More Coffee, Please

There’s so very much to talk about.

None of it will be politics. For a brief moment, I want to forget politics—though it must be brief. The passing of the teacher’s contract was the stopping of arterial bleeding from the patient; there’s much left to be done. Yes, the patient is no longer gushing out on the table, but they are in no way ready to walk out the hospital doors, or even get off the operating table. If anything, the campaign against the contract shows the depths of lies and deception that those who oppose education will sink to, and those lies will need to continue to be countered.¹

But not right now. Right now, I want to talk about what this blog was supposed to be about, was supposed to focus on: Education in the district and improving it—or, if not improving education, improving our understanding of it.

I spent several good hours Thursday doing just that with an individual looking to help an alternative education program get off the ground in another New Hampshire town. Like any good educator, he was looking for ideas of what worked, and what could be borrowed to make things better.

What became immediately clear was that in order to have the academic components, the social components need to be in place first. In order for a classroom to work effectively (for everyone) then the demands of a community must be met.

If there’s a civil war going on in the classroom, then it’s impossible to teach—there’s so much energy going into putting out fires there’s none left to educate the students.

This is an underlying factor in every classroom. The largest classes at MRHS are the College Prep classes, and it’s simply because those students have better social skills. A single teacher can work with 20–30 students because of the social skills of those students—not their academic ones.²

Courses with students who don’t follow community norms well must be smaller, because the individual teacher will put out more fires.

So the first trick for any school is establishing the culture they wish to see in it. This is not something which can be dictated by any one individual, but something formed by agreement of the individuals within it—and it takes time, and argument, and discussion, and deliberation. It must be intentional, and not be allowed to form by accident.

Part of that is size. Being in community requires close communication, and 1300 students cannot all have a voice. Of course, a large school can be broken down into a small one, and a large school can adopt norms for the entire school—as long as they’re reinforced by the smaller cells.

It’s one of the neat things that has changed this year—a new note has been struck at MRHS. An invitation to more respect and responsibility was extended to the students, and so far they’ve responded (from what I’ve seen) quite well. Of course, without intentional attention, culture and norms have a way of developing in ways we would prefer they did not.

But the real trick to changing and forming a new, better culture is to give students a time to come together into community and practice it. We don’t form citizens by telling them about citizenship, we have them practice it until it becomes habit. We don’t create a good student by telling them how to do it, but by having them practice.

Providing the opportunity and the space to do it is the tricky thing.

1 One of the things pointed out to me as the primary difference between this vote and previous ones is that the structures are now in place to counter the lies of the MTA in real-time. They very carefully released their little lying yellow fliers close enough to the vote that, a year ago, it would have been the last word. Now there are a host of people who got the truth out in time. We need to continue to build those organizations and communities so that the truth can move quickly around the district. Ultimately, we need to be spreading the truth about who and what the MTA is, and make people realize they are ideologues with an agenda—then their lies will be dismissed as rapidly as they tell them. And it’s not just here in the Monadnock District—it’s happening all over the state (here, as in many other things, the MRSD is a leader. I wish it were for a better thing…) but enough politics. ↺

2 The first year I taught Crime and Punishment at MRHS I had thirty-two students in the classroom, and probably 3-4 visitors for any given class period. It had nothing to do with me, but everything to do that the bulk of those students had been with me since they were sophomores. Two years is long enough to form a community—for fifty minutes a day, at least. The upside to a good strong community is just this—fewer teachers serve more kids, and more gets done in less time.↺

Gregarious

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