For the past twenty years this night has always been a bittersweet moment. I have never been hobbled by boredom or a lack of “things I love to do,” so whatever supposed free time I have is rewarding in whatever I choose to do. The flip side is that I am teacher, and I also love the start of the new school year, for it signals another round of figuring out what makes for good teaching and what makes for the best possible experience for my students.
This year my mantra is simplicity.
Over the past few months I have put in tens–if not hundreds–of hours into creating my own custom classroom that emphasizes four things: Read. Write. Create. Share. All of it is, I hope, optimized to take advantage of the fact that my school is going one to one with iPads, and all of my curriculum and relevant content is all right there in my student’s iPads. The irony of technology, for me at least, is that it can simplify almost everything I do in class; moreover, it extends the classroom in a way that keeps students engaged in reading and writing, while it also allows for dynamic possibilities to create and share with each other–and the world at large.
And there is nothing else they need to bring to class.
It seems absurd to me that my older children, who attend a different school than where I teach, dutifully fill their backpacks each morning with several bulky textbooks (the majority of the pages are destined to languish unread) AND a school supplied iPad. Given the massive amount of resources on the web, the reams of apps that enable custom content creation, and the ready availability of interactive etextbooks, it doesn’t seem like that two-inch Algebra II tome really needs to be lugged back and forth every day to and from school. I even know a few teachers who are proud to the point of self-aggrandizement that they don’t use the iPads in their classrooms, as if they have locked on to a pedagogy that will suit him or her just fine until they retire. They feel, too, like they are doing their students a favor to have them learn like “they” learned.
Thankfully, most teachers are not opposed to new ways of doing things; however, many of them have simply not learned to use the tools in their shop. Their iPads are like lathes in this shop: they will only be used when a bowl needs to be made or a small trinket can be turned. The iPads rust in place because they are not seen for what they can do; they are seen for what they have done: kids playing games between classes, airdropping idiotic selfies to each other, texting, surfing non-academic websites, or gaming with some Clash of Clans partner in Slovakia; hence, in a very real sense, we throw out the baby with the bath water where the good is lumped together with the bad and everything important is lost..
The solution should be to either have the kids on a surfboard in set of big waves or gathered around you on the beach. A lesson plan should look less at common core and more at uncommon action–action that you guide as the teacher out there in the waves with your students. If it so important for them to learn and do, it should be equally important for you to model and practice–even if you fall off the board time and time again. And, in the long run of the school year, it is really, really fun to be the “guide on the side” because you do get to know your students in a deeper and more meaningful way, and maybe that will even translate into a shared empathy profound enough to be remembered by you and your students, and that is why, too, there needs to be time on the beach; time away from the iPad; time that reminds kids that remembering and reflecting on how and why they did something is as defining as that something they created, composed, compiled, and curated.
The wistfulness of experience warns me even now that I need to be ready to shift directions when my best laid plans lead into dull waters, but still I’m pretty pumped about the year. Will this slim vessel of polished aluminum have the bits and bytes needed to transform a summer dream into a fall and winter reality? Come spring, will I be tweaking or revamping? Will I be an endless source of disdainful gossip in the teacher’s lounge?
I am inspired by a memory from a scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when Jack Nicholson tries to get his fellow inmates at the asylum to rip a large sink out of the floor and throw it through a window high above to help them all escape. No one will help him, os he tries it alone and grunts and steams and screams trying to do it himself–but he can’t. In the end, he simply walk away and says, “A least I tried, goddamnit, I least I tried.”
I want to at least be able to say that.
