"How do you make school meaningful?" This question rattled around my brain all morning as I watched the students move around the room, almost robotically. For the past four years, we have talked about ways to make school come to life for the students. Different ways of incorporating outside sources to peak students' interest has been woven into every education class we've taken in college. So, in theory, I know how to make it meaningful. But what do you do when every part of your day is dictated by certain textbook pages you need to get through and specific amounts of time your kids must spend clicking buttons on their Chromebooks and calling it "Phonics Review." I look around the classroom and think of all the ways I would change it. The students wouldn't spend two hours a day aimlessly filling out Reading Wonders textbook pages that they would never glean anything from because their teachers never check them. Social Studies would be filled with children's literature and hands-on projects that make personal connections to the students and the information they are learning. And spelling; genuine time would be spent learning how to spell because contrary to popular belief, it IS important and it DOES matter. Even with the advancements in technology, children need to know how to spell instead of relying on Spellcheck to save the day.
Don't get me wrong, I genuinely respect my mentor teacher and none of this is to degrade the work she is doing in the classroom. But she's tired. She's tired of the constant testing and corrections that the students inevitably have to do because they were rushed to understand the material in the first place. She is tired of people who haven't spent actual time in a classroom determining what it should look like and how things should be done.
If I could do anything on my last day of student teaching, I would stand up on a stool and tell my students how smart I think they really are. How they have shown me great creativity in the sentences they make with their vocabulary words. How unique their brains are with the questions they ask. How funny they are in the jokes they tell and how kind they are in their interactions with one another. I don't know everything, nor will I ever claim to. But what I've seen in the past few months is an education system that is churning out students who don't believe in themselves. Students who already think they shouldn't go to college and chase their dreams because they aren't smart enough. And I'll be darned if I don't fight for these kids to understand how loved and important they are and how getting a 35 on a vocabulary test that tested words you wrote down in your notebook once is not an indication of the impact you can make on the world.
