Once a Pond of Time

The other day in class, while grading a comic strip where I asked my sixth graders to tell a story with the elements of plot, I came across a student who began with "Once a pond of time..." From certain students, I might have thought that this was a revolutionary metaphorical take on a played out beginning to a stroy (time being a pond upon which we all find ourselves, very Zen). But for this student, I knew he had only heard this phrase and not seen it written enough to know how it was spelled or what it actually meant. The student just knew that is how one starts a story. I could go on about the dirth of reading opportunities in today's screen transfixed generation, but today I want to talk about what IS catching this type of student's attention, if written books are not.
We took a field trip to an indoor ropes course/team building facility here in town this week, and I was brought back to why I became a teacher. Much like my first experiences with children at Laity Lodge Youth Camp, I saw kids engaged, attentive, and enjoying themselves as they never do in school. The students listen when they are supposed to listen, push themselves to do things they didn't think they could do, encourage each other and work together. Aren't these the lessons we want students to learn, the skills we want students to exhibit? All while done with some black light dodgeball (pictured) and some ropes course fun.
Schools work quite hard (usually unsuccessfully) to get students to do exhbit these skills while in school. High stakes testing (and most of the preparation involved) just don't inspire students in the same way. I know from my own experiences that it is days like these, both in school and out of school, that are the most impactful on my own educational development. I understand that we need to learn how to read and make a spreadsheet, but in my opinion the balance between relevant engagement and academic trials has been skewed by the decontextualized assessments pushed in the halls of government by large testing corporations. Intrinsic motivation and real world skills are lost in the numbing rumble of Scantron machines.

I try my hardest to make my class as much like the ropes course as I can. Creating a sense of drama about what we are doing, making each assignment an adventure and a challenge, and making the connections between our objectives and what they will need to do in the real world are ways that I try to bring the ropes course into my classroom. When school has created a situation where a sixth grader hasn't given enough attention to reading to be able to correctly spell "Once upon a time" (which doesn't really make that much sense anyways, if you think about it), but knows how to challenge himself with utmost attention and focus in the right setting, we are missing the point. I just hope too many generations go by before we realize it.