Looking for Purpose



Looking for a Purpose



This last year, colleagues and I have been engaging in soul searching dialogue about our highest priority goals for our students. Teaching at a college prep K-12 school, upper grades clearly are about preparing students for the skills they’ll need to get into and excel in college. Having taught writing at the college level and in high school, for years I’ve made it my mission to train students to write clearly written expository and persuasive essays. It’s a big project teaching students to write well, and as department chair I’ve marshaled a lot of resources certainly 9^th through 12^th and even in middle school devoted to helping students write well. I’ve learned one can’t have a dozen number one priorities and still accomplish much, so over time I’ve learned to focus on writing, sometimes to the exclusion of other important goals, but that’s a tradeoff  I’ve increasingly felt I should make. Success in college—indeed in high school as well—seems so dependent on writing well organized essays with something to say and, as students describe it, “flow.” So far so good.

In my own house in Nepal (pressure cooker in background)

Next, I’ve increasingly examined what students must read in college and become convinced that professors in the humanities and other fields assign loads and loads of nonfiction, with some fiction as well.  More and more, I’ve worked in informational texts in my senior classes just as a survival tactic for students who might otherwise drown in the college readings assigned. This seemed practical, responsive to the needs of the students, and farsighted. Pat myself on the back.

Several objections, however, have arisen. One can prepare for college in high school and prepare for high school in middle school and lately I’ve been hearing how much 5^th grade teachers and parents worry about preparing for middle school. A neighbor with a hip circle of friends told me about all the parents who experiment in early elementary, with language immersion, home schooling, alternative schools, only to panic when their children enter 5^th grade because they must hurry and catch up with the college bound highly academic students. 5^th grade! (I was riding a bike and going barefoot in 5^th grade, not worried about college.) Should school be a preparation for what’s to come? Or should it be a rich experience in itself? College admissions is the tail wagging the dog for all the time I’ve been teaching secondary school, and demographics have only made it worse. Parents advocate for more AP’s and honors classes, more sports and visual and performing art achievement, more clubs, and schools are complicit. What cost to the students’ souls  as they race to nowhere? I’ve known one student admitted to Harvard on the condition she take a gap year because some students are DOA, dead on arrival, from all the striving to achieve. Given the system and the competition and the common application making it easier to apply everywhere, and the competition from foreign students taking places in college freshmen classes, our response has been logical but alarming.

Now let’s turn to other sins we’ve committed in the name of college prep. Readicide by Kelley Gallagher and Reading in the Zone by Nancy Atwell indict English teachers for teaching books to death and putting an end to a student’s love of reading. So many students (but not all, admittedly) were once readers, devouring Harry Potter, Twilight (I know, I know), and Hunger Games, as well as other series books. Those kids were once readers, not to prepare for the future, but for pleasure and immersion into other worlds. We can quibble with Gallagher and Atwell, but they make a case that how we teach literature by high school both swamps our students who abandon free choice reading for lack of time and destroys their love of imaginative literature as have them analyze and write and compose. I’ve been the agent of that transformation and I’ve endorsed the result, the end justifying the means. I’m still conflicted.

But what if love of reading and love of learning were our chief goals? What if choice in what students read were more widespread? What if instead of mere rigor in our classes we aimed for more engagement? This is a real question: Would we sacrifice the preparedness we have been working so hard for? I don’t know if we can serve two masters, love of learning and achievement. Let the dialogue continue.

Here’s what I know from direct experience, which I always value over ideologies, school initiative, and sweeping generalizations. This year I taught non-AP seniors who sometimes don’t read well or read much, who sometimes struggle with “flow” in writing and grammar and organizing their ideas to carry a reader (me) through their essays. These students sometimes have more phobias around writing than they do around math, especially given the red ink they’ve been used to seeing on their papers.

But my emerging philosophy is that every student is capable in at least one area. So this year Andy (not his real name) discovered that he was a bit of a philosopher, reading the excerpt from Freud several times and exploring the implications for Hamlet in his writing. Frank, once considered shy, raised his hand more and more as his confidence grew that he had something to share. Haley wrote about film versions of Hamlet and presented at a student conference. I look back and I realize I helped every student find a strength that they could be proud of. Smaller classes helped, but it was also my learning the craft of teaching over the years, getting my priorities straight, tuning out some of the noise of too many goals, too many activities, too many assignments, and instead focusing on a few goals. My blog’s header http://collegethreshold.blogspot.com is now Read, Write, Think, Discuss, almost like I’ve boiled it down to four skills. But I think really it’s not just about increasing student skills, but about my developing people skills in connecting with students where they are, in genuinely liking them—every one of them—and together exploring their interests and their latent aptitudes.  If I can enable each one to shine somewhere, somehow, not in every category, but to show some strength, then I have succeeded. And I think I haven’t sacrificed the rigor or the preparedness, which serves as the foundation for student achievement. In fact, I suspect my courses are a little repetitive for students because I’ve focused what we’re aiming for. So love of learning might be a little too strong a phrase, but it’s not just about getting into the next school to prepare for the next stage of life.

But even as I write this, as I get ready to go off to China and Nepal, I know there is room for improvement. Deep conversations with smart, engaged colleagues about what we’re trying to accomplish, with pragmatic applications to lessons and curriculum put into practice in what I call my laboratory (i.e. class) sustains my interest in teaching anew. Also, reading professional works by great practitioners (Jim Burke, Carol Jago) and hearing them speak at conferences doubly energizes me. My grandfather, who taught school in Toronto, once said, “If you love your subject most, teach college, if you love students, teach high school.” In the end, it is the people—my students, my colleagues, my supervisors—who make my profession so satisfying and not static.