Make it Matter
Every so often I think back to my year in grad school at Syracuse University. Up until that point, I had finished my undergraduate degrees in tv/film and philosophy, worked in tv production for two years, and moved back to the East coast to become a teacher. I struggled through a year of substitute teaching in the Syracuse city school district from 2009-2010. I wanted to get a sneak peek into teaching and, honestly, needed to pay the bills before my graduate program started the following summer.
My year in grad school was busy. The program at Syracuse enabled me to finish my graduate degree in one year, given that I would attend classes while also teaching full time in the city and suburban towns nearby. My daily schedule, for one full year, included teaching from 9-3, grad class from 4-8, and rolling burritos at Chipotle from 9-midnight.
Most of my memories of grad school are of my classmates and one memory in particular sticks out. Syracuse is known for the immense amount of snow that falls each year. Halfway through our graduate program, we had to present drafts of our final portfolio and thesis. Throughout the hours long class, the six of us shared our experiences so far and had certainly earned ourselves a night out together afterwards. We walked over to Faegan’s, a pub just off campus. We chatted, we laughed, we compared war stories from student teaching. My greatest memory of that night, though, is the snow. I watched as the snow slowly creeped up the front window of the bar, and by the end of the night (5 hours later) we were stuck, kicked out of Faegan’s as it closed with no way to get home as the roads had worsened. We all made it home that night one way or another, but the thing that sticks with me is the snow.
As our graduate year ended, all of my classmates and I were asked to present our thesis papers. They were long, which wasn’t new to me as someone who’d spent my undergraduate years writing philosophy papers. The difference, though, is how personal they were. These thesis papers were filled with anecdotes about our time in the classroom. The overarching questions we were asked to answer focused on how children learn best. My answer: make it matter.
Ok… I didn’t quite have those words for it yet. But I worked for weeks on putting my ideas into a succinct philosophy on teaching that summed up my experiences both through substitute teaching and student teaching. I cited research articles and quoted academic scholars, but what was most compelling was the stories. Children learn best when what they’re learning about matters. Not to me or you, but it has to matter to them.
This is no small feat. There’s no telling what will matter to any specific child and you can’t force anything to matter to anyone, young or old. So how do we make it matter for students who feel disengaged in our work together?
One of the most important parts of our work as teachers is to get to know our students, and I’ve found that the first part of making learning matter is tailoring our teaching to what students are already interested in. Tell stories about topics they enjoy. Read aloud books with characters they love. Talk with them, one on one, about how they feel and what may be bothering them.
One of my most memorable moments from substitute teaching was an experience with a tenth grader in Syracuse. I worked and worked to try to engage him in our learning to no avail. When I finally checked in with him one on one, he opened his hand and showed me a cracked cell phone. It might not have mattered to me, but it surely mattered to him. Everything that is happening and everything that’s ever happened to a child matters. After talking with the student about his options, relieving him of the stress of his broken phone, we were able to move on.
In my teaching thesis I wrote about the things that make our work “relevant” to students. Relevant was the word I had used back then. All of the characteristics of a child, their family dynamic, their strengths or weaknesses, their interests, make learning matter to them. Their circumstances also matter. This includes their experiences, whether they’re hungry or tired, whether they’ve had an argument with a peer, the way they felt after a family dinner gathering or seeing a parade for the first time. All of these are things that can make something more or less relevant to a child. It can matter or it doesn’t. It’s our job as teachers to get to know our students, not just once or twice, but everyday. What are they into, what makes them feel proud, what are they feeling, and what have they experienced?
This leads me to the second way to make it matter. Getting to know your students is important and integrating what already matters is a great way to engage. However, as teachers we know that there are also some topics that we need to teach that may not matter naturally to children. Creating experiences that bring our content come alive can help make it matter. Field trips, experiments, interviews, videos and more. All of these can help content come alive in a way that traditional education tactics may not be able to. The American Revolution may not matter to many children (it surely didn’t to me), but visiting a home built in 1748 where George Washington once stayed, stepping on the same floor boards and crouching under the same cellar ceiling, that mattered. (https://www.vchm.org/). In order to engage students in learning, especially in topics that may not be relevant to them, we need to go the extra mile to make memorable experiences that they’ll remember.
A few weeks ago my daughter brought up the suburbs. “I really love all the different places people can live, like the suburbs or rural places.” When I asked her to tell me more, she said, “Well, I really love our time in rural places like Garnet Lake and Bear Mountain. But I love going to Nanny’s house in the suburbs. And we live in Brooklyn in an urban place.” All of the evidence my daughter continued to share revolved around her experiences in the different types of communities she had learned about. Experiences, both positive or negative, can make a topic matter to children more than it may have otherwise.
I’ve always loved the snow. My next door neighbor loves to share the story every year of how she used to see me out in our front year at the break of dawn rolling around in the first snow of the year. Syracuse was an obvious choice for undergrad and grad school for me for a million reasons. I think back to my memories from that time of my life. Tiptoeing through a small path pressed into the snow from our dorm to the dining hall, watching the snow pile up outside of Faegan’s, wrestling a classmate to the snowy ground after a long night out with friends, being driven home from a party and seeing -16degrees on the “Mony” towers. All of those memories are fresh because of the joy that they bring to me. They matter.
As we work your way through the curriculum this year, it should be our goal to think of the ways to engage our students in learning that feels relevant. How can we make adding and subtracting two digit numbers matter? How can we bring historical studies alive in ways that students can build connection to the content that begs them to ask more questions and want to learn more? Teaching isn’t easy, but when we consider the small investments that we can make each day into the interest and engagement of our students, we can envision the long term benefits of building a classroom where the learning really matters to everyone.