Mandy Gets It

Dear colleague,

Today's blog post is a little different, as it's almost entirely the content of a letter I received last fall from Mandy in Brooklyn. Though she wrote it at the start of this school year, I saved it for sharing until now because it's a great end-of-year piece on how the Five Key Beliefs methodology can shape our approach to teaching and give us a sense of autonomy and power even amidst difficulty and transition.

What I love about Mandy's piece is how she weaves it all together — the beliefs, Everest statements, AI, and so on. And I love that because it's how I use this work, too. While I share lots of tips and tactics on this blog, what I've always been trying to describe isn't just a toolset. It's a way of being, a way of inhabiting the role of teacher.

I hope you enjoy it. — DSJR

P.S. Stay tuned for more details on a cool chance to hear me speak on the Five Key Beliefs via the South Dakota Council of Teachers of English's upcoming virtual conference.

P.P.S. Only five more blog posts planned for this school year! Crazy.

Hi Dave!

Thank you for doing the work that you do. I've been reading your newsletter for years. In fact, I read The Will to Learn last summer in preparation to participate in the year-long group study. That quickly went by the wayside during the last school year, which was in many ways the most challenging I've had. I left a school I loved for a school MUCH closer to home. While I reduced my daily commute from 3 hours to 8 minutes, I had a hard time adjusting to other aspects of the transition: going from mostly teaching 8th grade at a 6-12 school to mostly teaching 10th grade at a high school; being the only new-to-the-school teacher on the faculty of mostly decade-plus veterans of the school; adjusting to a new student population that, while socioeconomically & racially similar to the kids I'd taught in the South Bronx for the past 7 years, were much tougher and more guarded. By the end of the year I was able to gain the respect, if not the reliable participation, of most of my students. I credit the Five Key Beliefs with giving me a lot of the philosophical foundation that I needed during this year to reach them. Credibility, Effort, Efficacy — I think I made some pretty successful improvements in these areas. The places where I struggled were Belonging, and especially Value.

So I was pleased to see today's newsletter declaring this the Year of Value. The most difficult part of the year for me was seeing really smart kids who had decided that there was no point in their bothering with school. They didn't see why they should pay attention, or do the reading, or come to class on time, or come to class without having vaped in the bathroom or stairwell first. Some of them felt that school didn't have anything to teach them that would help them in their lives. Others felt like school is not going to prepare them for the world they're going to graduate into. As you say in today's post, they are stuck in the red & orange sections on the Rainbow of Why. They see school as an obligation and their goal is to graduate and get out of there — so either they're focused on getting good grades so they can get a college scholarship, or they're focused on getting good-enough grades so they don't have to take this class again. Hua Hsu puts it this way in a recent New Yorker article about AI: “Until we're eighteen, we go to school because we have to, studying the Second World War and reducing fractions while undergoing a process of socialization. We're essentially learning how to follow rules.” While I think this is a little reductive (she's a college professor, naturally), the article contains an essential truth: a lot of students are using AI for everything because they are getting a sense that the rules are no longer relevant, and nobody seems to agree on what the new rules should be. They just aren't really sure why anything they're learning in school will matter.

I gave a lot of mini-sermons throughout the year about why I think school, or at least English, matters — how reading, writing and discussing can teach us to pay attention to things we might otherwise not notice, and how noticing can make life richer; how school can help us to think more clearly and keep from being taken advantage of; how it can make us more compassionate, help us understand people who would seem to be nothing like us, help us understand ourselves; how it can help us make ourselves understood. What we have the opportunity to do in school is so much bigger than just preparing to participate in the economy. We're preparing to participate in the world!
Extremely corny, I know, but it's entirely genuine!

I've been planning an opening unit for the first week-plus of school that addresses this directly, and that was inspired by your work. My goal is for students to spend time reading, thinking, talking, and writing about the question, “School: why bother?” (There must be a better way to say that!) My goal is to collaboratively construct an Everest statement as a whole class that can be posted in the classroom, and for students to independently construct their own Everest statements for the year, which will live on the first page of their notebooks. I've started collecting readings — Frederick Douglass on learning to read; some articles about AI use in school; an abridged, adapted version of Matthew L. Sanders' Becoming a Learner — and I'll use them for my beginning-of-year lessons on annotation routines, summarizing, writing a response to an open-ended prompt about a text, etc. (I'm thinking about writing out my own long-form mission statement, too — something that builds from all that stuff I wrote to you above — to share with them as one of our mentor texts. Hey, why not introduce myself to them as a writer and teacher by asking them to critique my writing? 🙂

This is all to say that I'm grateful to have found my way onto your subscriber list years ago, and that you are doing and sharing so much of the Big Work. I'm looking forward to reading this year's newsletters/blog! (blogletters?)

Warmly,
Mandy in Brooklyn, NY