At the school where I teach, I run a little exercise that goes like this:
Imagine that as you enter the dusty classroom you notice a plain, brown lunch sack at your group's table. The top has been creased down sharply, and although you have yet to heft the bag, yo can tell that something is inside. As you toss down your fake-label book bag you reach towards the bag only to hear my teacher-voice breaks the shuffling air, "If you so much as touch the bag before I give you permission, I will knock 5 points off your grade" (arbitrary point threats go straight for the jugular). We begin class and for the first 15 minutes I make no allusion to the mysterious paper bags sitting right in front of you. You find it hard to concentrate on what is being said, so curious are you for what lies just beyond your fingertips. Suddenly, this built up speculating is released as I say "Ok, now open the paper bags and place all of the objects on your table. Your group will have 3 minutes to arrange the objects into two piles based on what they have in common. Each group will have three attempts at organizing their materials. When you think that your group has it, raise your hand and I will tell you whether you are correct."
With that you scramble to be the one to dump he contents onto the graffiti-splotched table. Hands fly madly, turning over paper sacks. You are puzzled at what is inside--it seems that none of the objects are related: a Russian spoon, a hair clip, a pretzel, a CD, a candle, a celery stick, a digital watch, a water bottle, a rock...a whole assortment of what appears to be random objects. As you quickly search around the classroom looking at other groups you find that nobody has the same materials as you, yet they all are equally perplexed. Your confusion moves to frustration as I remind you to focus on your own work and that you now have two minutes left. Your eyes wander at your collection and you wonder, "How am I to make sense of all of this?"
This activity proves very frustrating for students who are used to having knowledge given to them in neat, predictable lessons. It challenges students to make their own connections and to discover their own learning. While the debate about this for of discovery-based learning is always hot in the pedagogical world, it is none the less a very telling approach that challenges every student. Learning--true learning--is never comfortable.
I teach 11th grade biology at a progressive school in the Bronx. Each morning I get on the Uptown 2 train in my neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I cut through Harlem, across the Harlem river, through the Dominican pockets of the South Bronx and end up in the middle of one of New York's largest project housing facilities at Gun Hill Road. Seventy years ago this neighborhood was filled with poor Italian and Irish immigrants, now it has been replaced with Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Caribbeans, and African refugees. Ninety percent of my students qualify for free breakfast and lunch (Title 1); most read on a 7th grade reading level, and all have real problems.
Mine isn't a story like "Dangerous Minds" or "Freedom Writers"--I'm not memoiresque or Hollywood friendly. Rather these are my thoughts and musings--most wash through my exhausted body as I snake back down the Bronx on the 2 train. Trains have long been the vessels of my greatest understandings of life--they are my rolling sepulcher, the adhesive ribbon in a life scattered across three continents. My words are not meant to entertain or to to teach--merely to exist. They are the contents eagerly spilt from a paper bag, left for you--and me--to rearrange and separate as we deem appropriate. You may now begin.
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