My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 5, #27, February 14, 2000

TEACH THE CHILDREN WELL

William Raspberry wrote a column recently, telling the numerous critics of public education to put up or shut up -- if you know so much better how and what to teach the kids, why not try spending a year teaching them, he asked. A good question. If you WERE going to be teacher for a year, what would you teach, and why? What kids would you teach, and how?

I think I would pick second graders. For one thing, I'd have them all day, every day, so I could make every lesson point to the same goals. Spending that much time with them, I'd get to know even the shyest little one well. Besides, I want to get them before some of them begin to fail, and while they still have the curiosity and sense of wonder they begin life with. Kids are born wanting to find out. If you've ever seen a bunch of 7-year olds watching turtle eggs hatching, or telling each other stories they made up, you see intelligence on every single face. Every one of these kids is able to learn and eager to learn, if we don't squash it out of them.

The one absolutely essential tool for learning is words. I would stretch their vocabularies, playing word games with them, reading them poetry and singing silly rhyming songs. They need to play with new words, use them in their talking and writing. I'd have a magnetic poetry set, so they could play with the words to create sense or nonsense or weird beauty. I'd have them read their own poems and stories to each other; they'd type them on the computer and we'd make them into booklets they could pick them up and read anytime. I'd have dictionaries lying around, and a rule that anybody can get up any time they need to look up a word and find out what it means.

I'd spend a lot of time reading to them. I can't act worth a damn, but when I read outloud I can play all different characters with different voices and tones and tempos. My kids would listen to Horton Hears a Who, and Where the Sidewalk Ends and The Hobbit, and know that reading is not a chore, but a road to magic.

I'd make sure every single child finds books to love, books they can't put down because they can't wait to find out how the story ends, because this is the way children learn to read well and fluently. We always learn better things that already interest us, so my classroom would be littered with books of all kinds, on all topics -- poetry and picture books, stories of heroic dogs and horses, books about dinosaurs, stories of Rapunzel and Jack and the Beanstalk and the Tortoise and the Hare. There would be stories about baseball and football, about building bridges and inventing robots. There'd be books about kids who live in China or Mexico or Wyoming, now or 500 years ago; books about real life heroes -- Clara Barton and Emily Dickinson and Jane Addams, Babe Ruth and Jonas Salk and Abraham Lincoln; books about the history of rock music and exploration and steam engines and science fiction and toys and medicine and wars.

Sure, my kids would learn specific information from these books, but they'd also get a sense of how wide open the possibilities are. They would learn that their heroes were children once, too, and find out how they chose their lifework and overcame the obstacles in their paths. They would learn that, no matter how odd a duckling they might happen to be, there are people out there just like them who laugh at the same jokes or cherish the same kinds of weird hobbies or share their ancestry or faith. My kids might find penpals on the net who enjoy the same things they do.

I would expect my kids to do something with what they learn -- go find out more about it, make up a game using it, imagine themselves in that situation, write a poem or play about it, think about it, ask questions about it, put it together with something they already know to create an "a-ha!" moment.

My kids would be writing every day, big pieces and small. I'd have them keep a journal every day, jogging their memories with statements like "That made me giggle" or "I felt bad because..." or "That was interesting but I'm not sure I agree." Writing doesn't come naturally, but because it's how we make our thoughts hold still long enough to see if they make sense, I want it to become as ordinary a way of communicating for them as talking.

My classroom would be filled with questions, theirs and mine. If they didn't know the answers, I'd show them how to speculate, play with several possible hypotheses: "I wonder if it's because of.., or maybe because of ...." I'd ask them what they would need to know to answer that question or test that explanation, and how they might find out. My classroom would be designed for "Go and find out", full of biographical dictionaries, timelines, atlases, guidebooks and quote books.

But I'd also expect them to learn that some questions don't have answers. Some questions produce opinions, philosophy, and moral reasoning -- "What is fair?" Some produce possible explanations -- "Why are there so many frogs with deformities?" Some produce action: "Why does the food pantry run out of food halfway through the month?" Some questions don't have answers because nobody has figured them out yet -- there are always new worlds to explore. Some questions produce dissention, because they are founded on false premises and prejudice: "Why are all the great works of art done by men?" I would teach my kids to analyze the questions, understand the underlying assumptions.

I would not waste their time and mine teaching to the test, a guaranteed way of making learning boring and repellent. I would make sure, though, that my kids could read the test questions carefully and understand the kinds of logic required. It's useful to be able to sort things into classes and deduce which things belong and which don't; it's useful to understand the kinds of relationships between things that enable you to answer questions like "stem is to leaf as ______ is to ________."

I hope they would learn from me that words and questions are the tools, and they are the carpenters, that every single one of them is capable of mastering those tools, and that with those tools, there is nothing their minds are not capable of imagining and building. I would hope to pass them on to their third grade teacher with their curiosity and joy in learning as rich and bumptious as it was the day they first came to school. Or even richer, because they would be more confident in their own powers.

You, no doubt, would do it differently. You might, like my son, want to work with older kids. He wants to teach a course about the history of baseball, because you can't learn this without learning about the history of cities, of labor/management relations, of racism, of transportation, of commercialism in sport. A course like this would show kids that though we pretend that history and sociology and economics and advertising are separate entities, in the real world they are always runing into each other, forming far more complex understanding of the world. For perhaps the first time in their lives in school, his students would have their personal interests treated as something worthy of serious study, and would see that those interests could be understood better through the lenses of school subjects that used to bore them to tears.

Whatever group of kids you chose, though, don't you think that, when the school year ended, you'd have learned this was a whole lot harder than you thought? Wouldn't you have a LOT more respect for teachers?

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

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