Listen, I get it. We all want our tweens and teens to be better readers. Better writers. Better thinkers. So we ask them to write in our classes. We teach them to “write across the curriculum.” We teach them the strategies that good writers use. They practice writing all kinds of writing styles. They write and write. Yet so many struggle with their basic writing skills. So we provide remedial support. We take them back to even more basic skills building. We spend an extra hour a day breaking down all the tiny components it takes to be a good writer.

And do they become better writers? Some do. Many just learn to hate writing, hate school, and solidly label themselves as “stupid.”

And we do the same with reading. We do the same with math.

And we have hundreds of PhD’s who are developing more ways to do it with more intensity. With more fidelity. And we have thousands of consultants writing books and manuals about how to do that to your kids, today, in 5 easy steps.

I’m sorry if I don’t really have the faith that those strategies will work so well.

I wonder…

I wonder if we stopped with the microscopes and needling and the … whatever else you want to label it …
I wonder if we went back to something way more simplistic. More basic. And this is going to sound dumb, I’m sure.

I wonder if instead of having kids practice writing/reading/math, if we could instead get them to be writers. To be readers. To be math.

*duh. That’s what all that other stuff is for*

But no, seriously. What if kids saw themselves as Hemmingway…as Vonnegut…as King…as Wilde…as Woolfe…Rowling…Card…Collins…Meyer (yeah, of Twilight fame…you may not like her style, but if a kid does, maybe it’s not for us to judge).

Sure, maybe the lifestyles of those writers may not be exactly the ones we want our kids to emulate, but the reality is, we don’t want to be copycats of others. We want to be our own best version of ourselves, right?

But to begin to imagine ourselves as a writer? To consider how a writer might live? To think about how their day is scheduled? Kids would no longer be students, per se, but instead, writers. To learn to seek, see, find, and develop inspiration. And I’m not talking about holding a Writer’s Workshop here, although that’s a great start. Let’s take it further.

What would a day/week/month/year in the life of a mathematician look like? An engineer? A statistician? An entrepreneur? What conditions would have to exist for kids to not “do math” but to BE one of these people? To pretend? To imagine? To become?

What would it be like to not just learn about science, but to actually BE a geologist? A botanist? An agricultural breeder? A biomedical engineer? A bio informatics scientist?

I want my tweens and teens to play at these careers now. To decide which mantle might fit them best. Maybe we’re talking about re-thinking schools in the most radical way…creating mini apprenticeships? But certainly we can begin with regular and sustained job shadows. Sure, maybe we don’t have all those careers in our locality. Maybe as a teacher, I don’t know how to help kids replicate all of the higher-level careers.

I can’t say I know how to make this all happen. But I wonder if we might start with writing. Helping kids to BE writers.

I was sent this question the other day from a young man who used to attend classes virtually at my school and who is now in his own teacher ed prep program. As I was constructing a response, I figured it might make a nice post. So here you go!

Question:
Ginger, If you have the time, what were some of the strategies you used to catch your students “doing something right”.

First of all, I love this topic. So much of our time as educators is spent “correcting” kids or helping them to do better, which pre-supposes they’re doing something wrong. No, I believe to the very core of my soul that if we want kids to do better, we have to start from and build on the foundation we want to grow. We need to build on the foundation of kids doing Right.

So in response to that question above, I submit 10 ways we would catch kids doing Right:

Answer:

1.  I intentionally looked for it.
2. I put them into situations where they got to work in their strengths. In their learning styles.
3. I asked them to do work that they loved or were excited in.
4. We laughed and had fun. A LOT.
5. We created an environment of caring and sharing between students and students-staff.
6. I asked parents what their kids were good at. What they liked. What they wanted.
7. I asked kids what they were good at. What they liked. What they wanted.
8. We always celebrated doing the Right thing.
9. We made it ok to be weird (Everyone is somebody else’s weirdo. You think you’re normal? How weird is that?!), so it was a safe environment to be someone they might not normally be. To try new things.
10. I intentionally looked for it. (I put that twice because it’s doubly important, especially for those kids who NEED us to catch them doing right.)

What did I miss? What needs revised?

What’s more exciting than daydreaming about finding buried treasure on ancient shipwrecks?


What if we asked students to imagine themselves discovering the secrets held inside ancient Greek and Roman shipwrecks? Imagine hunting for them, deep in the murky depths of the Black Sea as the lights from our high-tech, submersible, underwater vehicles sweep left and right across the sea floor. Imagine what it would be like if we not only found them, but when we uncovered them, we actually found them completely intact, precisely as they looked when the ships went down. All the cargo still in the ship’s hold. All the sailors still aboard.

You see, that’s possible because of two amazing phenomena that happen in the Black Sea: the sea floor is a unique gelatinous substance that envelops anything of substantial weight that falls down to it; the water of the Black Sea is anoxic at a certain depth, which does not support the organisms that would normally consume the wood or other carbon-based materials that fall to the bottom of other bodies of water.

The potential to find complete shipwrecks in this environment is extremely high.

If an explorer could get into these waters, which were politically difficult to navigate for much of the 20th Century, what might we find? What would those ships have been carrying? What secrets of history are held in timeless suspension? Currently, Robert Ballard, the man who found the Titanic and the HL Hunley, is working hard to uncover and share these portals to history with today’s world.

…biology, history, geography, politics, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, archaeology, research, writing…

These are all topics ripe for exploration as students are asked to learn about the Ancient Merchant Ships of the Black Sea.

As adults, the reason we learn new things is because our lack of knowledge gets in the way of something we want to do. So we go out and find a way to learn what we need to learn. Right? Our recognition of our lack of knowledge and our need to know leads to learning. Authentic learning.

But school isn’t set up that way at all. School is set up for us to be “fed” all the information that we’ll ever need to know before we’re asked to use it. Before we even know that we might need it. Before educators even know that it’ll be useful for us. It’s all based on the assumption that “they” know what “we” will need to know.

What if school was set up to help us practice learning how to learn instead of spending time asking us to prove that we’ve retained something that’s been fed to us? Because in the real world, rarely is the information we need to know for our jobs, for our lives, fed to us. We have to go out and find that information.

Well, that is, unless we’re working on an assembly line that requires very little original thought or initiative.  —— long pause ——  And just how many of us in the US have those factory based, assembly line types of jobs now?

Right.

So if we’re preparing our kids for the real world, why isn’t school set up with a series of challenges that made us need to learn information-gathering, idea processing, and content creation? And the kids learn what information (and skills) they need to know through those challenges? And best of all, why couldn’t the challenges be set up in ways students would want to complete them?

And why is this concept so difficult for us to try?

If you’re intrigued, let me know. I think I might have answers but I can’t complete this challenge alone. I need your help too.