While working with my 25-year old son Landen and my best friend Jorge Sanchez this morning painting the interior of my house, it occurred to me how much fun it is to work with others, as a team.
It should be the same in our classes. When we work together with our students in class as a team to create some kind of narrative (tableaux or stories), it’s a lot more fun than when we choose to function without the feeling of being on a team, with us doing all the work, in isolation yet exposed - with our students feigning interest in our trench mouth utterances, but wishing that they could create something instead of preparing for one of you district-mandated assessments. We both know that when the kids see us accepting the full burden of the class on our own half-scared and fully scarred shoulders, they notice it and withdraw from us. It’s a normal human reaction to pull away from a group when not invited into it.
When we work as a team, our kids don’t feel judged and we don’t feel like we have to do everything. It’s less nervous. They have their jobs and it’s better. It’s easier and it gives them a chance to find their voices in school, which is a big need right now in education.
The days of feigning interest and boredom will one day be over for our kids and for us. It’s a hellscape for many of them now, for the kids who resist memorization, for the kids who think with their whole brains and their hearts, for the kids whom many of us see as rebellious because they refuse to just memorize and regurgitate. The change depends on us, on how courageous we are and whether we teach as per the research or as per our district-mandated memorization marching orders.
Whether we offer a good or a bad, traditionally ineffective product to our students depends on each one of us. Right now, for this coming year, we’re poised to do the latter because it’s too late to retool now anyway.
The CI Renaissance guys (Sean and Greg) asked me in a recent CI Renaissance podcast* how long it would normally take to get a good CI curriculum going in a classroom and I said about one year. We can’t do weekend trainings anymore. Surgeons don’t train for a weekend either, unless we view our jobs as less important than surgery. I view them as far more important, but that’s just me and what teaching for 40 years taught me.
May the Lord bless and keep us in our classroom struggles this year, therefore. One day our struggles and those of our students will be over, when enough teachers pull off the hundredth monkey thing. Someday we really will work as a team with our students in our classrooms generating real, not fake CI classes. But that timing is up to the Lord.
*The CI Renaissance on Spotify
The CI Renaissance on Apple Music
The CI Renaissance on Amazon Music
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