Earlham College Leadership Academy

This week is the first of a two week summer school / summer camp that the Earlham MAT students help orchestrate for about 40 kids from area middle schools. It takes place in the morning, and involves typical camp activities like games and teamwork challenges and more academic skills like graphing and reading and analysing texts.

My partner in teaching is Mr. Bell, and we are having the opportunity to apply some of what we've been reading about in our lesson plans. We have a group of 7 students we are working (the self-named "Alpha Leaders"). As a group, they must prepare a presentation that presents some element of life in 2050. At the end of camp there will be a grand presentation of all the group projects, and each group must give some background information on the element of life they're focusing on, and what it will be like in 2050 based on their predictions. This is all about using past knowledge to make educated guesses about the future, one of my favourite academic tasks (as I have written about in reading drama especially).

Our group has a mix of ages, personalities, academic strengths and senses of humour. It is such a delight to be back in the classroom. Students are so great. Always surprising, amazingly smart, quick on the uptake ...

Recently I was reading an article by my favourite economist, Thorstein Veblen, who points out that 

"IT is one of the commonplaces of the received economic theory that work is irksome. Many a discussion proceeds on this axiom that, so far as regards economic matters, men desire above all things to get the goods produced by labor and to avoid the labor by which the goods are produced."

Veblen acknowledges that he is making grand generalisations, but is this not true? Going to work is, for the most part, seen as undesirable. 

Veblen points out that "The avowal does not cover all effort, but only such as is of some use; it is, more particularly, such effort as is vulgarly recognized to be useful labor." We do not shrink, for example, from "the effort that goes into war, politics, or other employments of a similar nature. And there is commonly no avowed aversion to sports or other similar employments that yield neither a pecuniary gain nor a useful product." 

This is surely true for students. They have boundless energy, which they happily expend on activities of their own choice, but somewhere along the line they learn that school work is odious. What I have enjoyed about working with the middle school students so far is that, while they may roll their eyes at the idea of doing a "useful" task, they quickly become invested in the actual work associated with it. Today during a graphing project, everyone was 100% engaged in a challenging and immediately satisfying task of plotting charted data on a line graph. 

I think it is one of the joys and challenges of teaching to come up with ways to stave off the perceived "irksomeness of labor" (Veblen's title) which creeps in through mediocre schooling. How do we do this? It shall surely be my lifelong challenge to find out. 

Certainly trying to incorporate student choice into the classroom helps. Can they choose some of the topics covered? Can they choose texts? Can they choose the subject and method for a presentation? 

Another source of irksomeness is boredom associated with listening silently to someone else, then having to do what they say. How a student's voice is involved in a lesson is key. I spoke about this with a friend, who pointed out that we should think about what verb we place int he blank in the following sentence: 

As a teacher I try to _______________ my student['s] voice.  

Do I give my student voice? 

Do I incorporate my student's voice?

Do I celebrate my student's voice?

Empower his voice?

Challenge?

Seek?

Listen to?

Is it enough to give a student voice? Is it too ambitious to hope to celebrate the voice of each student in a 25 person class? Certainly, my job is less irksome when the students are doing more talking. The MATs, in their feedback session this afternoon, acknowledged the glee they felt when students willingly participate in a lesson or discussion. There's no better feeling that knowing you've successfully gotten the students invested in the topic at hand. But if I've chosen the topic and questions, how much of their pure voice am I really honouring? I don't know the answers to these questions. 

Switching gears some, on the topic of irksomeness of the teacher's job, versus the joy of it:

When I made the decision to take on debt to pursue this program, a pragmatic friend told me that it was a fine idea, as long as I was ready to sacrifice the fun of pursuing whatever I want after the program is over, in order to service the debt. "You can't go get another passion job," was the friend's conclusion. 

This attitude aligns with the phenomenon Veblen identifies, but I rankle at it. Am I not pursuing this degree because I feel a level of passion about the job that the degree will permit me to do? Teaching is the passion job.

It is nice to feel as though my job is enjoyable when I do it well. If I plan poorly and it's just me and the sullen students in the classroom, it's irksome. If I plan successfully, and kids are engaged, it's energising and satisfying. I suppose we all have a level of influence over the irksomeness of our work, depending on our attitude and our preparation. I feel this is especially true for teachers.