Honors and Insecurities
I was tracked atarting in the fourth grade when I delighted in being one of a select group who got to leave school one day each week to attend a special program. Now I am of the opinion that student success would have been greater if every student in my elementary school had been a part of this Personal Enrichment Program (PEP). We payed chess, othello, read poems and played logic games, invented civilizations and buried their artifacts inside of refigerator boxes filled with insulation. It was everything elementary school should be.
Being tracked into "honors" classes in high school was a bit of an instructional roller-coaster. Some teachers engaged me, presented challenges, and I certainly did my fair share of skirting the work, but I grew as a learner in these classrooms. Others followed formulaic plans: "We will study Dickinson because she is important, never mind why, she just is." And so I just was. There. Bored. It was in these classrooms that I felt incapable, doubted myself and confused my lack of interest for lack of intelligence.
My sphomore year, I had an English teacher who tried to get us working on higher order thinking. We regularly held literature circles and had a selection of projects we could complete. She was also more pleasant to female students when we wore dresses and our hair was kept than when we wore pants and looked dishevelled. We all tested her by experimenting on multiple, coordinated days. It was highly unscientific, but she confirmed our fears over and over again, surely because we hadalready decided that she would. Whether born of her own bias toward the highly feminine (she was known to make comments like, "Wouldn't it be great if we had classes that were just girls?") or our prejudice, she was unpopular with both male students and female students who were not prone to dressing up for the school day. If we wrote, we wrote little, and within strict confines. Usually, we gave presentations. There were interesting assignments; we created soundtracks for our favorite books, were encouraged to make art, and had some choice in reading material. Whatever she did well was generally undone by the unwelcome environment she maintained.
Junior year was like a classroom dream come true. I had never had a teacher so sincerely human as Nancy Nott. She encouraged us to be honest with her if we hadn't completed an assignment or a reading, and was receptive to our honesty. She was interesting and funny. She kept a corner of her room walled off with cubicle partitions, equipped with cushions, floor mats, and a bookshelf. If we were having the sort of day that high school students are apt to have and could not quite face participation in class, we could exempt ourselves from our usual seats and read in this little nook. The only rule was that we report to her before leaving to check in and verify that we'd been reading and not sleeping. This space could also be used for two students to privately edit a piece of writing, practice a presentation, or "opt out" together if one needed the support of the other. We did not use this space often; it was enough to know the option was there. She made very clear that we were in her room because we had chosen it from a slew of options - some unpleasant - and as such, we were to claim this space as a safe, learning space. No one dared cross her. We respected her too much. We read Anna Karenina and other books that we hated and felt proud for finishing them. We wrote. We wrote academic papers with skills we didn't believe we had, journaled to keep ourselves in the writing habit, authored fiction that made us feel proud and excited.
I cannot recall the precise routines of Ms. Nott's classroom, but I remember that we sat at round tables in small groups, and that we both read and wrote a great deal in class. She would circulate constantly to glance over the portions of our journals that we gave her permission to read, clarify complicated texts and ask probing questions, and oversee our ventures at peer-editing and revision. we spent a great deal of time writing, drafting, revising, outlining, journaling, writing notes to Mrs. Nott. She a welcoming and comfortable manner. I finally felt at ease.
As I reflect upon it now, it seems that Ms. Nott used a number of Nancie Atwell's writing workshop tactics modified to accomodate assigned reading and writing. We wrote consistently and focused a great deal on the process and on revision. We wrote about topics largely of our own choosing, thought the genre was assigned. We spent much time reading our pieces aloud and learning how to be useful editors for ourselves and out classmates. She loved what she taught and that passion was at least a little bit contagious.
Senior year was a mediocre comparison. The teacher was well-intentioned, kind, and knowledgeable, but her format was all wrong; it was all Frost in the yellow wood and no heart. We read poems over and over, watched the world's smallest white woman awkwardly snap and bob up and down reciting Hughes, hoping that reading us a poem about the dangers of abandoning education might win us over. It did not. The jazz-era scat style was far from being either catchy or hard-hitting. I was grateful that in this passion wasteland, we were not asked to write poetry - only to analyze it, and pull apart every choice line until we'd assessed and re-assessed and beaten every word in poems that hadn't moved us in the first place. It took me years to realize that there was indeed poetry out there in the world that I liked - no - loved.
Being tracked into "honors" classes in high school was a bit of an instructional roller-coaster. Some teachers engaged me, presented challenges, and I certainly did my fair share of skirting the work, but I grew as a learner in these classrooms. Others followed formulaic plans: "We will study Dickinson because she is important, never mind why, she just is." And so I just was. There. Bored. It was in these classrooms that I felt incapable, doubted myself and confused my lack of interest for lack of intelligence.
My sphomore year, I had an English teacher who tried to get us working on higher order thinking. We regularly held literature circles and had a selection of projects we could complete. She was also more pleasant to female students when we wore dresses and our hair was kept than when we wore pants and looked dishevelled. We all tested her by experimenting on multiple, coordinated days. It was highly unscientific, but she confirmed our fears over and over again, surely because we hadalready decided that she would. Whether born of her own bias toward the highly feminine (she was known to make comments like, "Wouldn't it be great if we had classes that were just girls?") or our prejudice, she was unpopular with both male students and female students who were not prone to dressing up for the school day. If we wrote, we wrote little, and within strict confines. Usually, we gave presentations. There were interesting assignments; we created soundtracks for our favorite books, were encouraged to make art, and had some choice in reading material. Whatever she did well was generally undone by the unwelcome environment she maintained.
Junior year was like a classroom dream come true. I had never had a teacher so sincerely human as Nancy Nott. She encouraged us to be honest with her if we hadn't completed an assignment or a reading, and was receptive to our honesty. She was interesting and funny. She kept a corner of her room walled off with cubicle partitions, equipped with cushions, floor mats, and a bookshelf. If we were having the sort of day that high school students are apt to have and could not quite face participation in class, we could exempt ourselves from our usual seats and read in this little nook. The only rule was that we report to her before leaving to check in and verify that we'd been reading and not sleeping. This space could also be used for two students to privately edit a piece of writing, practice a presentation, or "opt out" together if one needed the support of the other. We did not use this space often; it was enough to know the option was there. She made very clear that we were in her room because we had chosen it from a slew of options - some unpleasant - and as such, we were to claim this space as a safe, learning space. No one dared cross her. We respected her too much. We read Anna Karenina and other books that we hated and felt proud for finishing them. We wrote. We wrote academic papers with skills we didn't believe we had, journaled to keep ourselves in the writing habit, authored fiction that made us feel proud and excited.
I cannot recall the precise routines of Ms. Nott's classroom, but I remember that we sat at round tables in small groups, and that we both read and wrote a great deal in class. She would circulate constantly to glance over the portions of our journals that we gave her permission to read, clarify complicated texts and ask probing questions, and oversee our ventures at peer-editing and revision. we spent a great deal of time writing, drafting, revising, outlining, journaling, writing notes to Mrs. Nott. She a welcoming and comfortable manner. I finally felt at ease.
As I reflect upon it now, it seems that Ms. Nott used a number of Nancie Atwell's writing workshop tactics modified to accomodate assigned reading and writing. We wrote consistently and focused a great deal on the process and on revision. We wrote about topics largely of our own choosing, thought the genre was assigned. We spent much time reading our pieces aloud and learning how to be useful editors for ourselves and out classmates. She loved what she taught and that passion was at least a little bit contagious.
Senior year was a mediocre comparison. The teacher was well-intentioned, kind, and knowledgeable, but her format was all wrong; it was all Frost in the yellow wood and no heart. We read poems over and over, watched the world's smallest white woman awkwardly snap and bob up and down reciting Hughes, hoping that reading us a poem about the dangers of abandoning education might win us over. It did not. The jazz-era scat style was far from being either catchy or hard-hitting. I was grateful that in this passion wasteland, we were not asked to write poetry - only to analyze it, and pull apart every choice line until we'd assessed and re-assessed and beaten every word in poems that hadn't moved us in the first place. It took me years to realize that there was indeed poetry out there in the world that I liked - no - loved.