A Teacher's Morning Coffee: Dancing Chairs

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Dancing Chairs

I have never been one for seating charts, especially during the first weeks of school. As a high school educator, I release my tyrannical control over my students and implore them to choose a seat that will fit their learning style. “It’s your responsibility.” I say “Nobody but you knows where you need to sit to achieve greatness. Pick a seat wherever….” Inevitably a group of chatters take control of the back rows and a group of eye burners take control of the front.

I fear my “It’s your responsibility” system failed this year, and I’m left with a terrible situation…

Searching for the answer to the unanswerable question, this morning I danced the chairs around my classroom, hoping to find that magic arrangement to induce student learning. Where do I place the struggling learners? Where do I place 32 students? How do I optimize what little space I have? Something has to be done after yesterday’s test results.

With scores ranging from 100+% to a 0% there exists awesome disparity in the learning gap. No Child Left Behind?...yeah right….something is happening and someone is being left behind. So where do we place students who missed the bus?
A Catch 22 looms over every crowded classroom. Regardless of how the chairs end their waltz, finite room is left in the front rows, leaving two main options for student placement:

Option 1: Place all low achieving students in the front, while displacing the high achievers (who generally are inclined to sit nearer to the front) to the back. Though difficult to segregate learners before their astute peers, forcing a learning environment through proximity can benefit those who need it most. But what about those who wanted proximity in the first place and thrived on being near the front? What will happen to my eye burners if they are moved to the back, after all they chose to be proximate and their decision proved to be wise. Who can honestly say it is just to strip them of their right to be near the front, where they chose to be, and where they showed excellent results? But, the lower achievers are now within reach and easy to control, excite, and motivate.

Option 2: Leave the seating untouched, where generally the higher achievers have situated themselves nearer to the front and the lower achievers nearer to the back and sides. With this status quo arrangement those who have chosen to learn are best inclined to do so; those who have opted out of the learning experience have not been geographically forced to join in. But can that be fair either? Teachers are not hired to teach selected students but rather the entire classroom body. Leaving the status quo allows students to be left behind; we educate for success of ALL students, not just those who choose it.

The two seating arrangements epitomize a Catch 22. With neither option showing a true tendency to leave No Child Left Behind, what are we to do? Perhaps some of our students are choosing to be left behind, or more so not “moved ahead” and seating arrangements have nothing to do with their success. Perhaps dancing names and chairs this morning superficially alleviated my pains but something more drastic must be done.

Students are not failing because we have failed to place them in the correct chair. It is our duty to talk with each failing student, regardless of the situation, to find their good and to bring out in the classroom. Most of us long for something greater than the material we are asked to teach, yet we struggle to define ourselves as more than material pushers. Here is our chance!

Finding the beauty in each child’s life and helping them deal with their personal struggles is just the beginning. We get to intercept student paths and join them on their journey through life. Each student is a product of their own uniqueness; unfortunately few find themselves worthy of greatness and thus choose not to move forward. We are blessed with the opportunity to become bricklayers in our students’ futures and welders of their worthiness.

Something greater, more life changing than seating arrangements, is happening in your classroom today….it’s time we talk with our students, it’s time we know our students, it’s time….

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Dear Teacher

Dear Teacher,

Let us open our memory to when we were students seeking our degrees in education. Be it college or grad school, from day one we were taught how to teach. Between demanding methods of teaching, classroom behavior management, curriculum development, and the like, our professors modeled the ideal classroom. We presented lessons to our peers, critiqued deliveries, and role played numerous classroom scenarios until we all had an idea (or at least we thought) of what faced us in our journey ahead.

In the chaos of student teaching, interviewing, graduating, and so on, some of us forgot why we entered education in the first place. We simply did not choose jobs; we chose a vocation that impacts the rest of the word. Our souls have great purpose in what we are doing and there is something within all of us that moved us toward the classroom. Teachers thrive in the classroom, what we have to offer is more than subject material; we long to share ourselves.

Our belief in one student can change the world, yet we were unable to materialize our beliefs in our "how to teach" courses. Believing in students is an understanding of why we chose teaching as our careers. It is difficult to believe any of us chose this vocation without the ambition of changing student lives. Propelling one student beyond the content material is the difference we make as educators. As teachers, we must teach in such as way that our students can reflect upon their education and use us to mark history.

State testing and the bureaucracy that comes with our evaluations, tenure, and outside judgment will continue to haunt us all. Though rarely talked about and certainly not fully developed in our educational training, our desire to reach the adolescent heart is omnipresent. You are not alone in your quest to lead students to a greater peak in their learning, one higher than any state test can measure.

We have chosen an emotional occupation; the days may be long, the journey exhausting, and the victories difficult to see. Throughout this blog we will find meaning in our teaching through why we teach and allow it to transform how we teach our students.

Come on the journey with me to discover why we became educators. There is something deep within calling us to pursue more than the subject we teach. Our hearts long to be part of a story more important than standardized tests and student success hinges upon us being masters of that story. Rarely have we been given a chance to listen to our heart and reflect upon why we teach. Together we will pursue the source of the ever flowing spring of educational desire.

We are in a career in which we receive little monetary compensation. We are frequently berated from lack of tangible success and often blamed for the problems with America’s youth. Yet we are connected emotionally to our occupation. We love it….but sometimes the system kills the passion we had entering education and brings us a new reason to educate, to pass the test.

What happened to our initial motivation? What stole our spirit and how do we get it back? In the end, it is not really about dollars and dimes, what parents think of us, or how well our students remember Romeo and Juliet or the Pythagorean Theorem; it is about giving ourselves to our students. And when we give ourselves, there we will find true joy, there you will find motivation to keep teaching. There you will find the purpose in what we do.