The first week back at school after winter break is always fascinating and exhausting.
By this point in the year, something has shifted for many 10th graders. The number of kids who enter the classroom ready and available to learn has increased. They have developed new mental and attentional muscles over the first semester. They come in, sit down, read the instructions on the board, and start jotting down notes in their paper planner. My ninth-grade Registry (homeroom) is still like a basket of puppies, but my 10th graders are much more grown-up than they were even a few weeks ago. They are becoming warriors for their own learning.
I dove straight into instruction on Day 1. I announced the first quiz. Kids who failed my class or got a D last semester have the option to retake the class this semester, but when I reached out to talk about this option, a surprising number of them told me they were staying put, even if that meant extra work for them this semester. “I’ll do online credit recovery after school,” one student told me. “I am learning something important here.”
We discussed the risks of not retaking the first semester course and the agony of online credit recovery, but I could see that something had shifted inside them. They had made up their minds. They feel ready and available to learn math now in this class in a way they weren’t a few months ago. And that means something to them.
Readiness is a gift, but nobody can give it to you.
Students are also encountering the reality that motivation is a three-legged stool, balanced on the pillars of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. The student who is fully bought into their academic program gains more from their efforts than the student who is merely ticking off boxes on a checklist. Learners focused on their own mastery and compared their results today with their prior results. They aren’t trying to negotiate or demand points they didn’t earn. Intriguingly, the students who know in their bones why they are here in class share a sense of purpose with like-minded others, and that shared knowledge carries them forward together, regardless of where their families come from or what they aspire to
Tenth grade is a major fork in the road. If all you want out of your educational journey is to loudly and repeatedly declare yourself a victim in the oppressor/oppressed Olympics while posting selfies on Instagram, then you can certainly choose that path.
But by 10th grade, more and more students realize those aren’t the skills that colleges, employers, or our society are looking for.
There are no guarantees in public education — there is only effort. High school is a doorway to an ocean of opportunities, but there’s no magical pixie dust teachers can sprinkle on students. You have to “make effort.” Students get out of this experience what they put in.
Learning how to protect and cultivate your own attention is one of the secrets of sanity and success that you can learn in school.
It’s one of the most miraculous and dramatic things I get to experience as an educator.
As a veteran teacher, I learned a long time ago that the curriculum is only a part of the curriculum. What I am teaching students as we work through the curriculum is actually the most powerful learning I know about surviving and thriving both in school and in our society:
– Your ability to control your own attention and to pay deep attention to challenging, meaningful activities over longer and longer periods of time is the most precious and important thing you can learn in school.
– No one but you can choose what is healthy and sane for your soul.
– In an open, pluralistic, market-based society, there is an infinite army of people whose exclusive focus is to attack your attention, keeping you stupid and distractible, because their success depends on your lack of impulse control and self-regulation.
– Learning how to protect and cultivate your own attention is one of the secrets of sanity and success that you can learn in school.
This year, we’re on the hook for more standardized testing than ever before. District leadership seems to have decided that if three standardized testing events were good, then four must be better. This is a very SFUSD way of thinking. I am hoping that someday we will stop wasting instructional time obsessively testing students every five minutes to see if student outcomes have improved yet.
Unfortunately, this is not going to be that year.
And because we are stuck with the need to interrupt the flow of instruction to do more standardized testing, I will organize our work around it. There will be more Wi-Fi outages, more denial-of-service attacks against the testing companies’ servers, and more battery-drained Chromebooks dying in the middle of the testing session.
But we will not let that stop us.
We are too busy putting our asses on the line and mastering the mathematics in front of us.