So yes, it is that time of year again. Emily will dive into the next stage of her academic career and the challenges it will offer her. Dylan will embark on his high school adventure, and I am confident that he is going to surprise me more than once in the coming months and years. I have the opportunity to welcome back young men and women who have grown up before very eyes as well as those who will fearfully step through my door for the first time. It is exciting.
As often happens, my kids, those born to me by my beautiful wife, taught me, or retaught me, some things recently which should serve to focus my efforts and make me a better teacher. When I returned from the annual rafting trip last weekend, Emily handed me a two-CD set of music inspired by great literature. She had pulled together a collection of tunes connected to works by Huxley, Orwell, Shakespeare, Carrol, Faulkner, and Hemingway, among others. The music was created by bands such as Anthrax, Metallica, The Police, The Ramones, and Green Day. As part of the offering, Emily included not just the playlist of songs and artists, but also details of what works were connected and when they had been produced, as well as album and book cover artwork.
"What's the big deal?" some might ask. Sure, I have some interesting music to listen to as I write lesson plans, workout, or watch film, but what is there beyond that? There is plenty. I have lesson resources at my fingertips, and I will use them; trust me on that one. I have examples of how creative minds used the written works from time centuries ago or mere decades past to inspire their own thought and creative processes, to stir up those mental juices. I also have before me one of the most clear examples of cross-curricular assessment that I could hope for. "What?" you say. In recent years, we have all heard about Common Core and its evil slithering through our schools. I have read the College and Career Readiness Standards for ELA, Literacy, and Speaking and Listening adopted by Kansas, I have placed them next to our former standards, benchmarks, and indicators to see how they match up or diverge, and I have applied those CCRS to my lesson planning. Despite all of the gnashing of teeth and hysterics, Common Core, no matter what term is used to identified it, are not evil and is not destroying our schools. They actually free many teachers to truly teach students on a more in-depth level. I will not say the CCRS have been implemented perfectly, or even remotely well, in some school systems, but that has more to do with those systems than anything else. CCRS give us guide and a destination; how we get there most effectively is up to us.
But I digress. Back to Emily's compilation. One of the reasons that I am so confident that Emily will prove successful as she moves forward, beyond the obvious genetic advantages she holds, is that she has learned how to think. She can examine a piece of music and see its literary value, research its historical significance and relevance, ponder the psychological implications of the lyrics, and delve into the piece's artistic influences. How do I know this? Because she discusses these things with me on a daily basis. Emily learned how to think, and I owe a sincere thanks to those who guided her throughout school, the social studies teachers, the art instructors, the English teachers, the counselors, and the administrators. Now, no standardized test could measure the depth of thought and experience she can apply to her studies or her daily life. I do believe that her experiences prepared her well to succeed on those tests, but, more importantly, they allowed her to develop as an intelligent, confident young person.
My son is beginning to display some of those same qualities despite his youth. This summer, he walked down to Hastings and returned with a book exploring Tolkien's writing process in creating Lord of the Rings. He wants to write, and he has learned that if you want to do something, and do it well, you must research it. That research might be academic, it might involve speaking to an expert, or it may take the form of personal experience. That last method has led Dylan to request that he be allowed to walk part of the way to Buhler one day. I have not passed that little tidbit on to his mother just yet. Dylan is currently writing a story whose protagonist ventures out from the safety of a walled city to find supplies and search for other survivors. Dylan told me that if he is going to effectively create a character who must walk the post-apocalyptic world, he must know what that character would feel, the exhaustion, the isolation, and the uncertainty. He can only discover those feelings through experience, he said. Dylan sometimes frightens me with his thought process, his vocabulary, and his wealth of seemingly irrelevant facts, as well as his ability to apply those facts to topics we discuss and his willingness to research whatever topic strikes him as interesting. Once again, I credit so many teachers in Dylan's life over the last decade who instilled in him the curiosity, the ability, and confidence to explore his world fairly independently. He will do fine on standardized tests. I do not think the most important lessons were focused on doing well on those assessments, however. The lessons that gave him the tools and inspiration to learn were the ones that have proved most valuable.
Where am I headed with this rambling? I am glad you asked. We are not teaching assessments, we are not teaching the ACT, we are not teaching Student Growth Measures. We are teaching kids. We have to provide them with tools that will let them explore their worlds and then express what they have learned on those adventures. We have to inspire them to seek out the challenges that will test those tools. We have to push them to develop as people, not just as test-takers and assessment measures. I will not pretend that those mandated tests are not important, and we must be aware of them. However, I also believe that high achievement on those measures while providing the tool, inspiring challenges, and driving development in those young people.
So thank you, Emily and Dylan, for inadvertently reminding me why I am a teacher, and why I am a teacher at Buhler High School. You have focused my vision and inspired me once more as I begin this year. Hopefully, I can live up to the expectation.
Now, how do I drop off my son on the side of the highway at 6:45 am so he can become a great writer without Heidi discovering such a questionable parenting choice?
Note: I won't drop Dylan of on K-61. Jason Williams has made several valuable suggestions such as Sand Hill State Park and the trails at Dillons Nature Center that may provide even more useful experience in creating Dylan's post-apocalyptic world.
