being a teacher, goodbye, journey, Student-centered

They Are Ready to Leave

Pernille 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 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.  
Uncategorized

Turn that Countdown Around

Pernille Ripp
I used to love the countdown, 20 more days until school is over, thank goodness!  What a way to excite the kids and make sure they had no focus the last month of school.  So I stopped it in my room but then realized that others still had them up in the hallways.  Hmm, I could not walk around and ask everyone not to do it (sorry Kirk) so I instead I chose to work with it.

This year since about 18 days left of school, we have mentioned just how many days are left, but instead of heralding summer vacation’s arrival, we have focused on all we need to get done.  In previous years, I would let the kids meander a bit, read leisurely, and finish projects while going at their own speed.  Not this year.  In fact, I just introduced a final project Thursday with only 4 days left to complete it.  These kids love it.  Instead of being bored in their classroom waiting for that last magical bell to freedom, there is a sense of urgency or purpose within my room.  My students ask for projects and ask to be challenged, and I am happy to oblige.

It is this sense of urgency that has propelled us all year.  We have not rushed but rather focused on our goals and set timelines that accommodates everyone.  If someone finished early, they got more time for an extension project.  There is always learning to be done.  So as the countdown continues and is now at 4 days left, my students cannot believe it.  “You mean this year is over?  But it just started!”  This year has rushed by, much like time tedns to do, and yet we have accomplished more than what we set out to do.  We cherish the moments we still have left and work hard to learn even more in 4th grade.  Even though the days are numbered, our learning is not, so embrace the countdown, share with the kids how precious your time with them is and how much there still is to learn.  Make it exciting, give them choice, let them create, and enjoy these final days together.  Count them down together, fore a new adventure awaits.

For a great post on why you shouldn’t embrace the countdown, please see Jesse McClean’s fantastic post “A Case Against the Countdown.”

being a teacher, smartboards, Student-centered

The Sheer Genius of SmartBoards

Pernille 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.