All work and no play...

John Dewey’s tome How We Think was at times a tough read. It’s hard to stay focused on a text like this while working 50ish hours a week, lesson planning, grading and trying to achieve some sort of semblance of a social life. That being said, I think it offers truly valuable insight into how humans think. It addresses thinking through psychological as well as philosophical lenses and it resonates with me in how I approach my classroom.

One section that really piqued my interest was the section that differentiates work and play for children. Dewey states that “In play activity, it is said, the interest is in the activity for its own sake; in work, it is in the product or result in which the activity terminates. Hence the former is purely free, while the latter is tied down by the end to be achieved.”  I’ve been confronted this past week with how “boring” or how “fun” our lessons have been in our junior ELA III class.

I’ve shared that I have been less than thrilled with our drill-like unconnected lessons regarding narrative and expository writing sprinkled with powerpoints and handouts. It’s hard to be enthusiastic about a lesson I don’t understand the purpose of and then I have to convey that faux enthusiasm to the students. My students fail to see the purpose of the end result of our ELA lessons. They don’t see a big picture in regards as to how these lessons help them succeed in life or even just to the extent of anything beyond the STAAR test. It’s no wonder that they spend half of the class in  passive lethargy.

When I walked into my classroom on Tuesday my CT said that she wasn’t ready to give our juniors another essay to write because we have yet to finish grading the last one. We quickly put our heads together and thought of an interactive activity involving reading four expository articles and looking at their techniques to see what makes a strong or weak article and what techniques they could put to use in their own expository essays. They worked in groups taking note of the positives and negatives in each essay and then they got up and went to a poster that corresponded with the article they read and wrote their notes. They then switched to the next article. After they finished all four we came back together and discussed the positives and negatives of each article. It was the most awake and involved I’ve seen this class all semester. I asked them what they liked about this activity and one of them responded “It was actually fun, we got to work together and do something interesting for once.” Ouch. I’m happy that they found it interesting and that they had something to take away from it but it is a rough reminder of what they think about the other work we’ve done in the class.

Then again, that statement was from my student I had mentioned last week that spends most of the class with her head down and talking back to me. The way she said it made it seem like we were there to entertain her. I think there is a balance between work and play and is attainable and a lot of it has to do with cultural relativity.

Cultural relativity has really lacked in this class thus far. We’ve been reading short stories and articles that deal with children for about a month now. We read a story about children who are left unattended and a horrible accident happens to them and it was paired with an expository article about children who are laborers. We were comparing narrative and expository but there wasn’t any front loading and it felt really random. Then about two weeks later, we did the same activity again with two similar articles. The students kept asking “Why are we reading so much about children??” There was no feeling of cohesion or a theme throughout these readings. It felt like we were just putting articles in front of them and saying here, “read this and fill out this chart.” Sure, the short stories were about Latino children but there was no connection the students felt towards these stories. It was just another thing they had to do go get by to get the daily points for the day.

I guess my point is that if we use culturally relevant materials and connect them to a purpose the students can identify with more intrinsically than points or the STAAR we can more easily mingle play, (by which I mean entertainment/engagement) and work. The activity we did on Tuesday allowed them to work together, read articles they could find at least somewhat interesting (the subjects were love, the science behind basketball, the music industry, and people who have accents) and see their work presented in front of the class. We then tied the activity to techniques they could use in their writing. The students need to understand what the end result of our lessons should be but enjoy the process along the way to feel more agency in their education.