Connecting With Students

As a second-career teacher of World History and World Geography in Pleasant Grove, an impoverished section of South Dallas, most of my students read well below grade level and had little motivation to learn. Those students had never been celebrated throughout their education, and were used to being tracked and having teachers with an “another day-another worksheet” mentality. When they were given something challenging or original, they would often rebel because they were so used to worksheets and the one simple answer concept of education. To me, this was a tragic situation and I made it my mission to show my students their untapped potential.

I found that success for them (and me) lay in making two kinds of connections with my students—connecting them with important ideas and establishing a connection with them as individuals.

Being a traditionally low-performing school with a new principal whose mission was to raise our standardized benchmark scores, we were given a great deal of leeway to be creative and find ways to get our students excited about their education. For me, that meant organizing my curriculum around key concepts rather than rote memorization of facts and integrating my curriculum’s concepts with those of the math and English departments. Too much of what I saw going on in the school was the result of a previous focus on pieces of knowledge rather than understanding, and a disconnection between the knowledge and the student’s own lives and experiences. Knowledge, in my opinion, might get the students to answer the who, what, when or where on the state’s tests, but it falls way short of helping them answer the more meaningful how and why questions.

I soon discovered that previous teachers had just given the kids worksheet after worksheet over the years in the hope that the worksheets would pound knowledge into their heads, that the repetition would create memory. Well, it didn’t, and I was very surprised to also find a subtle attitude among many of the faculty that nobody really expected the students to understand anyway…just that they needed to do better on their annual state tests.

Because I disagreed with both of these ideas, I used a center based classroom in which they were challenged and expected to step up to that challenge of understanding…which would then, I hoped, lead to knowledge. To do that, I had the students work with units that raised important ideas in geography and History. Why were so many of the world’s great cities located near ports? Why is the daily weather in the month of October so different in Dallas, Sydney, Lagos, Rome, Berlin, Lima, etc.? Why is the world charted geometrically, and how do we use that to efficiently navigate from point to point? How has globalization changed the way we travel, communicate, and live? How have we adapted to and altered the environments in which we choose to live? What would happen to Pleasant Grove if the Trinity River overflowed?

When creating lesson plans, I always tried to imagine myself as one of my students, asking whether the lesson would be an engaging use of my time, and as a teacher, asking whether the lesson would be an effective way of demonstrating meaning.

I also learned early on that connecting with my students was even more important than connecting them with the curriculum. I had been taught that being assertive and inflexible with the rules would make the students work harder. But that soon proved to not be the case, and connecting with the students did get them to work and encourage them to accept living within the classroom rules. I soon discovered that my curriculum had to come from a place that the students were comfortable with, and that began with our student-teacher relationship.

To do this, many of my classes began with games based on questions with point values such as found on Jeopardy. A variation of “Where in the world is Carmen San Diego?” using inflatable globes and a story sequence posed to student teams also proved successful, and led to them fully understanding how to read and use geographical coordinates to locate specific destinations. For many of my students, what I call edutainment (educating in the guise of them being entertained) was an extremely important and successful concept.

Illustrations were also important for my students, as so many of them were visual learners and symbolically astute, even though they weren’t aware of it at first. Show them an advertising symbol (such as the Diamler-Benz star or Nike swoosh) and they would know it right away. And so a simple Mayan or Egyptian picto-graphic drawing on the board at the beginning of class could generate exciting discussions of their meanings, their cultures, and why we don’t use that form of writing today. Each student would then have to do such a picto-graphic block (using a marker and piece of light brown construction paper) and these were posted outside the room in the hallways, generating a great deal of excitement as they proudly explained them to their friends who were not in my classes. I discovered that many of my students would then more intensely study the Egyptian picto-graphs on their own and then use them to write secret messages to each other so that their parents or other students couldn’t read them.

Because of their limited experiences and travels with the world outside their impoverished neighborhoods, videos and power-point presentations showing images of the Earth’s power and discussions were important. For example, because the process of a hurricane forming over the ocean meant little to those who had never been to the ocean, our discussions and projects emphasized what mattered most for them to understand—relationships, causes, and effects.

The final assignments were the student generated Thug Nasty Big Eartha (World Geography) and Cruisin’ Time (World History) projects. Students had to assume the role of producer of a new CD and select a project from a number of options that demonstrated the Earth is a thug nasty and time is an own ya place. Students had to write lyrics for songs such as the hit singles Big Eartha’s House or Nevah Again (a holocaust warning) and design a CD cover. The projects focused on the Earth’s power (how the Earth exerts its supremacy) or the impact of a historical event that affects our lives today. And because so many of my students had difficulty completing schoolwork at home, many stayed with me in the afternoons or during lunch for the time, space, and support they needed to complete them.

And did all this work? I don’t really know because it was a very busy transition year for me and I’ve since moved on from that environment. But if things such as students being willing to talk openly with me about personal or social issues (of which there were many at the school), leaving thank-you notes on my desk, coming to my classroom to share other successes or ask for my help, and raised state test scores were an indicator, I guess it did.

Childhood...what childhood?

It was never easy to be a kid, but it must be much more difficult to be a kid in today's world. But kids, for the most part, don't know that because they've never experienced any other kind of childhood. It wasn't always like this--this being the obsessive, over-parented, angst-ridden, schedule driven method of child rearing I see so much of today. And I'm not sure how I might have turned out if I had grown up in a world where my parents scheduled my life in such a manner that I wasn't allowed to waste (in their opinions) time, to pick my own friends, to just go off on my own for several hours and just explore or laze about, to play games without adult supervision, and to get into minor scrapes--which inevitably meant banged up knees and elbows--that taught us how tenuous friendships were and how important it was to consider how our words or actions affected our friends and friendships.

I grew up in the country near Florin and Elk Grove, California, in the 50's and 60's, and we literally roamed the countryside and sought ways to entertain ourselves as often as we could get away with it. There was one television in the house, and Mom had first dibs on it for her soaps... with Dad being next in line for the evening news...and my brothers and me being last. If we were home, we could watch the Mickey Mouse Club or Crusader Rabbit or Woody Woodpecker because that was generally when Mom was busy starting to get dinner ready so we could eat together when Dad came home from work. Adults went to work and came home, we went to school and came home, and after school we wandered as far as our bicycles could carry us and still get back to the house by dinner time and dark. We made forts in the many hay stacks in the barns and the fields; climbed trees to fetch bird nests, hide from our friends, and build dangerously frail platforms to just perch and idly talk about whatever came to mind; waded barefoot in the creeks and irrigation ditches to catch pollywogs, frogs, fish, bugs, muskrats, turtles, and snakes; swam wherever there was enough water of any sort to allow us to more-or-less submerge ourselves; and dug holes--we called them forts or tunnels--wherever we could get away with it. School was important, but learning for us also included the importance of experiencing the natural world and being able to figure things out for yourself...without the aid of a parent, teacher, tutor, computer, or the Internet.

Oh, we made a lot of mistakes...for which we received motherly treatments that generally included chastisement for doing something so irresponsible, copious applications of--ouch--iodine, and frequent trips to the doctor's office for yet another tetanus shot--one of the hazards of being barefoot most of the time in an area where rusty nails and broken glass were to be found everywhere we went.

But we learned a lot, too, and discovered that:

• we could do just about anything we put our collective minds to doing
• planning did not always guarantee success and plans worked well...until we tried them
• risk had two categories--unnecessary and calculated
• many things you would never suspect as being dangerous were
• fessing up generally proved a far better option than lying
• we couldn't do everything we wanted to do--but that isn't necessarily a bad thing
• there were consequences for not doing the things we needed to do
• some consequences were permanent and couldn't be undone
• you shouldn't spend more than you have
• going to jail was something that should not to be emulated or praised
• if you broke it, you were expected to fix it or replace it
• taking something without the owner's permission was not borrowing
• farming--especially dairy farming--was hard work
• work was something to be praised

I tend to look back on my childhood rather nostagically these days...the result of watching too many parents over-supervise and over-schedule their children's childhoods. I am glad I grew up when and where I did, and in the way my parents allowed me to experience childhood. I'm not sure how I would have turned out today...and am glad I don't have to worry too much about it.