The Day I made a Podium from a Box

I have days where I feel as if I've reached my students. Where the fog and mist of ignorance are cleared away and my students leave my room more educated, more alive -- better human beings for having known me.

And then I have days where I stare in the mirror at myself and wonder what the heck I'm doing. Problems that have no immediate solutions present themselves. And these aren't problems like, "Should we have pork or salmon for dinner tonight?" They're problems that are reminiscent of, "We're in a car hurtling downhill toward the edge of a cliff, the brakes are shot, and the doors are stuck. What do we do?" They're moral dilemmas.

Today was a day that feels an awful lot like the latter, even if somewhere in the distance I look back on it and it turns out to have been the former. I desperately wanted to move forward with my Thursday and Wednesday work groups. Desperately. They need to complete (start in the case of Wednesday, re-start in the case of Thursday) their outline presentations on Chapter Four. I gave Thursday more time today to organize their presentations in groups (though admittedly this varies greatly from what I did with the still-surging-ahead Tuesday group).

Within ten minutes, the class was in their groups and each group was miles from doing what I had asked. I imposed silence so that people could concentrate. Many a teacher can sympathize with the ironically named Simon & Garfunkle tune, "The Sound of Silence," for they know that silence can speak volumes. In this silence I saw students giving up after roughly 30 seconds and staring into some unseen distance. I had students "secretly" whispering to each other about something other than Celtic migration patterns. And I had some students who must have eye problems because if they can't see without putting their faces on the page while snoring, well... you get the picture.

I scratched my head for a moment and one of my students came to my aid. "Mr. Cochran, I don't understand this." Me: "Understand what?" Student: "This." And she indicated to the page and a half she was responsible for reading in her group. I pointed out, to help break her disillusionment with herself, that the passage was in English. She giggled as I knew she would, and I brought her back by asking, "What, specifically, don't you understand? Are you reading it paragraph by paragraph as I suggested?" I spent some time leading her through it, but suffice it to say, the girl had no reading comprehension whatsoever. It wasn't that the text bored her or that she felt it dry (though what she did understand, she did pronounce "boring"), it was that she honestly did not understand most of the words on the page and she could not form coherent ideas from the text.

I quickly discovered that she was not an exception (as I had secretly suspected for sometime). I've been kidding myself for sometime now about my students' reading abilities. I had everyone put their desks back where they belong and I had them turn to the first page of the chapter and we read the first paragraph quietly. After they were done, I had the students ask what various words meant -- bearing in mind that I told them before they started reading to pay attention to the words around words they did not understand so that the context might clue them in.

Commerce. Substantial. Evoke. Narrow. Phenomenon. Decisive. Mediterranean. "Carthago, as the city was known to the Romans." These, among many smaller and less awe-inspiring words & phrases, landed on the radars of every one of my students. Whenever a word was brought forward, I always asked the class what the word meant. With few exceptions (narrow was one of them) no one knew what the words meant. Couldn't even make a guess as to what the word meant. Context meant nothing.

I was reminded by one of my students of my own 9th grade days by the word, "Analogous," because I remember the day in 9th Grade Biology that I learned that word. But substantial? Commerce? I may be kidding myself, or perhaps expecting too much, but are these words really that... well, I suppose I just don't know.

I grew tired of holding my textbook near the end of the Thursday work group's period and I grabbed some boxes from my back closet and built a make shift podium that came to just above my waist. It was shaky, but it held the textbook for me. I kept it in place for the fourth period (Wednesday Work Group) so that I could do the same activity with them. And the results were comparable with Thursday, though with less enthusiasm.

I feel a great deal at the moment like my students are that podium made out of boxes. They're shaky at best, I have to watch them to make sure they don't fall, and the odds of them being able to support the weight & breadth of the high school history textbook are fairly slim. I mean, sure, they might pull it off, but it's a triumph if they do, not the natural result that should be expected. The odds of them being able to support the standard college text & work load are not quite as good as all that. If "The Earth and Its Peoples" is too much, what will "The Critique of Pure Reason" and "Physics: An Introduction" and "Global Finance" do to them? For that matter, what will the tenth grade do to them?

How do I turn the shaky boxes into solid oak finish? And can I? Will I? And, God help me, what happens if I don't?