FOUR
Exploring the Magic
As the years go by, I continue to find more and more evidence of how vital good student-teacher relationships are to studentsâ success in school. At the same time, though, Iâve found that that connection by itself is not enough. Yes, Mrs. Warnecke had cared for her students, but I had many caring teachers during my school years. Another question I started to consider in my third year of teaching was, what was the difference between those teachersâ classes and Mrs. Warneckeâs?
Teaching can be a claustrophobic proposition, regardless of whether itâs happening in a trailer, a state-of-the-art classroom, or a below-ground improvisation like my first-grade room. Here we teachers are, grown adults, but still governed by bells that tell us when to arrive, when we can leave, and when we can attend to personal needs. (I sometimes refer to my colleagues and myself as âPavlovâs Teachersâ because we respond so well to bells.) The broken-down trailer I taught in during my third year was particularly claustrophobic. It was no more than twelve feet wide by about twenty feet long. Its entire length was lined with windowsâin various states of functionalityâwhich gave a view of the parking lot, the railroad tracks on the far side, and beyond that the roofs of the little town where I was teaching. I would stand in the room, look at the bell tower of the town hall in the distance, and think, The world is out there, and Iâm in here.
One day, standing gazing out in my usual reverie, I started to think about how my students must feel. Middle and high school students have six or seven classes a day where they sit in uncomfortable desks for hours at a time. Even though many teachers work hard to engage their classes, it has to be difficult for the kids to be there. If itâs hard for adults, whoâve had so much practice at it, it must be that much harder for young people.
Yet, thinking back on my school days and to the windowless basement where I attended first grade, I remembered it as a magical placeâmuch more than four walls, rickety desks, and a blackboard. There must be, I thought, some way to recreate that feeling. And so I began that year to test some ideas for making the classroom a place where kids would want to beâa room like Mrs. Warneckeâs.
Later on, after I left the language arts classroom and became a reading resource teacher, the issue of environment became even more critical to me. I realized that if I wanted students to be successful in my class, they needed to come there willingly. After all, I would be pulling them from other classes; they might be missing basketball or band or artâsomething they loved. Further, the stigma of a remedial reading class is always a concern. So over time Iâve come up with ways to make my classroom a special place, and I guess they work: my principal, Jason Johnson, said to me once, âIâve never seen so many students beg to go to a reading class.â
I thought, Iâm trying to make it magical in here . . .
Hereâs what Iâve learned in twenty years about making the classroom a place kids want to be.
Breaking Down the Walls
To alleviate claustrophobia, I try as often as possible to get the students out of the classroom. Teachers know that learning is about discovery, and thereâs more to discover outside a school building than in it. Students have given me beautifully written descriptions of spider webs, flowers, blades of grass, cloudsâit would be difficult to find that creativity inside four walls. Last year, for example, after we took a walk on a trail in the woods behind our school, my student Savannah wrote in her journal, âThe skinny twig hung off the branch as if it were asleep.â I didnât see Savannahâs twig that day, but I can see it now.
Every year, I begin my writing instruction by taking my classes outside for an exercise in sensory writing. I tell my students that they are going to use all their senses except oneâthe sense of sight. I assign partners and loosely blindfold one student in each pair. The partners lead each other around the schoolyard as they listen to and feel everything around them. Once they are back in the classroom, they write reflections on their experiences, like this one of Brianâs, a seventh grader:
I was walking and trying to feel my way around the schoolyard. I felt the roughness of the bark on a tree, but I couldnât concentrate because I was nervous about falling or walking into the street. It made me appreciate the sense of sight even more than I already do, and it seems like concentrating on the way a piece of bark feels made me understand it in a different way.
I once taught at a school that sat beside an old cemetery. In the fall, I would take my classes out there to do gravestone rubbings so that the students could better determine what had long ago been carved into those weathered stones. Placing a piece of notebook paper against the gravestone, the students rubbed a pencil or crayon back and forth across the paper, and the names, dates, and other inscriptions magically appeared on the paper. My students were always thrilled and fascinated to see words on their papers that were illegible on the stone itself.
That cemetery had a long row of gravestones, seven in all, that appeared to be the graves of an entire family: parents and five of their children. We used these in a cross-curricular activity: after looking at the dates and doing the math to determine the childrenâs ages when they died, my students would write beautiful stories about the family and how they lived in the seventeenth century.
Iâve always found getting the students out of the building to be a wonderful motivator, but itâs certainly not an original idea. Pass by a school in the spring, and youâll see children all around, doing one activity or another in the sunshine. In my early years of teaching, I so wanted to be outside on the first warm day that I tried to be creative when thinking of activities that would match the learning goals for my class but could be done just as well out of the classroom.
Another way to escape the stuffiness of a classroom is to use the entire building whenever possible. My classes routinely do âreaderâs theatreâ presentations in the auditoriumâreading aloud the different charactersâ parts from a dramatic textâto an audience of one: me. The short walk from my classroom offers a change of scenery and loosens up the kids.
One year, after my class had turned in a particularly grueling research paper, I took them to the gym. There was only one rule. The entire class had to fit in the âjump ballâ circle in the middle of the court. Once they got there, they could talk, scream, or dance, but they had to stay within the confines of the circle. The restriction ensured that the activity would be challenging, because the students were pressed against each other like a dozen clowns trying to cram into a Volkswagen. It was funny to see these middle school kids falling out of the circle but trying like crazy to stay in, and they loved it! The entire activity took only ten minutes, including traveling to and from the gym, but when we returned we were all more focused, having had the opportunity to âbreak down our wallsâ once again, while at the same time being a little silly.
Another twist on expanding the classroom is one I began while teaching summer school. Many times during my âsummer career opportunities,â I was teaching students who had displayed a strong work ethic throughout the year but still hadnât been able to pass their standardized tests. So, because it was summer and we had to be in a classroom, I told the students that we would be bringing our summer inside with us. On the classroom wall I wrote a poem (which was a little too reminiscent of my first-grade poetry):
All of our friends are out there
in the world so wide.
So since we want some summer, too,
Weâll just bring it all inside.
Corny, I know. Still, around that poem on the wall we posted anything and everything âsummerâ that my students wanted to bring in. Some brought pictures of swimming pools and boats, some brought seashells, and others preferred to create their own artwork: drawings of flowers and summer scenes. At any time during my summer school classes, the students knew that they were allowed to go âget some summerâ by taking a break in the back of the room. Even I got frustrated sometimes and headed back there myself. I would whine loudly, âI just want to be outside,â and all the students would laugh at the crazy teacher who didnât want to spend her summer inside a classroom any more than her students did.
Walls with a Message
When I first started to reimagine what I wanted my classroom to be like, I made the most important and biggest test my own: Did I want to be there myself? If not, surely my students wouldnât. If Iâm going to be in a classroom all day, I want it to be a pleasant place to be.
Fundamentals matter, of course. Twice Iâve painted my own classroom walls. (I even showed up once in the summer to paint the halls of the school!) But some teachers go to greater lengths. Beth, a sixth-grade science teacher in my school one year, painted a mural of tropical fish that covered one entire wall of her classroom. Her students were so excited when they first saw it at Open House; they felt like the luckiest sixth graders in the building to be in that room.
When I first started to reimagine what I wanted my classroom to be like, I made the most important and biggest test my own: Did I want to be there myself? If not, surely my students wouldnât. If Iâm going to be in a classroom all day, I want it to be a pleasant place to be.
Some would probably argue that this type of physical labor is not in a teacherâs job description. But I have to say that any amount of personal attention I can give to my classroom and building makes it more meaningful to me to be there every day. And because many of my students live in deplorable situations, Iâve always wanted to ensure that they have the best possible environment when theyâre at school.
Fresh paint is only the beginning. Prefabricated borders for bulletin boards and the other classroom decorations available from teacher supply stores are well and good, if on the pricey side (clearly, someone is making a great deal of money selling these things), but they probably arenât terribly meaningful to students.
I have always remembered fondly that the decorations in Mrs. Warneckeâs room were made by herâfew companies were selling classroom supplies in 1963. She taught us how to tell time on a handmade clock she had drawn with a human face and hands, the latter affixed with brad fasteners. But after my first-year bulletin board spelling error, it was about four years into teaching before I attempted anything more artistic than âWelcome Back to School.â I used to joke that my Welcome Back message was still on the board in April!
Iâve relaxed a little since then. One type of decoration I often use is what I call âstory starters.â I cover an entire wall with pictures of some kind (it varies from year to year), and when students get stuck for writing ideas, they can look at the wall to get a jump start. For instance, every day when my students enter the room, I have them begin with a warm-up activity. To get them focused I provide a promptâa question or quotationâand the students respond in their journals. If they draw a blank, the wall is there for inspiration.
The first year I did story starters, I decided to use several posters of cute little babies that I had gathered. There were babies sitting in unrolled toilet paper, babies with food all over their faces, babies snuggling up to puppies. But there was a problem with these picturesâall the babies were white. In the back of my mind, I knew this was a problem when I hung the posters, but Open House was approaching, and I didnât want bare walls when the parents came to visit. Then I forgot about it until sometime in October, when one of my students, Brandon, asked me, âMrs. Rigsbee, why donât you have any black babies up there?â
I wanted to crawl under the floor. Iâd been thinking that I had finally gotten this teaching thing together, but Iâd blown it again. I hadnât meant to be insensitive to the majority of my students, of course; I just hadnât been able to find any posters of black babies or Hispanic babies or Asian babies. I told Brandon that, and that I would continue looking. And I did, but as I had figured, there were none to be found. So one day I went in and pulled all the posters down.
Then I explained the problem to the students and asked for their help. For weeks afterward, they brought me pictures of babiesâthemselves as babies; their brothers, cousins, nieces, and nephews as babies; their neighborsâ babies. It was a babyfest! And they loved writing their baby stories whenever they chose the story starter wall.
One year, I wanted to have a board that highlighted student poetry. So I cut out letters that read âDive into POETRY.â Then I asked Charlie, the best artist in the class, âWhat would be a cool picture to go with this?â Charlie got right to work, and the next day he came in with the cutest frog, long legs outstretched, jumping off a diving board (nicely placed on a lily pad) into a pond. After stapling Charlieâs picture to the board, I added student poetry all around as the water. That board was a turning point for me in my attempt to make a classroom for and about the students. From that point on, I stopped buying classroom decorations from stores. I now use student work and projects, and we make our own wall designs every year. And student artists get a venue for showcasing their creations.
For the last two years, I have taken a large piece of bulletin board paper, ripped from the roll so that the edges are jagged and rough, and written âReading Strategies We Useâ on it. (Iâm not an artist, so this is my idea of abstract art.) Then the students choose their own pieces of paper, also abstractly ripped, and they write strategies on them. We place all these on the wall, like a huge collage, and I point to it all year when talking about what we do when we read. Iâve also seen the students look at it while they readâitâs a reading guide and artwork, all in one. Itâs colorful and decorative (not to mention cheap), and you canât find it in a teacher store. And because itâs unique to my classroom and my students, it feels like ours, and makes us feel at home at school.
Mrs. Vail
Though it was decades ago, if I close my eyes, I can still see my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Vail. Her classroom was a big, bright frenzy of huge paint jugs, stacks of vivid paper, and cups of colorful crayons. Every day her lucky students were excited, inspired, and creating . . . truly learning with joy and love.
During one memorable Show and Tell, Camille stood before the other boys and girls and slowly opened her brown paper bag. We all gasped as she held up the butterfly wings she had worn as p...