Once Every Nine Years Or So

Over twenty-six years in the classroom, I’ve had a chance to chat with former students from time to time who stop by to say hello. Not that often, actually. In fact it’s pretty rare, so I enjoy it when it happens. Three students  in particular have sought me out specifically to talk about the role of schooling in their lives. That’s about one visit every nine years, for you math-dogs out there. These three students have all appeared in the last year couple of years, however, and there is something strikingly similar about the visits. They didn’t come to thank me for being a nice guy, or giving them ice cream or an extra recess (all of which I did). They certainly didn’t thank me for guiding them through the mandated math curriculum or doing the ‘checking for understanding’ questions at the end of the chapter.

Two of them talked about how important the drama activities were that we did throughout their fifth grade year. Going to see West Side Story at Portland Center Stage, creating and staging an original musical–both of them performing in a musical for the first time–and a ton of other theater activities I don’t recall. A third student talked about how much he loved getting his “Science Minute,”–I gave him one minute every day to tell the class whatever he wanted about what he had most recently learned on the Discovery Channel (and I timed it closely! 🙂 The two drama kids are now heavily involved in the performing arts, one as an actor and one as a dancer, which is gratifying, but frankly, that was never my goal as a teacher. What these three remember, as I see it, is having a voice, a means to express themselves, and doing activities in and out of the classroom that were engaging and slightly risky, like making a musical theater debut at age eleven in the Winningstad Theater.

Here’s an idea.

Give kids a voice. Give them hard tasks that make a difference. Get them out into the world regularly to see what’s going on; get them doing things that involve some risk–nothing huge, necessarily, just some risk, sometimes. Let them prove themselves with us adults cheering and supporting from the sidelines, or working alongside as mentors and collaborators. This is how you find out what the world is about, and who you are in the world, and who you are not. Such experiences are the stuff of a deep and lasting education.

Just sayin’.