Tag Archives: School

Education

See Me

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My thirteenth year as a teacher comes to an end this week. As all the years before it, it has gone quickly. There has been, as always, joy and sadness, disappointment and surprise, stress and smooth sailing. I keep track of seasons based on what we’re doing in school and refer to years according to the school calendar. In August I’ll buy a new pocket agenda.

There is a lot on this blog about teachers and teaching, about schools, students, and learning. I admit to loving, really loving, the work that I am privileged to do. If you ask me what I teach, I’ll give you the easy answer: I teach history, psychology, social studies, Theory of Knowledge. It’s true, but far more important to me is the human element. I teach young people and I watch them grow up for a little while. And then they go off into the world and I smile.

Last week I received an email from a student who I’ve taught since grade 10 who just completed grade 12. He is one of many students who has come to me over the years to talk about something that was on his mind, and one of a few who have written to me about it afterwards. What he said struck me and reminded me of things that matter. I wanted someone to see me and you saw me. I needed to talk and you listened.

Maya Angelou had it right: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

It’s not uncommon for me to raise an eyebrow at a student and ask, “You okay?” Or, when it works better, those words go on a sticky note that I pass to the student when moving around the room. I usually get a nod and sometimes a change in behaviour, and then we go on our way. Occasionally a student comes back to me later and I find out what was going on. Sometimes I receive messages, on a few occasions even years after the fact, telling me about a student’s feelings in that moment.

Young people are crying out to be seen and to be heard, and I think it’s not only young people. When we choose to engage, we don’t always know what our level of involvement will be. We don’t know what we’ll hear and therefore what we will be required to do. And we don’t do it for the possibility of thanks at the end.

To see a young person how they want to be seen, to sit across a table and pass a packet of tissues, to really listen to someone who just needs to talk – this is what I do. And I am so, so lucky to be able to give those moments and the accompanying feelings. This is all part of being a teacher.

Education

Pride Month

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As usual, the Student Council students have organized a series of activities for Pride Month. This year’s set-up includes posters around the school, a box in the foyer for questions about LGBTQIA+ topics, a series of Instagram posts, and safe space stickers passed out to teachers for their classrooms. Next week, a flag will be hung in the foyer, and the questions in the box will be answered and the answers sent out to the community. Our school is a proud member of two local organizations dedicated to open-mindedness and anti-discrimination practices, so this is just part of what we do.

But. Our school is still a diverse community with diverse opinions. Every year, some of the posters hung up for Pride Month get torn down or defaced. Now that I’ve been overseeing Student Council for three years, I have full confidence that this is not a coincidence and the school’s teachers and administrators agree. In response, Student Council has put up more posters. A colleague a took ripped poster from classroom to classroom, and we hung signs asking students why Pride posters bother them and encouraging them to talk with a few specific staff members, including ourselves, about their concerns. A note went out in the daily bulletin that was read aloud in homeroom, explaining that such behaviour is not in line with what we do at our school.

It seems like the fun of tearing down Pride posters has worn off, which is a small victory. In this case, a clear stance of “This is not acceptable and we will not stand for it” seems to have prevailed.

But the questions of “Why?” and “What’s bothering you?” remain. No one has answered our call to talk about their concerns, which is not a huge surprise. It’s much easier to act anonymously, especially when such actions go against the social norms of a particular environment.

Earlier this year, when our school community voted in favour of joining a network of schools dedicated to anti-racist teaching and practice, there were a surprising number of “no” votes, suggesting that we have not done enough to emphasize what being international and open-minded actually means. This is what we are, but to what extent is that what we do? How have we acted to make our school a place where we openly behave according to our principles? And what have we done in situations where individuals do not act in those ways?

Such questions have been ongoing at school this year, and there have been a few interventions with particular groups to address active acceptance of diversity and inclusion of all, with more plans in the works for next year. But right now, we are wondering at motivation to vote “no” or to take down a Pride poster, and there has been much discussion among staff as to why that could be the case. Having had a lot of time to think about it, I have several hypotheses.

First, there is the possibility of typical teenage rebellion. You want to have a say about something, such as voting whether or not to join a network of schools with a specific agenda, and this seems like a reasonable opportunity to be contrarian.

Alternatively, it could be the case that students know that such topics can be considered controversial and, whether they themselves find the topics controversial or not, do things that they shouldn’t do, just for the sake of it.

The possibility of genuine disagreement cannot be ignored, either. At least as far as Pride is concerned, we have a population of students from religious backgrounds, which means that we need to far more explicitly address the issue of how we, as members of the school community, are respectful of one another even when we disagree.

There are countless possibilities I haven’t thought of, certainly, and I am heartened by the number of staff who have mentioned having conversations with their classes and who are proactively printing out and putting up new posters themselves. I appreciate the support and I know the Student Council students do, too.

Appropriately, a question that came up in Student Council was why we chose to make a big deal out of Pride Month when we’ve ignored most other designated months, and nearly all holidays. I was pleased to report that the school, having recently identified this issue, has created a rotating calendar of culturally significant days to highlight in our school events and practices. Students were impressed and excited, and we are looking forward to what this brings in the upcoming school year.

Schools are places of continuous development, and it is the people within the community, both students and staff, who make them this way. It takes a lot work, it takes confrontation, and it takes decision-making, and none of this happens over night or without effort. It’s one thing to make choices as an individual, and quite another to make choices as part of a system, as the Student Council members are learning. The work is never “done”, but we can certainly take a moment to be hopeful about what we’ve started.

Berlin. Germany – December 2021
Education

May Exams

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Inside, students are revising between exam papers, the common area full of laptops, notebooks, and nervous chatter.

Outside, trees that bloomed in early April only to have their blossoms freeze overnight fight for their lives, flowers and leaves black but still clinging.

Over lunch, we talked about the idea that as people live longer, childhood has extended. In many ways, this is a good thing: It is no longer expected for children to leave school and go off to work at 12 or 14, nor that everyone is partnered and married in their early 20s. In other ways, perhaps not such a good thing: An extension of childhood seems to have translated to less conformity to social norms, many of which have to do with respect for others. I believe social media is at fault here for creating alternate realities that fit each user. Why, I imagine a user thinking-without-thinking in the brief moments that the real world intrudes, should I have to fit myself into anything at all?

It’s May and our grade 12 exams have already begun, with grade 10 exams following next week. Some aspects of my students’ school experience still match mine from many years ago, but there are also ways my students learn that could not be more different. The fact that students, unprompted, refer to “learning how you learn” indicates that some shift has taken place.

Considering how much of our daily experiences in the world are curated for us – think about music recommendations, subscription-based news alerts, personal feeds, and explore pages – I think it’s worth noting that the school exam experience worldwide is very similar. All students who take exams from a certain exam board go through the same process. All schools are obligated to fulfill the same requirements. Everyone opens their results on the same day. As a student, I knew this to be the case, but it always thrilled me when, upon meeting new people, conversation turned to our experiences in classes and with teachers. I was surprised to learn how different our daily experiences were, only having encountered my own. And somehow, we all had ended up at the same place.

Through many years working with students, I have learned that it is not the work that I put into preparing them for exams, but rather the work that students put into preparing themselves that matters. I spend very little time these days, and sometimes none at all, going over course material; after all, students have spent two years on course content and have access to whatever they need to review. Rather, exam preparation in my classroom takes the form of prepared activities in which students are actively doing something and I wait to answer questions that arise. It might be easy to listen to a teacher talk, but the work is in the thinking, and my students understand that I am not going to do this part for them.

They understand, too, that exams are not a measure of their worth as a person, but rather a step that certain elements of society has decided is necessary in order to get them from point A to point B. One aspect of German society that I really like is that almost everyone does some sort of internship during secondary school, and that there are many vocational pathways of how to become a productive member of society; sitting exams that allow entrance to university is neither expected nor required. So when my students say, “But what if . . . ?” it’s easy to point to other options. In Germany, only about a third of people hold a university degree simply because it is not required for the vast majority of career possibilities.

Wherever young people end up and whatever they happen to do, I hope they are happy and fulfilled. I hope they chase the dreams that make them feel whole, and I hope they give themselves enough time to figure out what those dreams are. I hope they have opportunities to learn from success and failure, to stand tall after standing up again. And if they remember anything from their time in school, I hope it’s about the world around them, about appreciation of others, about what it means to be a good friend. They’ll figure out the rest as it comes.

Outside, the air deepens with the feeling that spring is, actually, here to stay this time.

Inside, students approach their tests with a mix of quiet confidence and anxiety, an understanding that they’ve spent two years learning and now need to prove it.

A former student came in for a chat the other day, and I smiled when she said she hardly thinks about high school anymore because it’s just not relevant. A year ago, she was one of the students waiting quietly with blue or black pens and sharpened pencils before taking her assigned seat in the exam rooms. What a difference a year makes.