Yeah, so it was a radio show and then a television show and then a show hosted by a disgraced Philadelphia comedian. Today, though, I was thinking about the kinds of comments students start to make when the work begins to get difficult.  There’s always a grace period, a honeymoon period, a fun “hey this project is cool” period at the start of a project.  As Dr. Malcolm notes,

“Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and um, screaming.”

Today was one of those days when you felt the tension of the work becoming real and difficult.  I wrote these on the board as I heard them and on random scraps of paper.

“I don’t like words.”
“I know, I know, but that’s hard.”
“But I’d have to do that after school!”
“I’m not doing that.”
“I know I should, but that’s hard.”
“That’s like extra work.”

It’s a measure of my growth as a teacher that I can hear some of these statements and not lose my mind.  Some of these are attempts to push buttons and I can feel them as such (and ignore them).  Some of them, though, are real statements of frustration as students realize that this is past the worksheet, past answering the odd problems, and past just pleasing the teacher.

And it’s real. Any work that’s not just following a recipe or a repetitive task creates the same angst.

Part of the way we’re trying to solve this problem is by orienting the work towards the outside world.  I wrote papers in high school because my teacher told me to and because if I didn’t, I’d get a bad grade.   You can’t eliminate this part of school.  The difference for us is that if we’ve made the project as authentic as possible, as focused on the real world as possible, then the student feels (or hopefully feels) the pull of doing something that actually matters.   For this project, if we do it right, they will have begun a catalog of community organizations that ninth and tenth graders can read about and formulate possible projects.  We’ve made clear that their work will be shared with the entire school as well as the organizations they’re writing about.  If successful, they have something they’ve made, something that might make the school and maybe even the world a bit better.