We’ve all seen someone who, like the high school student in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” is asleep, drooling on his desk. “Anyone? Anyone? … ” the teacher intones while he takes roll. It really doesn’t have to be like that, and though high schools are taking steps to combat the boring nature of some classes, change is taking place at glacial rates.
A few teachers are natural performers, and in their rooms students are engaged, no matter what the subject. One of the most popular literature professors in Columbia’s graduate school taught courses on John Milton, whose poetry is difficult and inaccessible — main ingredients in the recipe for “boring.” Yet Edward Tayler’s classes were always packed; I even went to some lectures a second time the following year, just to be sure I hadn’t missed anything.
Other teachers are so learned that their students always sit at attention. Jacqui Talton, who teaches American history at Oakton High School, is such a teacher. Students love her classes even though they are hard and require enormous quantities of reading. “She knows an interesting story about every American figure!” students tell me.
But for the rest of us — not performers, and not walking encyclopedias — there are techniques to keep students engaged in material that may not be inherently fascinating. These methods encourage students’ competitiveness and their natural sociability.
Games always draw students in, because everyone likes being on a winning team; a skillful teacher capitalizes on that and arranges it so every team wins occasionally. Group work takes advantage of a teen’s urge to connect to others. As long as group members are given specific tasks so that one person isn’t doing all the work, this is very effective in encouraging students to take responsibility for their own learning.
Veteran teachers have fine-tuned academic games and group lessons, but for the new teacher it is often a case of reinventing the wheel. In Fairfax County, administrators have been encouraging (and even requiring) the sharing of lessons in designated “team meetings.” Most administrators leave the choice of which lessons everyone will use up to the teams, so the “in common” activities are only as good as the strongest member of the team. In some cases, boring lessons become institutionalized and mandated, repeated year after year by all teachers.
The most rebellious of us sometimes simply “forget” to do the mandated, weak activities. But that is, of course, frowned on if discovered. As any teacher knows, administrators often don’t check to see what a teacher is doing or not doing. But none of this “rebellion” would be necessary if the curriculum were sound and engaging in the first place!
The most effective way to develop an engaging curriculum is to pay teachers to brainstorm together in the summer, when they’re rested and not spending all their free time grading papers. Two of the three schools where I’ve taught used this incentive, and the results were always better than what teachers came up with during the year. But that takes money — currently in short supply. Wouldn’t that be a good use for stimulus money: to stimulate the revision of stultifying high school curricula?
Erica Jacobs, whose column appears Wednesday, teaches at George Mason University. E-mail her at [email protected].
