What's the "Line" of Your School Year?

a quick, timely reflection designed for students and teachers alike

Particularly in high schools around the country, April can be a month that oscillates between drudgery and distraction.

Spring Break is over, as are many of the days-off of the previous months. “Testing season” is in full force, too, and in many classes it can feel like the norms have been firmly established for students and teachers to “go through the motions” to get across the school year’s finish line.

(Note: the many classrooms that literally have a “how many days of class left” tracker on the whiteboard.)

Contrast that, though, against prom and end-of-year field trips and spring-time athletic events and the ever-drifting eye towards both graduation and summer, and there is a paradoxical reinforcing going on, I think: teachers lean on the “drudgery” routines because of all the distractions and students seek out the distractions to escape the aforementioned drudgery. (Or maybe, sometimes, vice versa?)

Needless to say, it is a lot for teachers and students alike, and it’s exhausting.

This is why I took a brief moment in class the other day with my sophomores to ask them to grab a square sticky note mid-lesson and fill out the following:

After several expectedly whined, “this isn’t math class, Mr. Luther,” we moved into a three-step exercise with this sticky note that, in total, took fewer than five minutes:

1. Students created a line that showed “how things have been going” for them as a student since the start of the year. They were given the option of focusing 100% on their “school self” or taking outside-of-school aspects into consideration, too. (More on this below.)

2. Students chose a point on the line that they believed was important, marking it with a star and jotting down a brief reason why. As you’ll see below, the “choice” students made here varied widely—with some choosing the moment that improved the trajectory and others the moment that marked the descent.

3. Students explained to multiple classmates what their line looked like and what moment was important and why. They did this on the way to the back of the room, too, giving them a chance to chat with who they wanted to chat with while making their way back to the “collective board” of sticky notes, which ended up looking like this:

So of course, my response as a teacher? To take a picture almost immediately and then toss it on the Google Slide presentation for the entire class to look at and consider collectively.

My message to them, though? Gratitude.

Gratitude for reminding me that my vantage point as a just one of their teachers is inherently limited, as I had assumed there would be far more positive trajectories based on just what I was seeing as far as their growth and community in our English classes. As you see above, that was decidedly not the case—with a potpourri of different starting points and end points and roller coasters in between.

No matter how well things were going in our room in my eyes, in every desk sat a different line, and that observation was what I was grateful for in my students.

So I told them as much.

It’s so easy as a teacher to privilege your own perspective and assume that you understand much more than you actually do—and I was very transparent about this mistaken “assuming” with each of my classes at the end of this activity.

We took it another step further, too, in offering several follow-up questions to reflect upon: 1) is there is a major difference between your ‘in-school” line and “out-of-school” line? 2) how does this line compare to the line of previous school years? and 3) how much of your “line” is within your control?

Watching students reflect while weaving around the desks, I considered my own answers to these questions—and how other teachers around me might answer them, too.

More than anything, though, I felt very convicted that these were very important reflections to consider for everyone in education at this drudgery-versus-distractions point in the year—for teachers in our classrooms, for administrators with the teachers you’re supporting, and for pretty much everyone else, too, I’d argue.

So I’ll end this brief post with that essential question:

What is the “line” of your school year so far?

---

Also, I do recognize that it’s been a bit since I’ve posted on here—both Jim and I have been sidelined by our own versions of Spring-itis with obligations and stacks of essays getting in the way of podcasting as much as we’d like to.

That said, I have had the opportunity to share some thoughts on education on different platforms lately, which I encourage you to check out if you’re interested!

1. I wrote about the “classroom culture wall”—a staple of our room for many years now!—for Edutopia last month.

2. Then recently I collaborated with Teacher2Teacher for a broader piece about the different systems around classroom values in our room.

Of course, I’ll keep writing here more frequently than anywhere else! But it has been fun broadening out to different communities and perspectives, and please don’t hesitate to let both Jim and I know how we can continue to evolve The Broken Copier to be the best resource and community of education thinking that it can be for this moment!

Take care, and good luck with your own teeter-tottering of distraction and drudgery in your own space as you continue your “line” forward, hopefully in a positive trajectory as this school year comes to an end.

—Marcus