Talk It Out

I've been rather annoyed with my remedial students lately. These are, of course, the students who are stuck with me at the end of the year -- meaning they haven't passed the test yet. They are the least motivated of the least motivated students in school. (Which really isn't fair to my very motivated students who just really struggle with language and motivated themselves to pass the test.)

What I notice is that they don't think. They don't turn on their brain. They don't even try. They look for the simplest, most obvious answer; anything beyond mind-numbingly obvious turns into "I don't know".

I have been dragging them through an investigation of their relationship with literacy. Do they even want to learn how to read? Do they think it will ever be useful for them? Should they try to learn something at point in their horribly tiny lives? (Can you see my frustration shining through.)

I took a page out of my own book, and asked them to draw some pictures about what they imagined in some quotes that are about literacy. Two of them were from Jimmy Santiago Baca, a poet who dropped out of high school and was incarcerated at some point in his life. His life, of course, sparked some interest with them.

Today, after spending 2 1/2 class periods dragging three drawings from my students, we had a Socratic seminar about the first quote. They were not amused. There were mumblings of "I don't want to do this" and "This is stupid" -- mumblings which I called them on and asked if we could at least try the activity before they trashed it. They didn't want to sit in a circle. They didn't want to talk. But I dragged them along, kicking and screaming.

On my end, my questions weren't great. I had to do a lot of leading the witnesses, your Honor. But I slowly got them to drag out some of the images in the first quote. Santiago Baca talk about dropping out of school and feeling like he was being hunted because he couldn't understand and was too scared to ask for help. The quote continues with more violent images -- hanging, trapdoors, masks, muteness.

After some more kicking and screaming, I managed to get them all to share something. I manged to tell them I was asking about opinions, and not about facts. And one of them (a royal pain) pointed out that it seemed like he was running away from something bad that he did. They knew what it was like to avoid public places and spaces because you feel threatened. And I led them to what it is that he did wrong -- he couldn't express himself. Well, maybe they got there more or less. I'm pretty sure they got a lot closer to understanding than they ever did with me at the front of the room. And I got to tell them that THEY figured it out together.

They probably won't be happy about it, but we're going to do at least two more of these. Maybe one or two of them will find the process rewarding. Maybe one or two will learn something about the value of trying and the value of learning. Maybe.