Ode (Owed) to the Kids

So already, for the first time in a number of years, ninth-graders are a part of my daily school life. My ninth-grade homeroom group -- or community meeting (CM) group as we call them at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School -- reminds me on a daily basis of what it is to be fourteen-turning-fifteen. Even the coolest ones who like to sit on the periphery of the group need only a gentle reminder to move closer and join in. Maybe my CM co-teachers and I are just very lucky, but lots of the kids raise their hands when we're having full-group discussions; and individual kids initiate conversations with us.  We manage to raise an occasional smile even from the small number of kids whose tendency is to whine, complain, and lament.

In general, they're a sunny group who are very much viewing high school as some great big buffet table:  they talk a lot about what to join, sample, check out, in their quests to "get involved" in high school. They want to like high school. They're also  very creative as a group:  in a skit they co-developed to dramatize the consequences of stealing at CRLS, they had one boy actually play the role of the stolen cellphone (the thief fled with the phone-boy on his back); and when it came time to decorate our door for "Aloha Day," they worked miracles using post-it notes.  Lots of them right now are gathering signatures to run for Homecoming Prince and Princess.

Like all CRLS CM groups, we receive weekly guidance, suggestions, and resources for ensuring that the students know about school-wide opportunities and can reflect on how their own behavior and attitudes are helping or hindering them as students beginning their high school careers.  Recently, we had two days' worth of CM stimuli directly related to the recent research on the roles that  grit and resilience play in school and life success:  research says that students who "bounce back" from setbacks and disappointments (we didn't discuss the factors that predict resilience) often learn more and achieve more than students who are more intelligent* but less resilient.

The day we were supposed to discuss resilience, I was excited because resilient behavior was occurring at that very moment in our CM group:  two girls were raising money for their sports teams -- volleyball and soccer respectively -- and were both needing to persevere in their efforts to find classmates to sponsor them per mile for a fundraiser road race -- because not everyone was willing to pledge.  So I said to the group -- and I'm changing the names of the students as I must -- "We have resilient behavior happening in our group right now.  We have Shawna and Nancy  trying to raise money for their teams, and they have to be resilient -- they have to keep asking, even if three times in a row, they hear 'no.'"

"You forgot Karen," three voices said practically simultaneously. "She's raising money for her team, too."

Suddenly, I got it. I remembered.  

These were ninth-graders in their first month at a new school, and I had committed the crime of not noticing one of them.  Resilience didn't matter to them -- neither the concept, nor my unbelievably relevant, in-time, highly personalized example of it. What did matter to them was not being unknown, anonymous, or invisible (even if cool behavior made it appear that some of them wanted to be unseen or overlooked).  Furthermore, no one wanted anyone in our CM group to be unknown, anonymous, or invisible.

I should have remembered this.  I've taught so many ninth-graders over the years and loved watching them grow over the course of a school year, even the ones that made me want to tear my hair out.  But my teaching of ninth-graders occurred before pacing guides and common assessments became such prominent players in teachers' instructional decisions, before aggregate data from standardized assessments became the primary way -- or even the only way -- that schools gauged their success.  In the 20th century, there always seemed to be plenty of time to know one another and plenty of time to learn, and the two were invariably connected.  Furthermore, I was entrusted with the power to decide how to use the time I had with my students to foster learning and community, even though the term "learning community" hadn't yet been coined (or so I think).

It's not the Common Core that's the problem.  The problem is an educational establishment that attends relentlessly and exclusively to the quantitatively measurable while professing its commitment to the "whole child" and to equitable "college and career readiness" (which means preparing all students to become innovators, which means helping all students develop certain skills and habits of mind that aren't readily reflected in quantitative data). And there's another problem, too: iterations of the Common Core that focus almost exclusively on basic skills development, essentially ignoring the document's guidelines for 21st-century skills development. Check out this graphic: very good stuff, but nothing particularly innovative, collaborative, and creative -- so perhaps not good enough?

Frankly, the moment I was most excited about the Common Core's potential was when I attended the Deeper Learning Conference** in San Diego last April and saw presentations featuring student projects, many interdisciplinary, that teachers, students, or both had aligned to the Common Core standards. In fact, in a number of cases, the students had been required to submit proposals that specified the Common Core standards with which their proposed projects would align. Although I appreciated the degree to which the school encouraged accountability, what really excited me was the investment of the students, evident in both the quality of the projects themselves and in the documentation of students' processes in creating them.  These projects weren't about the students themselves, but they radiated the students' interests, concerns, knowledge, talents, and values -- and, yes, their investment.  My ninth-graders would have felt visible and proud to have made such projects. 

I just finished reading Ron Berger's An Ethic of Excellence: Building a Culture of Craftsmanship with Students -- and it gave me just the shot in my educator arm that I needed. That word "craftsmanship" is such an unusual educational word choice.*** It suggests personally held very high standards and the pride associated with them; it suggests beautiful products (Berger talks about the importance of beautiful work -- not just high quality work) and the pride associated with them. In Berger's book, an extended project about the quality of drinking water in people's  homes became about community service and personal ownership simultaneously for the sixth graders who undertook and met its embedded science and communication challenges. No invisibility here: so much relationship between students and work, students and teachers, students and students, students and community.  No skills for skills' sake; plenty of skills for the sake of the project, though.

Alignment, inspiration, and personalization:  a great combination for ninth-graders -- and for all high school students. Ninth-graders are a very special case in terms of their initial need for being noticed.  But high school students of all grades need and want to be recognized (some clamor; others wait and hope) as individual people -- perhaps not by their teachers, but by somebody -- and to better understand who they are, what they're good at, what they might love, what they want to know more about.  

This is much on my mind as my seniors write their college essays, many of which are due on November 1.  They've all already begun to "prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet," though we're not even beginning "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" for another two weeks.  It's a poignant, meaningful, stressful time for them; the stakes are high. 

Meanwhile, my student Solomon -- also a senior treading this path to self-understanding and next steps -- is blogging about Kurt Vonnegut and Phillip Roth and their very personal effects on him, which he values highly; I hope you'll check him out and respond. "The Kid That Nobody Could Handle" by Vonnegut is definitely one of those stories that raises all kinds of issues around invisibility, caring, assessment, judgment -- what really matters when.  At least it happens in a school that has an arts program.  When I reflect on my ninth graders' ability to use post-it notes as art materials, I know they're already brimming with innovative  and artistic capacity.  Hope they get to develop it.


* "Intelligent" as measured by traditional intelligence tests. 
** These projects generally came from schools in which project-based learning played a central if not exclusive role in student learning.
***"Culture" is a little more usual, but still unusual:  if you can't quantify it, why talk about it, I fear the "evaluators" would say.