What Students Need in the Restructured High School
What are adolescents seeking to accomplish in high school? Yearbooks offer hints.
There's a cartoon I use in my classes these days that speaks to the apparent disconnect between adult and student purposes for school. The eager parent quizzes her teenage daughter about her first day back to high school. The daughter proceeds to describe the latest developments in the dating status and changed physical appearance of her friends. When the mother asks specifically about her daughter's academic subjects, the girl uses her classes to situate the times during the school day when she first observed these social developments in her peers. In my work as a middle and high school teacher and principal, I often marveled at the enthusiasm and dedication that teachers displayed as they immersed students in academic content. Over the years, I have been privileged to observe truly creative, engaging lessons developed by colleagues and now student-teachers, and sometimes, as a teacher, managed to design such lessons of my own. In my hundreds of middle and high school classroom observations, announced and unexpected, I have seen my share of engaged, enthusiastic students intent on mastering academic content. But more often than not, I have observed students, even the many academically able ones, as only peripherally engaged in the learning process, if not sleeping, writing notes or doodling, grooming themselves, whispering with others about anything but the topic at hand, or simply staring into space.
My puzzlement about this discrepancy between the adult emphasis on academics and the often-apparent different agenda of the students they serve increased as I watched my own two children navigate high school. Lengthy, gossipy letters, obviously passed back and forth between my daughter and her friends during class and adroitly folded into those little packages that only teenage girls can create, tumbled out of a backpack with my daughter's Advanced Placement English notes. Endless, multiple phone calls solidified plans for summer meetings of the yearbook staff, but never occurred as a way to untangle geometry or calculus homework problems. A day off that might have been used for sleeping late, shopping, or catching up on favorite soaps was spent with other members of the student government association painting all the school's exterior doors purple, the school color.
How did an adolescent who could not remember to make her bed or feed the fish manage to remember the birthdays of all the friends she sat with every day at lunch, providing each with a home-baked and decorated cake on the appointed days, even as she forgot her Spanish homework? How did a boy who regularly accumulated four "lates per quarter" (the legal limit before detention) during his four years of high school and routinely slept past noon on weekends, cheerfully get up without fuss or reminders to be at work by 8 a.m. on Saturdays...
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