It’s hard for me to walk the line between This year was not good enough and Given the circumstances, I did as well as I could. But I’m getting there.

I found out today about my schedule for next year. I’m losing AP English Lang (which I am totally OK with--something I never ever thought I’d say) and probably picking up two new classes to go with Desktop Publishing: Public Speaking and a new (to my school) class called Film and Literature.

I am pretty excited about this (still tentative) schedule. I get to frame up all three as Communication Skills Of Different Species.

Desktop Publishing has mutated from its original scope (making calendars in MS Publisher) to Digital Skills Wonderland: making short movies, coding games & HTML, photoshopping, blogging, and general website building.

Public Speaking is about communicating well in public, which includes speechmaking, yes, but also YouTube video production, digital citizenship, and puppets. Lots of puppets.

And the Film/Lit class will be reading, writing, and moviemaking alongside lots and lots of shorter movie clips. I haven’t thought this one through too well, since I just found out about it this morning, but what I do know is this: I learned most of my literary terms by writing them in poems, not memorizing them. I intend for students to learn about how movies are made by making them.

So yeah - there will be a lot of new next year, as always. There will be puppets. There will be more elaborate video production. I plan to do more short reps of skills, the way I learned from Cheryl, Corippo, and Make It Stick. And I can’t wait to see the stuff the kids create.

My class, at some kind of fundamental level, is based on a lie.

Not a lie, the kind that some teachers tell, about how much this worksheet is going to help you when you’re an engineer or an inventor or a programmer or a museum curator.

And not the kind of lie about work hard and jump through just one more hoop, and the next, and the next, and everything will be okay.

It’s a much simpler lie: I don’t know.

I pretend to not know lots and lots and lots of things I actually know. I pretend not to know how to do lots of things I know how to do. I do this with regularity and impunity.

I do this for many reasons. It builds community, because now students have to ask each other how to do things, instead of asking me--and I find that they generally remember better when one of their peers tells them, anyway. It also builds community in the sense of uniting them against their teacher who seems to be going out of his way to irritate them. Guilty as charged.

I also do this to introduce the idea of struggle. Cheryl and I talk, read, and write a lot about how cognitive psychology says that the more you struggle with something in order to decode it or parse it or otherwise figure it out, the more likely you are to remember it and be able to use it later.

And some struggle happens organically. Writing is hard, reading big books is hard, expanding vocabulary is hard, the videos refusing to move from your phone to YouTube--that’s also hard. A lot of the time, though, I just pretend to not know how to do something. My students often tell each other “Google it, because that’s what he’s going to tell you to do anyway.”

This is a big change for me, the whole “not needing to know everything at all times” thing. And it’s funny, really, that the three little words that have changed my class forever are often a flat-out lie.

So try it in your class. Instead of explaining all the things all the time, just say, I don’t know. See if you can figure it out. Explain it to me when you do. Pretty cool things happen when you do.

My personal theory on homework, as a teacher, is to not give it at all unless students don’t use their face-to-face time in an efficient way during class. 

However, homework is not something I ever really engaged in as a student, and yes, I realize this probably biases my opinion on the subject. 

There are teachers (and administrators, and other powerful educator-types) that claim homework teaches responsibility. 

Nope. 

Learning responsibility comes from the teacher (or authority figure) gradually releasing control of the learning tasks when the students/apprentices are engaged in a task they they intrinsically find to be worthwhile. It does not come from me telling a bunch of sixteen-year-olds what they should add to their overstuffed lives when they’re not sitting/standing/playing in my classroom. 

So really, the discussion of homework/no homework steers into a conversation about value in class. What do you value as a teacher? What do students value, beyond prom dresses and bandanna-print vests? It is reductionist to say that teenagers don’t care about schoolwork at all, which is an argument I hear often. Teenagers don’t care about THAT schoolwork, because it’s little more than checking off a series of boxes to them. 

Any kind of work, inside or outside of class, has to be connected to a larger learning goal that the students understand. And in my class, it often takes them a LONG time to get the connections, because the class is very non-traditional-- but the moments when they get it-- those are awesome. 

For example, today, I had a colleague come talk to my AP class about presentation skills, so the kids could hear a different voice and a little different perspective. He told them that slideshows shouldn’t have tons of words on them, and that they should hand out a short document after the presentation that gives notes/helps solidify the information. (I make them do this, and they mutter things at me.) 

As he said this, I saw several students look at me, the light registering on their faces… like, Oh. THAT’S why we do that. 

Yep. 

Prompt: How do you infect students with a passion for learning?

Let's start here: I take issue with the idea of intentionally infecting anyone with anything. The connotation of the word "infect" is inherently negative, and more importantly, it suggests a lack of agency on the part of the infected individual. 

Let's not suggest that students don't already have a passion for learning. At worst, they don't have a passion for learning THAT or THIS. 

And that's cool, honestly. I don't have a passion for learning forensic science (gross) or linear algebra. All I can do is to be excited myself and allow students the space to put their own spin on what we're learning. 

So let's do that. Let's create assignments with thousands of possible iterations, and give students the platform to try things out and see what works for them. Let's not make it complicated. We can remind them that they love learning, and let reawakening serve as our guiding metaphor instead of infection. 

In response to a journal topic that asked, in part, “Is it possible to create opportunities for deep learning in your own high school career?”, a student wrote the following:

I could definitely create those opportunities. I could go home every day, dive into articles, and essays, and youtube videos about what we’re going over in class. I could create connections and make these wonderful infographics to study with, but it wouldn’t be what’s on the test. And that’s what matters at the end of the day, even if nobody likes it.

And that is completely heartbreaking to me, for two reasons.

First, this student has had the desire to learn new, exciting things (and learn them deeply) kind of beaten out of her by waves of busy work.

And second, the student is right that the tests at the end are really what matter to most teachers in most classrooms in most schools around the country.

This is a problem.

It’s a problem that she (and most of the other writers, her classmates) all said basically the same thing: Yeah, that sounds great and all, but not as great when you’re trying to polish off your sixth hour of homework at 2 AM.

And it’s a personal problem for me. Deep learning is the pulse of my classes. I insist on students struggling and discovering things for themselves. I insist that they push each other and teach each other and support each other. I insist that they find connections and patterns where they thought there just were piles of words or cute stories.

Everything in my class is connected. I want students to read more deeply, to write more powerfully, and see the threads trailing out the windows and doors, drawing in history and chemistry and cognitive psych and calculus and physics. I want to say Here is a web. Now go make your own.

So we do things that are non-Englishy, on the surface. We draw pictures and make puppets with needles and thread and hot glue guns. We highlight documents in five different shades. We watch YouTube videos without words, and YouTube videos with too many words. We talk about how we learn, at the beginning, almost as much as what we actually need to learn.

And I model, hopefully, what voracious learning looks like. I pretend not to know answers to student questions. I steal from Ramsey, who says that introducing complexity and confusion and inquiry before giving any “answers” away is the path to true student learning.

This is true. 

I decided to become a teacher one winter day while tutoring 9th and 10th graders in the AVID program at Asheville High School, mostly in basic algebra, sitting across long-rowed cafeteria tables. There was a girl named Cece, and a boy named Darius, and as I watched them start to subtract, divide, and isolate their own variables, the lights came on for all three of us. 

I have told this story as brief and epiphanal for years, as a sudden burst of knowledge handed down from the sky, but the truth is that the decision to become a teacher came much more gradually, over the course of months and even years. It's much more fun to have a story that doubles as a Road To Damascus moment, but I barely believe my own story. 

I know the truth is actually much more complex.

I decided I wanted to be a teacher in a drama teacher's classroom at Asheville High. I was a senior in college, knower-of-all-things, trying to remember how to balance chemical equations on the board, feeling the chalk between my fingers, feeling the adrenaline spike as I realized that I was working with CNO3 on one side and splitting it off into two molecules of carbon dioxide on the other, and that holy crap, there's too much nitrogen and this wasn’t going to work and these kids are thinking I actually know how to do Chemistry and WHAT AM I GOING TO DO WITH MY LIFE?!?

Or: I decided I wanted to be a teacher after getting turned down by the MFA-In-Poetry programs at UVa, Warren Wilson, and Iowa--three of the most elite in the country. 

Or: I decided I wanted to be a teacher after a terrible series of experiences with teachers in high school history classes, after which I determined that I never wanted other students to suffer through the kind of Historical Hopelessness I had felt. 

Or: I decided to become a teacher when my grandfather, a 25-year teaching veteran himself, told me that it would be a good idea to get my teaching credential alongside my Creative Writing degree. 

Or: I decided to become a teacher when I realized that I didn’t want to live that far from where I grew up, and that there weren’t really any pockets of literary study/criticism that I thought were interesting enough to study as a grad student, and when I decided that it was all a bunch of arcane, disconnected-from-the-real-world, ivory-tower nonsense anyway. 

There seem to be two versions of I Want To Teach stories: either the "I wanted to be a teacher since I knew that was a thing, and I taught my dolls/GI Joes/baby brothers/dogs/anything else I could compel to be a captive audience" story; and the "I came to the idea of teaching late(r) in life/I wanted to do anything else but teach" story. 

But here’s the thing: teaching is something that you can't really decide to do as an avocation just once. Just like anything else you want to master, it has to be a constant, repeated choice over the course of many days and years. It’s a craft, like gardening, or painting, or joining two pieces of crown molding perfectly in the corner of a 150-year-old Victorian living room. It takes study and patience, hard work and moments of respite, fear and joy and magic pixie dust. 

The truth of the matter is that I decided I wanted to be a teacher on Friday, just a couple days ago, after we'd just missed almost a whole week of class because of a bit of ice and a lot of frigid temperatures. We went into school on a three-hour delay. I had a meeting before classes started that I got to take my kindergarten-aged daughter to, since her school didn't open for another hour. I was freezing, I was anxious, and I hadn't been to school in almost a week. I always get nervous before class starts, especially after a long break, and this particular time was compounded by the cold and the fact I realized we had lost a week of learning in an AP class that only had thirteen weeks of pre-exam instruction to begin with.

I walked back up the hall after saying hi to a couple department members, just as the first bell rang. The kids trundled in, cold, grumpy, laughing cynically (as only teenagers can) at having a four-hour school week. I told several students good morning as I walked, many of whom I have taught multiple times. I watched the fog lift momentarily as each looked up and said good morning as well. Then I walked back into B109 and sat down around a big table with fifteen students, with twenty more seated around four other satellite tables.

The room got warmer, despite the single-digit temperatures outside. 

The opposite of an ivory tower. 

I leaned back in my chair and began to talk.