Fourteen kids are sitting in front of me at this very minute taking a final exam in this second-year Spanish class. Most are sophomores. To what extent do these kids know that they hold the key to their own futures, and what they do on this test is relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of things? I would venture a guess and say that they have all stressed about how well they would be prepared and how well they would do. The funny thing is that those who stressed the most are probably the ones who will end up with the best grades. My conviction is that these particular kids will do well in life even if they flunk out of this school because it is my growing sense (and it is odd for a school man to make this statement) that school is but one measure of success, and maybe not even the most important.
One boy, sitting in the back of the room by the window, is very bright but horribly disorganized. He often looks as though he hasn’t had a shower in a week, his complexion and the look in his eyes would suggest that he eats poorly, and he regularly forgets to bring his books or a pencil to write with or a notebook. He is earning a grade one full grade-level below what he could earn if he were a more assiduous “student” (i.e., the careful type who always gets his homework done, crosses every I and dots every T, and asks multiple clarifying questions on a test to make sure he is doing things right. You know the type). However, he frequently contributes little tidbits of information gleaned from his own travels, or that he remembers from his history class, or something from music history. These kinds of comments enrich a class, but also show me that he is thinking, associating, making connections among bodies of knowledge, and it is this kind of activity that will grow his brain and make him someone, ultimately, who will enrich the world of those around him because he is letting himself be led by his curiosity and his interests. We are all better off when what moves people or what they are passionate about is what they pursue. I feel my classes were enriched by these bits of information that this student brought to all of us. In terms of how we structure a class, then, this suggests that students will do their best work when we give them broader, as opposed to more narrowly defined, themes to investigate.
I have evidence of this from the previous years of teaching when I have had kids do projects to present orally to the whole class. The best projects are the ones they defined based on a broad topic. For example, a theme this year was festivals of the Dominican Republic. Each kid who gave this presentation (there were two of them, one in each section of the second year class) structured the presentation a little differently. One focused primarily on Carnival, while the other gave a more panoramic view of the variety of festivals that populate the Dominican yearly calendar. Of course, the structure may have been generated by the particular documents that served as their information, but the point is that they felt empowered to pursue the topic from their own point of view and interest. Content was communicated and language was used to communicate that content, and the presenters felt that they had control over their own destinies.
This now brings me back to the original point. By the very fact that they are here, having pushed themselves to seek out an educational situation for themselves that they thought would serve them better, these students have already shown a level of creativity, daring, curiosity and courage that shows their true character. Young people can be especially foolhardy and do lots of things without thinking which shows, in part, their willingness to just let go and go do it, and which also shows their lack of understanding of consequences for their actions. At other times, however, kids get so focused on “the right move”, doing “the right thing” that they get paralyzed, their creativity gets stunted, and they can only see themselves as part of some vast continuum that demands that they get it right the first time or pay the consequences forever. What I hope they can walk away with in their interaction with me is the sense that there are many ways to the top of the mountain, that their creativity will be rewarded. But, even the ones who don’t do so well, and there will be those as well, they have shown themselves to be daring just in being willing to submit themselves to the rigors we impose in our curriculum and the creative ways we go about learning and teaching. They need to know that they have the intellectual vigor and the drive to go out and do things, to shake up their own lives and try to recast reality. These types are winners, even if they don’t get into Harvard. That would only be confirmation of the fact that they have learned the “student game” very well, and really nothing else. For my part, I will continue to develop projects and ways of learning that will spark their interest and tap into the creativity that is there already.
