A teaching life is full of lingering memories that resurface time and time again to remind me that my work and the time I spent as a teacher was impactful. It counted for something. It’s a gift of teaching to have that mind portfolio of the children you’ve helped, or laughed with, or struggled to reach but then, on some random Tuesday, finally did. And those children, the ones that were hard, I remember them the most. All of this to say that I have one particular memory that pops to mind more often than any other, forcing me to consider why. What is significant about this specific moment in my career?
This moment happened long before Common Core Standards and the fervor for the scripted curriculum. My then teaching partner and I had created a science fiction unit for the students in our English classes. We read science fiction stories from our old literature series and had a number of activities crafted to highlight the elements of the science fiction genre. One such activity, meant to highlight the characteristics of a futuristic or other world setting of science fiction, was the diorama project. The students were assigned the task of creating a scene from the future in a shoebox display. The students loved this hands-on project and the classroom was a buzz with creativity. They glued pictures of cars to fishing line to create the illusion of flying automobiles, some cut the bottoms off two liter pop bottles to use as the domes for their underwater worlds. Robot models of varying shapes and sizes popped up in shoeboxes around the classroom. Often on these production days the dismissal bell would ring without any of us even realizing the hour had been drawing to a close. It was magical!
On the day the dioramas were due, the students proudly displayed them on the counters and desktops all around the classroom so we could admire the imaginings and craftsmanship of these three-dimensional sci-fi scenes. On one such day, I meandered around the classroom, admiring all the futuristic scenes when one display stopped me in my tracks. The diorama was beautifully constructed with a log cabin in the center, a clothes line with little flannel shirts hung to dry, and even a crop of corn rising in the background. I studied it for a bit and when the sweet girl who had made it returned, I carefully broached the subject of her diorama. I started by complimenting her attention to detail and the sheer artistry of her work, and then I leaned in to ask the difficult part. I asked if she’d understood the assignment as her scene seemed much like one you’d imagine in a “Little House on the Prairie” book. She very confidently replied, “Oh, I understood. I think it will get so bad that we will have to return to the ways of the past.” I was stunned by her response and mightily impressed by her insightful execution of the assignment. Those words, her words have echoed in my mind ever since. And now more than ever I think she may just be the prophet in that group of 6th graders who dreamily imagined the future.
When it comes to the future of education, I can’t help but think we’d be much better off if we simply returned to the ways of the schools in the past, say education circa 1992. Return to paper/pencil tasks, design integrated thematic units that connect learning in social studies and English or science and math, encourage the exploration of the arts, provide shop class and home economics again! Shift the focus from the data of standardized test scores to supporting the whole child through the team teaching approach. Return to the time when we encouraged cooperative learning and emphasized higher level thinking skills. I know why that diorama memory keeps moving to the forefront of my mind. That memory holds the answer to a question that has been plaguing me about how we might “fix” the educational system. We turn around, we go back, and we return to what we know catapulted our students toward success.
They say you can’t go back, but I really think we should.
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