My faith restored...it worked!

Well, I want to thank the members of this week's #slowchatED for not letting me throw in the towel last night or this morning.  I had resolved at one point yesterday afternoon to realize that I was, once again, charging windmills, and just for the love of all that's holy STOP.  But some of you were eager to hear what happened.  Some of you encouraged me to stay the course.  And do you know what?

It worked.

They came to life.

They changed, and we had to shut the door to keep the toxins out and to keep the blessed, blessed energy in the room.

I started today's class reminding them about their homework.  "You mean how you told us to get a folder?" one child asked.  I turned to my desk and prepared for the worst.  My head, of its own volition, began slowly moving left to right as my back was turned to them as if to deny the reality I faced.  And then another spoke up.  "No. He means how he asked us to tell him how we want to learn...what was it we're learning." And then another, "Persuasive texts...or somethin'."

I turned back.  Some of them had paid attention.

After I acknowledged that my wish was for them to direct our learning, hands started to rise. One child made a rather mundane suggestion that we go to the computer lab and just look at some speeches that I could find for them before hand.  This just didn't feel student-centered enough. I called on a soft-spoken young man who suggested, "Couldn't we just, you know, try to persuade each other of something?" And then two young ladies at a table across the room raised their hands almost simultaneously.  They each wanted to beat the other one to suggest a group debate.  This turned, from another student's suggestion, into breaking the group of twenty-two kids into two groups of five and two groups of six and having one topic for the five-on-five debate and another for the six-on-six debate.  "But wait," one child said, "What is it we're debating?" The skepticism was palpable. He knew I was going to swoop in and steal this from them right about now.

Then a thought struck.  I rummaged for some index cards, sent my intern around the room to hand one to each child, and began explaining that each child needed to write down one controversial topic that we could debate.  After clarifying for these 7th graders that "abortion" was an example of a controversial topic (and, therefore, off the table, thank goodness), they began to write. Then we collected the cards, and I read out the topics. I asked them to try very hard to withhold emotional responses (laughter, snickering, groaning, etc.), as we were in the process of brainstorming and everything should, at this point, be considered.  Here is what they wrote:

• hunting whales
• speeding
• Are girls more mature than boys?
• argue for either the plaintiff or defendant in a mock trial
• dress code policy - specifically, tucking shirts in on campus
• year-round schooling 
• Should marijuana be legal?
• Are people separated into classes? Why are people thought of as lower or middle class? Does our school exist under a class structure based on money or status? (and she went on furthur to explicate this idea class structure in our society)
• why we should or should not have homework (four suggestions)
• gay rights (two suggestions)
• gun control (two suggestions)

And look...you're not even ready for this last one.  I know I wasn't.  And FOUR children suggested this. Of all the controversial topics available to them, in my classroom today, in this environment where I spent fifty minutes not having to tell anyone how to act, to be quiet, to pay attention, or any other disciplinary diatribes, four children suggested...

• SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT

How many of you are savoring the beauty and the irony of that as much as I did?  My God! They got it.  This was better.  This didn't suck!  School CAN BE IMPROVED, and we're experiencing the evidence of it right now.

Tonight I will construct a brief Google poll, and tomorrow, they will get to vote on topics.  We narrowed it down to the four with multiple nominations - homework, gay rights, gun control, and school improvement - and one student insisted we consider the class structure topic, and another wanted the drug debate to be included.  Those six will make the poll, and tomorrow we will narrow the field to two.

The structure of the debates themselves is a little up in the air at the moment. I'm not of a mind to force anyone to argue for a viewpoint with which they don't agree.  We'll see how it all shakes out tomorrow.  I know this, though, right now.  Tonight I will sleep the sleep of a satisfied educator for the first time in a long, long time.  These children refreshed my soul and my being and my optimism more than any Twitter chat or association conference ever has.  They gave me back my sea legs, and I feel grand.

Thank you, all, for your gentle prodding in response to last night's post.  Thank you for #slowchatED. Thank you for reminding me that my kids will only rise as high as I will let them and that when I rip the ceiling off the classroom, they will orbit planets we never knew existed.

I love being a teacher tonight.  Again.