation, messing up the order of operations on one side, to end up with 25=45. I ask that everyone copy our example in their notes. As some students have a problem with that, I ignore them and return to my song. A minute later I explain that 25 equals 45, so that if I borrow $45 dollars, you should be happy if I return $26 since 25 is really the same as 45. My students suffer, they learn to think, they become heroes to their peers when they publicly disagree. Their teacher can be sooooooo obtuse. He who unquestioningly buys into what I (or anyone else) teaches them will end up failing - and rightly so!. Up to this point, my classroom door has remained quiet closed,
but now there is a knock from the outside. Today is the day of our grand opening celebration and the US Ambassador to A. is opening the door. He enters with three photographers who record everything. Eventually, the students discover my error and equal signs can be easily changed to not equal signs. As he leaves, the Ambassador admonishes the students with a smile, "the next time your teacher makes a mistake, make sure you pay closer attention." The ISK Director, ISK Principal and OASIS President all expressed satisfaction with the way things are going in sixth grade. Closed-door-classroom no more.
The teacher is not an infallible prophet of truth, but a fellow learner. Since we use a four step writing process, and everyone has a place on the wall to publish their work, there is also a composition written by Mr. Drew, with all four writing steps evident. The final product is a two paragraph essay about how the classroom is set up. It is written on about a third grade level with multiple spelling and grammatical errors (even after some were edited out). An honest representation of the best work I could produce, it is written in Dari using Persian Script.
Reading class started with the telling of an emotional story about the Christmas vacation in 1968 when I orbited the moon, via TV, with the Apollo 8 astronauts. After splashdown, the TV offered no more moonshots (until March), and I was ever so depressed, until at the library I discovered that books could also take me back to outer space. Those trips were even better. Then we started talking about the similarities between listening and reading (they both are controlled from the same location in the brain, you know). If you hear every word, but do not "get the message" have you really listened? In the same way, if you decipher every word, but the book takes you nowhere have you really read anything? Reading a book in sixth grade means so much more than reading a book in fifth grade; it engages all five senses as well as the thoughts and emotions of the heart. School becomes so much more fun when you really read instead of just understanding the written words.
Social Studies also is a chance to think like never before. How do we know what people who lived long ago did? No one alive today was there to see them. So we learned about artifacts from the first day. I brought in a suitcase full of them (from my own bedroom), and each group of students had to reconstruct a personal history of the room occupant based on the evidence. They did well, everyone deduced that in that room there lived a man who speaks English and Spanish very well and is learning Dari, he exercises a lot, eats dietary supplements, is a devout Christian, and has visited (or been visited by) people from Mexico and/or Central America - all correctly interpreted from the artifacts. Another day, the kids brought in their own personal artifacts and their peers deduced their personal histories, expressed by written essays. The artifacts represent primary historical sources, the essays are secondary sources. The kids got it down right.
Ramadan started this week. It does not run from new moon to new moon. It runs from when the Mullahs say the moon is new to when the Mullahs say the moon is new again. No one can tell in advance exactly what day that will happen.
Some believe that my intentions were to brainwash the kids. Nothing could be further from the truth. Intentionally, all moral authority to brainwash was relinquished in the first few lessons. No one could uncritically accept anything else that might come from a teacher who will not even accept a heliocentric solar system. It is my desire to stick around long enough to see some of these children become young adults...
posted by Terry at
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