Schools and Sustainability

There's this story I tell about my first week of being a junior high teacher. I wanted to get the students excited about writing and I thought getting them to think about why humans had developed a written form of communication would be interesting fuel for thought. And so I gave them a topic. “The importance of writing to our society.” A paragraph. “Are you going to mark it?” they asked. “Of course,” I responded. “What’s it going to be out of?” “10!” I said confidently.

At the end of the class they handed their work in and I took it home to mark. The first paragraph I picked up started this way: Writing is important to our society because it’s much faster than printing. Not quite what I had expected, I picked up another one. Writing is important. You have to know how to write or you’ll get in trouble. And if you get in trouble your Mom and Dad will get mad at you. I picked up the third one which said that writing wasn’t important at all because computers were going to take over and no one would need to write anymore.

It was finally around the seventh or eighth one that I started getting what I was looking for. Writing is important because it lets us keep track of information, it allows us to communicate, it let’s us be creative. Now I just had to decide who got 5 and who got 10 and who got 2 on that assignment. None of them were wrong necessarily, and really perhaps my instructions hadn’t been as clear as I thought but to what extent should I tell them what I wanted?

Within days of becoming a teacher I came up against the two things that would continually make me uncomfortable about my role in the classroom. The first issue is the degree to which remembering and regurgitation have been disguised as learning. The second issue is around the role of teacher both as mentor and judge...especially when I was expected to judge with inadequate tools and then represent these measurements in ways that supported unfair discrimination between students. After six years of trying desperately to understand the system and make it work for students I entered grad school determined to get to the heart of learning. That's where I began to fit all the pieces together...farm kid, social worker, teacher...and what was that other piece? Oh yeah. Next time.