Getting to the heart of LEARNING may first involve a lot of UNLEARNING!

So as this new year begins, I am reflecting on the major things that I need to work on this year.  I think that I've been doing a great job building connections and getting kids interested in English class again, but when reviewing last year I see some major roadblocks that need to be tackled.

I have noticed that my students are generally not what I would call "real" English students.  This sounds derogatory, but I mean it more as an indictment of the way they've been conditioned by many of our teachers in many subject areas than as an indictment of  my students.  As in many high poverty schools, we are simply teaching them "life-skills" English:  how to spell, proper grammar, and that the purpose of reading is only to be able to answer the questions your teacher puts on the test.  It's the equivalent of how special ed departments approach teaching their students in the past by simply teaching them how to tie their shoes and proper hygiene.  Don't get me wrong, life skills are important, but by the time students are in high school they should be at a level where they are being challenged to their cognitive maturity even if they don't have all the "skills" yet.  Let me explain it another way, yes, you can teach 30 year olds how to read by having them read "Go Dog Go" over and over, but it will not be challenging them intellectually, only teaching them reading.  It's not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with teaching skills as long as you are simultaneously working on their higher reasoning skills as well.

And therein lies the rub.  In order to get them to be able to challenge themselves with high level literary discussion, it seems that it is now necessary to train them in the skills that they never learned while only focusing on the life skills portion.  In essence you must teach the skill needed to get past merely teaching skills. SO, this year I want to begin focusing on how to scaffold kids to these higher levels of learning by teaching how to hold meaningful discussions, how to read in a meaningful way, and how to process material without the direct prompting of the teacher.  To me, it's like deprogramming everything school has taught them thus far about what it means to learn.  

To make things a little more coherent for myself, these are my reconditioning plans.  First I plan to try to strip away all the bad habits, and replace them with new understandings of English as a subject of high level inquiry. 
Things to be untaught:

• Learning is passive.
• Being a good reader is inborn.
• There is one answer to understanding literature.

Things to be reprogrammed:

• Students need to be trained how to have actual classroom discussions where the teacher isn't the center of the focus

• Being a good reader is a matter of learning not only how to decode words, but decode meaning and the work's social relevance. 

• Teacher's don't supply meaning, readers do.  Students are always "right" as long as they can prove it in the text.  Students must be taught that the academic process and English inquiry isn't a magical act or inborn talent only available to the teacher or a small group of students, but a very calculated cognitive skill that students are capable of learning through practice and proper teacher scaffolding.

Welcome to my blog....

It occurred to me today that I should decompress after work.  I spend a lot of time thinking about teaching and thinking about my students, so much so that I NEVER feel like I am off the clock.  I hope that by using this blog to reflect on the day, gather my thoughts, and chronicle my successes  and failures, I will better process what is going on inside the classroom.

So a little about myself.....

....  I am now sitting in a large classroom in a tiny school in the heart of the Cascadian foothills.  My school has only 250 kids K-12, about 20 teachers total and a superintendent who is also the principal, vice principle, maintenance coordinator, and math teacher.  Our school is 98% white and predominantly poor.  Despite the lack or racial diversity, we have a fair range of upbringings.  There's the kids who were raised in the middle of mountains and grew up without electricity, to the kids growing up in large ghetto-like trailer parks, to the kids who's parents came from California to escape city life.  The valley where our school is also has a mixture of political ideologies.  There's certainly a large contingency of survivalist conservative families, but there is also a group that stem from the hippy insurgency of the early 70's.  Quite a few of the families came out here to experience communal living. Although most of the original communes have since disbanded, many of these same hippies have stayed to raise their families away from the rest of the world.

All this, makes for an interesting combination of kids, and there is a definite new culture that has been created here.  In many ways it is a fascinating place to be working.  One of the things that fascinates me the most is the many contradictions that you see here.  You have intense poverty, unemployment, drug use, and violence painted  onto a canvas whose background is filled with lush greens, beautiful clear rivers, and the most intense winter sky I've ever encountered.  There's the contrast of the cultures of the old who see this place as a refuge from the liberal evils of the city and the ever present influence of this shunned culture as it seeps into every pore from the outside through t.v., the internet, and outsiders who move in and become part of the community.  It is my students who listen to country and Lady Gaga, who can often be unknowingly racist but dance the Souljah Boi at our school dances.  It is the wealth of knowledge they have about the animals, the rivers, and their trucks placed against their distrust of teachers and their dislike of books.  Then it's the kids who defy all that and just do their thing.  The religious right, and the huge number of teen mothers.  The joy and the pain.  All this can be overwhelming some days, and exciting and beautiful the next.  And although it can a million and one different things, it is never dull....

... welcome to Teaching in the Sticks.  Enjoy your stay, watch out for the cougars!