Caring is easy. Keeping students engaged and operating at full capacity over a two-hour block is difficult. Serving every student the highly specific smoothie of success and failure — just enough success to encourage them, just enough failure to challenge them — is difficult. —Dan Meyer —Career Crisis #2 (of 2) (DY/DAN)
A response to the movie Freedom Writers, which seems to glorify one part of the job and ignore the other.
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Glad to hear from you. Your article has been on my "to do" list for far too long... today was our last day of classes before spring break, and I hope finally to be able to follow up as I have promised!
Dennis:
I was quite impressed with Freedom Writers. I am currently reading the teacher's newly released biographical account of her decade-long pedagogical journey. I agree that there has to be balance between skills-development in a NCLB test-driven educational environment and the creative, emotional (brain-based) learning that Damasio and Ramachandran are researching here in California. You do a good job of reaching this equilibrium in your classes judging by your blogs.
However, since not every teacher is Dennis Jerz or Erin Gruwell (Freedom Writers), there must be a way of getting the class to work as a team to achieve their goals. Blogging, wikis, journaling like Gruwell did, cooperative learning all seem like ways to get people to synchronize their efforts and start to helping each other think critically and reflecting on their work. Since, there is a limit to the resources available at many public high schools as I can tell you from experience, the teacher has to reach disenchanted minds somehow to get any coherent response. Then there is the chance for learning to occur as students make new (neuronal) connections for themselves and reconstruct the social context to try to get past prejudices and cultural misconceptions.
If we ever get the chance to work together, I hope to learn from your model how we can encourage other teachers to use technology and composition practices to motivate students. Learning is a lifelong endeavor for most of us.