Another school year has come to a close and despite soaring South Texas temperatures and humidity, every teacher can breathe a sigh of relief.
Finally, we think. Now we can get to the business of shape-shifting into real people again—people who can go to the restroom at will, people who can eat a real lunch instead of a handful of crackers, people who don’t need to make hundreds of immediate decisions a day.
Except.
We suffer from one little problem: our brains never really shut off. Our eyes can’t stop seeing what would be great to share with students in a few months. Our ears are always listening for the next thing that maybe just might help students remember key ideas and concepts.
And while thinking ahead probably saves us some time come August, what we don’t spend enough time doing is reflecting on the year we’ve just closed out. After nine months of brooding, surviving, kvetching, and enduring, we don’t do enough to celebrate the wins that happened along the way.
What worked? What worked better than it should have? What needs only a little dusting to go from meh to mahvalous?
When I look back on this year, two things stand out:
- the paramount importance of student voice in the classroom
AND - the never-ending work of making the complex simple
Student Voice in the Classroom
For the last two years, my students have not come into our classroom ready to express themselves in front of their peers. No matter how non-invasive the question or how open the answer pool is, students maintain a tight-lipped reserve for the first 6-8 weeks of school.
In one-on-one conversations, they are wonderful. They share prodigiously in their written work. They talk easily with each other in small peer groups. But students clam up when tasked with sharing ideas in a whole group setting.
They are afraid to be “wrong.” They fear phones trained on them and ready to record any cancel-able idea or gesture. They are unused to speaking because their academic experiences have taught them to sit quietly and regurgitate “right” answers. And speaking, they find, is far harder than writing, reading, or applying formulas. Like writing, speaking demands thought—clear, concise, intelligible ideas made audible within a definitive span of time.
Eventually, students warm to the discussion-heavy nature of the class, and most learn to enjoy chiming in (or at least listening). The best, though, develop an appetite for thinking quickly and well—skills easily transferable to all content areas. I, too, learn how a new generation of readers and thinkers perceive texts, topics, and themes, which leads me to make more informed instructional choices.
In addition to actually hearing the chatter of student voices in the classroom, there is always room to listen to the wisdom of student voices by asking for their input regarding how best to assess their learning, what reasonable timetables for assignment/reading completion are, and what kind of texts they would like to experience.
Mind you, this doesn’t happen every day or even with every assignment; that would be a chaotic nightmare of indecision and endless vacillation. I ask students when genuine curiosity strikes. The questions sound something like this:
- We need to have a test in the next week and a half. As you think about your schedules and other classes, when would be the best day?
- Considering what you need more practice with and feedback on, would you prefer that the exam be heavy on objective questions or analysis/application questions?
- What are your concerns about group work, and how would you suggest making it better?
- Knowing that we have to take two grades a week, what makes the most sense for assessing your reading of the novel?
- Would you rather divide the reading of the novel equally between number of pages and days, or would you rather have heavier reading over the weekends/breaks? Is there a better way to schedule the reading?
The expert in the room isn’t always me, particularly when it comes to student matters (academic experiences; extracurricular events; tests/projects in other classes; work/life issues, etc.), and demonstrating even this small amount of consideration for students’ lives builds community and establishes reciprocal empathy.
Making the Complex Simple
In the world of AP Literature and Composition, “complexity”1 is a cornerstone of all literary analysis. Students must probe complex texts for their complex characters, complex relationships, complex responses, and complex situations.
As you might guess, students are initially baffled by the concept, often confusing “complicated” for “complex.” And this confusion is not limited to AP English students.
Teachers, too, often confuse the nature of their complex work, and we make it complicated when it shouldn’t be. To be fair, the sheer number of curricular documents, state standards, data sheets, campus initiatives, district initiatives, and testing mandates teachers are beholden to are enough to make anyone’s head spin. The trick is to take a long view of it all.
For me, it comes down to what I need students to understand. What they know and can do will vary based on context and texts, but conceptual understandings are enduring. For example, I don’t much care if students can detail what happened in a chapter; rather, I want them to be able to understand why those things happened and how those events factor into the broader thematic purposes of the text.
To be sure, having command of details strengthens arguments and analysis. However, as a life-long reader, it’s not the minutiae of novels I value or recall; instead, it’s the overarching structures and patterns and ideas. It’s because I understand those larger constructs that I’m able to see the true value of details (surprise…it’s not to answer quiz questions) and bore into the core of any work’s multiple meanings.
This year, I revisited a time-worn text with my seniors, one that I can recite entire paragraphs from without much thought. Because the details were not at the forefront of my mind, I approached the novel with one question: Everyone says this novel is about X, but what if it’s about something else?
My job, then, was to find the “something else” that would hold true for the entirety of the narrative arc and bind characters, relationships, conflicts, and situations. In short, it was to find a linchpin for the entire novel. Once I settled on that linchpin, the instructional path became more scenic with much more to talk about than just X.
In finding a linchpin for the novel, I also discovered a way to make the process of entering any piece of literary fiction less complicated (but still complex) for students. Instead of asking them to consider everything all at once in a text, I asked students to read everything through a particular lens and test the security of the linchpin. In this way, students found that their perspectives had the freedom to be supported or subverted by the linchpin—either way, they found meaning in the text.
And, believe it or not, despite the seeming limitation of a linchpin idea, students still talked about all the novel’s usual literary suspects, but they did it in a focused, nuanced way that I’d never before experienced when teaching this novel.
Even now, I am in awe of how this move to simplify the complex worked. As the slow days of summer churn, I can’t help but let this idea tumble in my mind until it is smooth and polished.
Until then, I will feed the schemes of the past school year with sunshine, words, and rest. May you do the same.
1 Complexity is the ability of contrasting elements to be true simultaneously; thus, a complex situation is one that is both exciting and terrifying.
Introvert Therapy 