Poem
I jotted down a little thought when getting into my car one morning. I’ve worked at developing it over the past few days. Here’s the original “jot”:
Winters are hard
As if the sun is tired of warming us so continually
Or the earth is tired of seeing it self so clearly in the light
The earth shells itself up with winter blankets
Both cloud and snowfall
And the bitter wind chases through the streets
Heading nowhere
Here’s the developed version (with a title and everything):
Helios in Winter
As if the sun sought respite,
and we, too, tired of the clarity
it brought, thought to shell
ourselves with bedding
of cloud and snowfall.
An attempt to recover from truth.
Baffled, Helios rears his head and
strips the linens to let the tongue
of winter free, while we,
with panic and fervor,
punch seeds into the earth
and beg for tendrils of green
to lift us forward.
Growth counters direction,
grips to pull us back and in.
The wind, tasting everything,
sharpens then javelins us
in place to face it.
Transactional Schooling
We have a week left in the third term. Stress is high. Students are feeling it. I can sense the anxiety within some of them (turtled postures, curt responses, tapping pencils, wet eyes).
I’m currently studying the book Ungrading and am thinking of ways to incorporate what I’m learning into my philosophy and curriculum.
Here’s one idea:
There’s a correlation between the end of term and the increase of cheating. I had four recent submissions that were clearly “copy-pastes” of each other. One of the students “worked” on his assignment by directly transcribing off a photo of someone else’s work. I watched him do it.
My students may just be stressed with the end of term and are trying to quickly cross things off of their list. I think, however, that these experiences (and cheating in general) are evidence of a deeper issue.
Students don’t see value in doing assignments. This is true either because their sense is accurate, and I haven’t created assignments that are worth their investment, or it’s because I haven’t effectively communicated (in word and culture) the value of the assignments I’ve designed.
If I know a task is valuable, I will do it. I won’t jump hoops or skim by. If I don’t think it’s valuable, I’m likely to get it done as efficiently as possible (in my case as a student, that meant doing the bare minimum for the maximum grade). If I learned along the way, great—but that often was moved to the back burner if my grade was in jeopardy.
Students seem to view school as a marketplace. It’s transactional. They work so that assignments can be exchanged for points. These points add up to a grade. They believe this grade/their GPA will be valued as a currency for scholarships, college acceptance, guaranteed jobs, etc.
School, to them, is not valuable in itself. It is not a place of learning. It is a place for building academic capital that will “buy” them a successful, happy life. Their goal at school is to earn, not learn.
In the words of Susan D. Blum: “[L]earning seems to be a means toward an end, which is the grade, rather than [the] grade [being] a means to the end, which is learning (and to which grades don’t contribute).”
I want my classroom to be a place of learning. Not a place where students are caught up in grades.
From School
“That isn't a picture book, it's a psychological weapon.” (Referring to The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein)
Student 1: “You know that feeling when you have to pee but you’re just not in the mood?”
Student 2: “Oh yeah.”
Student 1: “Yeah, like I know it’s a bodily function but I want it to be a choice.”
“I'm proud of my sister. She had her first kiss!! ...it was with a pig.”
“Mr. Merrill, what if we made you a Tinder profile? Like what if we had photos of you, and we were editing them to make you look hot.”
“I finally figured out why some people are idiots.”
“Merrill, when you were in college did you study astro-rizz-ics?”
“I swear it’s true. Girl’s bellybuttons are like down here, and then guy’s bellybuttons are way higher. At the middle.”
“Mr. Merrill, she bit me!”
“Incorrect. We came back in the same car and you guys had plenty of time to get to class on time… Wait. Were you making out in my back seat??”
Goodies
Cheers!
p.s. I think my students are great.