Is Our Fear of Chaos Boring Our Students to Death?

Sometimes, when I visit the many schools I am asked to visit in my line of work, I ask myself the question, "Are we going about this whole education thing all wrong?" Classrooms start to look the same to me after a while. There are kids sitting there, listening to a teacher who has got good intentions for them. Occasionally, that teacher is using some interesting technology, and once in a while they even let the students get their hands on it.

Now before those of you who are teachers start getting your backs up, let me say this post is not yet another attack, blaming the teachers for what's wrong in the world today. There's plenty of blame to go around for that. I'm just wondering when we're going to stop doing the same thing, over and over again.

I'd like to think I did things a little differently when I was a teacher. Because we were a "School of Last Resort" at Satellite Academy High School, we had a great deal of autonomy. The prevailing feeling we got from the Powers-That-Be in our district was "Do what you have to do with these kids, because we've tried everything."

So, our alternative school was truly alternative at one time. We did portfolio assessment and projects. Cooperative Learning was present in nearly every class. It wasn't unusual to see team-taught, interdisciplinary classes like the one Susan (a Social Studies teacher) and I (an English teacher) taught called "Power" about the permutations of power in politics and literature. I taught a college-style Creative Writing Workshop class. Because I could.

It seems that in traditional schools we set up our classrooms to prevent young people from interacting with one another. At Satellite, I thrived on the interactions of my students, not only in that writing class, but in advisory and all my other classes, as well. And it wasn't just us humanities teachers, either. Our math and science teachers were constantly putting our students into groups and pushing them to ask questions and to THINK together.

Sure, it was loud, and sometimes feathers got ruffled. But you could feel the learning happening. And you could see the excitement in the faces of the students. This is the kind of school I want to run someday.

It's not okay for us to bore our children into submission anymore. We've been doing it for too long, and it's time for it to stop.