Category: being a teacher

being a teacher, education, Passion, Teacher

No Longer Mine

Pernille Schmidt Ripp
I can’t take their work off the walls.  With two days left my classroom still looks as if we have all the time in the world, but we don’t.  On Thursday our journey ends and a new one begins for these incredible 23 students that I have been lucky enough to call my kids.  When I am asked what I am passionate about, many people assume technology, or writing, or math.  Sure, I love all of those things, they are interesting, they even sometimes excite me.  But passions?  I am passionate about my students.

These children are given to me on loan and it is my job to make sure they still love school when I am done with them.  It is my job to ensure that they still love learning when this year is over and that they, in fact, have grown not just academically but personally as well.  I am passionate about them because they are the reason why teaching is the best job in the world and also the most heartbreaking.

We invest our hearts every year.  Our dreams, our hopes, our ideas.  And we hope to plant a tiny seed within our students knowing that they matter, that we care, that their sheer presence makes a difference for us and everyone else.  That passion consumes me.  When the end of the year arrives, I know I have to let go.  I know they are no longer ming but someone else’s.  It is someone else’s turn to become passionate about these kids and I get new ones to focus on.  Yet my heart grows wider after the sadness leaves and I know that these students will in some way always be mine, or at least their 4th grade version will be.

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being a teacher, goodbye, journey, Student-centered

They Are Ready to Leave

Pernille Schmidt Ripp

I started this year with a vision and ended it with a new belief. I started this year by throwing it almost all out, scrappng what I thought were “have to’s” in the classroom, discarding rhetoric survived from college, raising my own expectation for eagerness, excitement, genuine learning rather than memorization. I started this year with many ideas. Not my students. They started this year being excited about being 4th graders, bummed about losing their third recess, but pumped that the chairs and desks were bigger. Some were even interested in what we would learn in 4th grade, but none of them knew what to expect. Neither did I to tell you the truth.

So these kids that have been my partners in learning, these kids that have believed in our journey together are now ready to leave me. They are ready for new challenges, new jokes, new routines and expectations. They are ready to decompress, breathe a little bit, and just be kids in the summer heat. I pretend to be ready to let them go, I know it is their time, but it is still hard to lose the label of “my kids.” The journey we have been on has been so incredible, so beyond expectations, that I wonder if this is it? Is this the year I will always try to emulate? Or did I really stumble upon something within myself? Did I create a new teacher where then old me once stood? Will my vision survive the next year?

I started this year with a vision and I was lucky enough to have kids that believed in it too. Now they get to leave with our vision of what learning should feel like, and I am left behind, alone, but so, so proud. These kids – they will change the world some day.

being a teacher, history

Let Them Learn about War

Pernille Schmidt Ripp

“Oh, you let them build a war model?” another adult is scanning our products from  our Innovation Day.  “I don’t think I would let them do that…” and so begins my train of thought.  Did I do something wrong by allowing Jack to build a model of D-Day?  Should I have steered him toward something kinder, more 4th gradeish, should learning about war be a one time occurrence?

I guess I hadn’t even thought about it.  After all, I asked the kids to do something they were passionate about, something that would keep them focused an entire day, something that we had perhaps not covered. Jack loves the history of wars.  He is good at it too.  All year whenever we came close to a war in social studies, and there are many of them, he is the one that adds the facts that I would never remember, the facts that bring the other kids in, the facts that put the human face on war.  His passion is contagious too and other kids have checked war books out from the library because of him.  Should I have stopped them?
I realize that I teach 9 and 10 year olds who are not ready to know the true devastation and horror of war, and yet, the sheltering that occurs in America of our students, the rewriting of history so to say, is taking on epic proportions.  You don’t need to look further than the recent rewrite of Huckleberry Finn for proof.  Yet we have to realize that our history is not made up of unicorns and rainbows, or even peace and understanding.  Our history is one of a cycle of violence, people who fight for change, and in that fight, there are battles.  If we do not teach our students about the fight, then how will they ever appreciate the outcome?  I don’t go into horrific details about the injuries or torture or anything of that sort, but we learn about it so that we can understand our world a little bit better.  
It happens again; a child wonders whether he is allowed to add a sword fight in his fairy tale.  Perplexed I ask him why he is even asking, after all, there are many battles or fights in fairy tales.  He tells me that some teachers don’t allow it.  Again, I wasn’t aware that this would be a problem.  Of course, there are battles in stories, particularly in the stories written by my boys.  And that’s it isn’t it?  Is it because we as female teachers prefer stories about love, compassion, and friendship?  Is it because we do not relate to the need for action, for fights, for valor and bravery?  I have never had a female student write a battle story and yet I think some day I will.  So I want to keep the option open.  I want my students to feel that they can write whatever they please as long as it fits within the requirements we have determined.  I want my students to know that this world is a messed up place that we are continually trying to enhance and we can only do that by learning from our previous mistakes.  We have to stop the sanitization of our history, in essence, we have to bring back the violence, the grittiness, the not so perfect human side, that makes us all human.
So let’s stop the unnecessary fixing of our curriculum.  We have to give time to the battles and wars so that all of our students can learn from them.  We have to stop skipping the “bad” parts and only focusing on the good.   We have to embrace the interests of our boys and cater to them as well.  They are equal partners in learning and deserve their chance to express themselves creatively.  
being a teacher, smartboards, Student-centered

The Sheer Genius of SmartBoards

Pernille Schmidt Ripp
Image taken from here

I am not a believer in SmartBoards, there I said it.  Sure, they are a nice tech tool to have but honestly, for that amount of money, I could think of about a thousand other things I would rather have in my classroom.  In fact, Bill Ferriter at the Tempered Radical agrees with me, which partly prompted this post.  And yet, I have to applaud what the makers of SmartBoards have done to our school districts.  Think about it, a smart board.  So if you have it then you must be smart for making the investment and if you don’t, well, then you are not.

Sometimes it is all in a name.  After all, that is why companies spend money trying to come up with the best marketing they can.  So when someone came up with the name SmartBoard you know high fives went around the room.  How about the Interactive Whiteboard?  Teachers love to speak of how interactive their SmartBoards really are.  And where does that notion come from? Their name.  I do nto for one minute believe that soemone went up to that board and thought indepedently of how interactive they are for students, maybe for the teacher, but not for others.  It really should just be called a touch and response board but that just doesn’t seem to have the same kind of connotation.  So when you call something interactive well, then, think of how much easier you can sell it.

So really who is the board interactive for?  The teacher who gets to touch it as the lesson moves on or the selected student who gets to come up and move a word around.  Ooooh, now that is engaged learning.  I don’t dismiss interactive whiteboards as classroom tools altogether but I do dismiss the notion that they are the ticket to reform our classrooms, to re-engage our learners, and teach our children.  Instead they lead themselves to more “sage on the stage” type of teaching where the teacher is in control of all of the learning and the students just get to participate.  That is not what school should be.  So laud your interactive whiteboards as much as you want, but keep in mind just how they were sold to you.  I think it is time we see them for they really are; tools, not solutions, not magic pills, just another tool and one that comes with a steep pricetag and a much too deep learning curve.  This should not be the future of our classrooms. 

being a teacher, grades, label, rank, students

Some Questions on Labels

Pernille Schmidt Ripp

Those struggling learners, the reluctant readers, the underachievers. All labels heard in schools on a daily basis. The tired ones, the creative types, the giften, the talented, the fidgeters, the lazy students. We label and label in order to define them all, to fit them all into a box under the pretense of being better teachers, of making our jobs easier, more manageable, more suited for differentiation. After all, if we don’t label then how will we know who needs which services? If we do not label then who will we teach at what time? How will class lists be made up to ensure balanced needs? We may not be tracking our atudents openly but the labels keep on coming.

I often ponder labels and what effect they have had on my own life. Some teachers labeled me gifted, I was not, only gifted through circumstance. Others labeled me underachieving, where rather it was in response to the teaching method. I was labeled opinionated in history, that one stuck, outspoken in English, talentless in math, and relentless in my pursuit of academic excellence in college. Labels shaped my education whether I agreed with them or not, yet how often were they shared with me? How often was I aware of what category I was placed in? And worse, how often when I was aware did it become my definition?

Some will inevitably argue that if we do not label our students whether through tests or grades then how will we rank them? How will we teach them best? If we don’t know who our strugglers are then how will we reach them? I don’t know. But what happens when those labels become all we see? What happens when the labels end up defining the student rather than the student defining the label. What happens when one teacher’s comment becomes the mold we force the student into? Can we label our students without actually harming them and impeding their learning? Can we genuinely categorize students as struggling when they are perhaps just learning at a different pace?

I hope someone has the answer.