More Coffee, Please

Any parent of a MRHS senior—or anyone who knows a Monadnock senior—knows that the last month or so has been consumed by the “dreaded” senior project research paper.

In addition to being a graduation requirement, it’s also the midterm grade for semester-long senior English electives. To say there’s a great deal riding on it is an understatement. ¹ For a good chunk of November and into December I spent part of lunch sitting down with various seniors and coaching them through their paper—working on outlines, suggesting sources, and answering questions about how to write it.

In particular, there have been five students I’ve really been working with. ²
All of them were in serious trouble with the original due-date of December 19—they could have gotten there, but the work would not have been the best. The snow days, and the decision to push the due-date back to 5 January means that there could have been a great deal more work done, a great deal more quality, and some truly impressive work done. I was expecting a great many phone calls this vacation, a great many appointments at Panera or Starbucks or the Keene Public Library to get the final draft done well.

I’ve gotten one call—and it was from the kid who was furthest ahead, sadly enough.

Every teacher sees this, over and over. There are kids who just “get it” and though they might make a mistake from time to time, they generally are okay. They show up on time and they get their work done and they talk their problems out and they negotiate solutions, and, finally, they get good grades.

And then there are the rest.

It’s not a question of intelligence. It never really is—there are some kids who need more time, but that’s very different than needing more intelligence. There are many things which I take longer than someone else to “get” and I did very well in school. The real question is what other skills the student does or does not have. Are they dedicated to getting work done? Do they know when to ask for help, and can they communicate clearly the need when they have it? Do they show up for help sessions on time?

Or, as so many students see it, is “help” a sign of weakness? Is hard work something they’re not used to doing—either because they’ve never been asked to do it, or they’ve never seen it done at home? When they ask for help, do they expect the teacher or anyone else to just solve the problem and do it for them, rather than working together in a partnership?

These are the skills which really determine success—and yes, as I’ve heard so many people say, they are skills which can and (in a better world) would be learned at home. Yes, mom and dad should have taught the importance of showing up on time, of communicating calmly, of not losing their temper, of cooperation. They’re part of that “good ole fashioned middle class work ethic.” And, gosh-darn it, if parents would just raise those kids right then it wouldn’t be a problem. Humph.

Except… well, where does a kid learn those skills if mom and dad don’t have them? If mom and dad aren’t the pillars of social skills that we all are³ then where will a child learn how to be successful—if not in school?

I’m sure this is a rather aggravating thought to anyone who considers school a place for learning math and science and subjects and such, but really, as much as we might snarl, “that crap ought to be learned at home” the fact is that it’s not. We can dismiss it as much as we want, we can be as grumpy and ill-mannered as we wish about it, but it doesn’t change that these are still things kids should know.

A public education should lift all boats—every kid who walks in should have value added. It shouldn’t favor those who already have skills that others don’t—it should make sure that the foundational, behavioral habits should be taught as much as academic knowledge. As it currently stands, kids enter school with a performance gap between them, and that gap only widens over the twelve years of school.⁴ It’s not whether or not they’re learning the academics—the kids are missing the skills needed to learn the academics. Until we address those issues, we can’t be teaching them subject matter—the kids will ignore it, or it will just go right beyond them, because they don’t have the skills needed to retain it.

The hard part isn’t doing this, of course—it’s fairly easy to, once the intention is made. The hard part is accepting that this is what we need to do. It’s not fun, and it’s not glorious, and it’s not exactly in the job description as we currently write them—where does that fall under science, math, English, or social-studies? It doesn’t, and so it is never explicitly a part of the curriculum.

It is inherent in the title teacher, though, and that’s the one we can fulfill best.

1 There’s nothing like a paper to make every child an expert on a subject. The senior hallway was abuzz with all sorts of suggestions to hit that “massive 8-page minimum.” This included font suggestions (it looks just like Times New Roman, but will make pages about half-again as long) suggestions about programs to type it in (make sure you use the new Microsoft Word, it puts another space between each paragraph automatically!) to the margins (another half-inch on the margins won’t be noticed by so-and-so) to the very exotic (have you heard about kerning? What about character scaling? It’s awesome!). The moment I knew I was really an English teacher was when I had to sit at the front of the room holding a ruler in my hand—applying it to every paper handed in. Yes, I was serious about the margins, no that is not Times New Roman, and yes you will hand that back in tomorrow, and yes it will be late. Sheesh. ↺

2Many of the students who asked were the younger siblings of students who had sat in my classroom before, or were “Mr. Gross’s orphans”—the kids whom we (practically) team-taught during the 06-07 year. Before my decision to work at MC², they were fully expecting to sit in my classroom their junior year, and that relationship lasted. For a student, real relationship will always win out over formal relationship—it doesn’t matter who their teacher actually is, they’ll go to the teacher who they know best. I watched it over and over again for years—Pete Lambert and Mike Paone were two middle school teachers so good at forming solid relationships with their kids that for four years of high school, if there was a math or social studies problem, you could guarantee they’d be the first ones asked. Of course, that’s not to say that many high school teachers can’t and don’t do the same—they do—but only to point out the value and power of a long-term teacher-student mentorship. ↺

3I’m feeling rather sarcastic at this point, and I hope that’s very clear. ↺

4Except for kindergarten teachers, God-bless ‘em. All I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten—now, if only it were a systematic and ingrained part of the system that required mastery before pushing a kid forward on the assembly line. ↺

Technorati Tags:
Education, Monadnock Community Connections School, School Change

Gregarious

Share This