Month: September 2024

Just 15 minutes

Once again, I forgot it was Tuesday. This is odd because yesterday I knew that today was Tuesday, and, frankly, today I knew it, too. I had planned to write something last night, but then I didn’t because… I can’t remember, but there was a very good reason. This morning I even set aside some writing time, but then the supplies we ordered came in, so I had to check what we received against what we ordered (vaguely similar) and distribute them to various teachers, then I had to set up a new booking system so that we can get the 95ish Chromebooks distributed fairly to the 30ish teachers who want them for various classes (no, the math doesn’t math there). Anyway, one thing led to another and then it was after work and now it’s 8:45 and I haven’t written my Slice of Life.

Recently, when I’ve found myself in this position, I’ve thrown up my hands and decided to put things off until “next week,” but this week my students have essays due, and I have this nagging sense that if they have to write and publish then I should probably write and publish. So here I am.

Part of the reason I lost track of time (and the day of the week – I even missed my knitting group!) is because I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with about 15 minutes of class time tomorrow. The original plan was for the grade 12 students to share their This I Believe essays in a sort of “desk exhibit” – they were going to walk around and read each other’s essays & leave positive comments on post-it notes. BUT… today’s lesson involved a peer feedback protocol that worked so well that quite a few students have some serious edits to make. Given our lack of Chromebooks combined with student jobs and after-school commitments, tomorrow needs to involve a little time to tidy up their writing in class, so the gallery walk will happen on Thursday. They do not, however, need 75 minutes (the length of our classes) to edit, or even 60 minutes (after 15 minutes of daily reading), or even 45 minutes. I figure we need a maximum of 30 minutes of editing time. This means that I need to create a tiny lesson – just 15 minutes – to bridge us from reading and writing narrative arguments to learning about rhetorical analysis and using that with popular culture.

Here is where being a teacher gets weird: I know what we’ve done, and I know where I want us to go; I also know the information I need to share, and I know the students. This lesson should be simple – just, you know, teach. Instead, I’ve spent at least an hour looking at videos and slide shows, thinking about the right way to present the topic so that students are interested and engaged. I need something that intrigues students and is memorable. This will be the first peek at something that we won’t really start until Monday (because essays, PD day, the weekend…) I want this to hook some specific students. I want them to have something to think about. Come Monday, I want them curious.

So do I read them a picture book by Jacqueline Woodson? Do I show them a video about a soccer team in Thailand – one that turns out to be an ad? Or maybe I show a brief interview with Simon Sinek about the power of stories? What stories matter? Why do we care? Who is telling these stories? To whom? For what purpose? Thomas King says, “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are” – I need a fifteen-minute something to start them down the path to believing that. 

I bet I can find it if I think about it for just a few more minutes…

Why read?

It’s the second week of classes, and we’re all slowly settling in to the familiar rhythms of school. In grade 12 English, we’re already reading our second short mentor text for our narrative argument unit. (This is a new unit for me; I wanted something a little different from the personal essay, and here we are.) Today we read a This I Believe essay called “The Power of Hello” by Howard White. I didn’t know who White was (former basketball player, VP at Nike) until I read this, but I loved his message “that every single person deserves to be acknowledged, however small or simple the greeting” so his was an easy essay to choose as a mentor text for the class.

Before we got to the text, however, I paused to ask the students why they think we are still teaching reading and writing in an age of AI. Reading was the easier sell. If you google “Why is reading important?” – which I do every semester – there are pages and pages of hits. I like to summarize them by saying, “Reading makes us smarter, kinder, richer and a better date.” (The better date is because reading can improve conversational skills – who knew? Well, I mean, besides me and the internet.) Lots of students nodded their heads and sort of looked like they agreed, and for today that was enough. We’ll come back to this when they need to remember why I’m pushing for a high volume of reading.

Writing, on the other hand, seemed less important to many students. While one student straight out said, “writing is thinking” plenty of students looked less than convinced. And I get it – though I disagree. Words work for me; for others, this is less true. When I try to sketch something, I am often significantly less successful at communicating. If I needed to show my thinking through movement, I would, I suspect, often fail. Too often, students have only ever written for a grade. I can’t fix that, but I can try to help them understand that words have power that they can harness with practice. I’ve got a whole semester to make my case.

Because of this brief class discussion, reading and writing were on my mind when I saw a woman with a stroller stopped on the sidewalk ahead of me. I wasn’t actively thinking about Howard White’s essay and the power of saying hello, but his words must have been somewhere in the back of my mind because I very consciously registered the scene: a young woman with a baby strapped to her front and a toddler between her legs, hanging off the stroller. She was stopped awkwardly in the middle of the sidewalk, and the toddler was twisting and turning just enough that I knew she wasn’t watching him. I said hello.

“Hi. Um, there’s something in my eye,” she said. “A bug flew in there. I can’t really see.”

In fact, her eye was watering. The baby wasn’t just in a carrier, they were nursing, and the toddler was close to tipping the stroller over. The mother looked just a tiny bit frantic.

“I could look at your eye…?” My voice trailed off into a question. It’s an oddly intimate offer – here, stranger, let me look at your eyeball – but she took me up on it immediately.

I didn’t see a bug, and now her eye was watering with tears? irritation from the bug? “I can really feel it. Can you look again?”

And there it was! A tiny black spot. I reached toward her face and swiped the critter to the edge of her eyelid; she did the rest. “Oh, thank God. Thank you. Thank you so much for stopping.”

I told her, of course, that it was nothing – because it was. Just one mom helping another on the sidewalk at the end of the day. Just a tiny interaction between two people who happened to cross paths. She won’t remember it by tomorrow morning; she may be so tired that she has already forgotten.

But I wonder… would I have noticed her if we hadn’t read that essay in class? Maybe White’s belief that everyone deserves to be acknowledged primed me to actually see her. Maybe the fact that he wrote his small story and shared it helped one human reach out to help another. Maybe now that I’m writing this, I will remember to do this again. Maybe you will read this and you, too, will help someone. Maybe this will happen even if you forget that you read this. 

This, I believe, is why we write and why we read. I think I’ll share it with my students.