She is so disappointed.
She is also a bit of a judgey know-it-all.
She is me, in my last year of my teaching degree. Her self-congratulatory attitude is in part due to the pride of just writing an essay entitled “Five Paragraph Death Punch” wherein, the five-paragraph essay was word-kicked in its formulaic little baby-teeth using Five Finger Death Punch lyrics. I still love this essay. I still hold many of the beliefs espoused in it. So then why are my 9th graders writing a five-paragraph essay?
Because I got out of my own way. There are many ways to write well. And even when that writing is contained in a drab five paragraph wrapper, it can be excellent. My students are currently in small group book clubs wrapping up our Civil Rights unit. The goals of this unit are for them to complicate and deepen their understanding of the universal truths and disparities between the way the world has worked and should work. I’m asking them to wrestle with these concepts on the page.
Each week we’re following the routine of mentor Monday, reading and discussion Tuesday-Thursday, then writing Fridays.” On Mentor Mondays we unpack a poem together, practicing the skills we’ll use throughout the week. They prepare for their group’s discussions by reading, collecting passages related to a theme topic, and preparing questions using the AVID opening, core, and closing Socratic questioning model. Finally, they take the best of their thinking from their discussion and annotations and turn it into their paragraphs on Friday.
We will do this three times. Each Friday they are writing what will eventually be one of their three body paragraphs of their final essay. So, am I a sell out? Did I let the man get me down? When I envisioned my classroom, I struggled to see past the way I was taught. I couldn’t see past my experience of saying just enough of the teacher’s lecture back to them to get an A. I couldn’t see how traditional forms could be used to inspire new thinking. I can’t pretend I’ve got this all figured out. There is a saying I used to hold dear, then put on a shelf, but now in my teaching career it has taken on new meaning: “a beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.”
I think that’s where it’s at for us as teachers, showing them where the bread is. Where they can find the good–in themselves, in the world. Where they can find truth and contain it in words. To express the realities of their lives and the lives of those they could never meet. To practice radical empathy.
She can be disappointed. She can judge.
She hasn’t seen what we have.
She hasn’t held the attention of twenty-eight fifteen-year-olds and wondered if she was worthy of it.
She will learn.
Luckily, someone showed her where the bread was.
