Keira Chapter 4

I found I was able to take most of the boys' complaints about school and schoolish learning seriously, and ended up feeling that some of the complaints had to do with issues I felt willing and able to address as a teacher. I was a little surprised, but actually pleased, to learn that one of the complaints had to do with what the boys perceived to be insufficient depth. They *wanted* to understand things in more depth, but the felt that school tended to jump too quickly from one topic to the next (107). Relatedly, they felt that *connections* between topics were underdeveloped. "Robert," a tenth grader, talks about the problem this way:

...after we finish reading, we just go on to something else. We go on to something else to do. Like, she'll give us some different work. After we read, we just close the book and do different work. (107)

The superficiality and discontinuity was related to the boys' feeling that school didn't give them a feeling of competence and control. According to Smith and Wilhelm,

These boys argued that school leaps from topic to topic, and that textbooks in particular do not provide the basis for the deep understanding that was important to a sense of competence and control." (107) 

I have a few thoughts here. First of all, it really does help me to see this picture of the problem from the angle that Smith and Wilhelm are taking because I think (perhaps like many people my age) I might be inclined to think that young boys (and to some extent girls) currently have such fragmented attention (related to media overload, internet surfing, etc.) that they won't value depth and continuity. It's actually extremely encouraging to think that maybe they in fact *do* value these things, and I'm thoroughly willing to do what I can to make connections explicit and to allow for as much depth of inquiry as possible.

One possibility I will raise, however, is that people with very fragmented attention may fail to recognize connections that teachers do earnestly attempt to develop. Without actually observing the boys' teachers, I'm reluctant to condemn their work. Still, it's extremely valuable, in my opinion, to note that the boys did seek depth of knowledge and connection between topics. Helping classes work better for them would surely involve good strategies for checking in with them about whether they were able to follow/ pick up on/ make connections. A bit of repetition and a lot of explicitness in this connection would probably (though not definitely) pay off.  

It's good for me to see a possible connection between the lack of a feeling of competence and control and a lack of depth and continuity. I had been a bit worried that the key to giving the boys a feeling of competence and control might be to dumb down and make generally more shallow the topics of study. The very possibility of that got my back up, and I felt unwilling to cater to the boys if that's what was going to be involved. I'm glad to see that there is another, much more palatable, way of understanding (and potentially solving) the problem.

Another problem with school on which the boys tended to agree was that the teachers, they felt, didn't (as Rev put it) "know you, care about you, recognize you" (99). I am a little surprised at the possibility that teachers' connections to their students might be as weak as the boys suggest. I was frankly STUNNED to read of Marcel's failure in Spanish. Marcel was a native Spanish speaker. *How* could his teacher fail to address this issue very directly? I know we don't always know which of our students actually speak Spanish at home, but if I thought there was any possibility that that might be the case, I would ASK. "Do you speak Spanish outside class? Where? How well? With whom? Since when?" If the answer is "with all my family and since BIRTH" I would for SURE find some way of individualizing the challenge of the class. I know it's possible that I'm underestimating the problems that this particular teacher may be dealing with, but: Holy Cow! That one example did sure seem to me to suggest that some teachers didn't really know who their students were.

For my own part, I'll admit to having hated high school by the end. But I can't say that my teachers didn't know me or bother to make any connection. (It's kind of funny to realize this, but I guess I'm actually facebook friends with my grade 12 English teacher.) There was, of course, some variability. Teachers of subjects in which I made the most effort took the most interest (there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg question there), but I even had at least one gym teacher who bothered to ask which sports I *did* like, and she went out of her way to include some activities I favored, and really praised me on the rare occasion that I did excel athletically. I think I maybe even got an "A" in my last semester of gym. (I was generally a C+ student in that subject). I guess I'd concede, though, that my school was relatively easy on the teachers. It wasn't riddled with social problems.