As a newer teacher, I fell into the same trap each week. I would work constantly, and then justify it to my friends, family, partner, and self by saying that Yes, this week is crazy, but next week will be better. And when the next week came around, I would find myself once again working too much and repeating the promise that the following week will be better for real this time.
Eventually, those in my life told me that I had to stop. Or more accurately, that I either had to stop working so much or stop saying that the following week would be better because the combination of the two was driving them all batty.
This loop I found myself in during the school year is a large part of why I started writing about education. I knew that I needed to stop pretending that the workload would just magically get better, and writing has always been a way for me to bring clarity to the problems I face.
Jump to today, and thanks in part to that writing, I’m in a far better place, both in terms of having a more sustainable workload and being clear-eyed about how busy my weeks will or won’t be. There is however one glaring exception that I will admit to and (if you noticed my three week absence from the newsletter) just fell prey to again: The start of the school year. Somehow every mid-August, I still manage to convince myself that the start of the year won’t be so overwhelming and exhausting this time. I likely do this because if I remembered what was coming with true clarity, I would probably spend most of early August curled into a tight ball.
The problem with the start of the year is that there is only so much one can prepare for in advance. I come into the year with my lessons and scopes and sequences planned, but the second that first bell rings, I suddenly find myself needing to do a whole host of time-sensitive things: establish my credibility and build connections with each of the 33–35 students in my five sections; remember all of their names and accommodations; rebuild my five class cultures—which were so lovely last year!—from scratch; and chop away at the relentless start-of-year Google forms and trainings and items that suddenly crowd my to-do list.
I wish, dear reader, that I had a magic wand that would make all of these early tasks simpler and less overwhelming for me and for you. But the truth is that while the whole school year should not be a series of impossibly busy weeks, there might be only so much that can be done to mitigate the start-of-school crush.
So in lieu of a magic wand, I thought I would instead offer a series of lesson ideas over the next few weeks that, while not the product of a magical wand, are a bit magical for me when it comes to accomplishing the tasks we face in these early weeks, namely, building credibility, establishing connections, and cultivating strong class cultures. These lessons are also practical examples of how I navigate the challenge I discussed in my last post: Figuring out how to start the year with basics in a way that doesn’t feel basic (and instead feels interesting and deep). My first one is how I introduce the notion of themes to my classes, and it is called “Theme Party.”
Theme Party
In my early years, my students often struggled to create meaningful thesis statements for their essays. The most common issue was that so many “arguments” were so obvious and boilerplate that they weren’t really arguable at all. Think something like “Of Mice and Men shows that inequality is bad” or “The House on Mango Street is about the difficulties of growing up.”
For many years I just assumed that the majority of freshmen and sophomores were simply too concrete to formulate deep, personal thesis statements. Eventually though, I began to understand that there might be another issue impeding the work of these young essayists. In a policy paper from last month, Doug Lemov captures the potential issue well:
When applied to reading, the limits of working memory are hugely important. If recognizing words on the page is anything but instant, it will require conscious thought, and that thinking will crowd out more advanced cognitive activities that are required to understand text. When you cannot read words effortlessly, your ability to understand, think about, and remember what you have read is severely limited.
Lemov’s paper is about reading fluency, but the same dynamic applies to writing, maybe even more so. If students need to focus their conscious thought on the basic tasks that go into writing—from spelling to sentence structure to remembering how to format a quote—they likely won’t have the cognitive space needed to figure out deep, personal, and strong thesis statements.
This means that at this point in the year, my job is to help students to build fluency in all the core components of reading and writing. Once students are fluent and automatic in those skills, they will be able to focus their cognitive resources on other tasks like crafting deep thesis statements later in the semester.
Of course, like I discussed last week, just because we are building the basics, doesn’t mean our classes should feel basic. Early on we are building culture and credibility and engagement, so the content of our classes needs to be deep and interesting right away—even as we are quietly building core skills.
The theme party is a perfect example of how I seek to do that. Here is the idea: I introduce what a theme is and I ask the students why art almost universally has themes. This conversation inevitably turns to the fact that we want even our most frivolous entertainment and art to have a point.
We talk next about how a large part of high school, college, and the wider world—personally and professionally—will be about unearthing and exploring the meaning of things. I also make sure to mention that since everyone has a unique perspective, if they dig deep enough, they will also find unique meaning in art.
I then divide the class into teams and we have a “theme party” where I show them visual forms of art: paintings and woodblocks (see below), music videos, short videos, etc. Each team is then asked to share the most interesting, unique theme they can, and we discuss and debate them, with the “winning” team (as determined by me, their benevolent dictator) getting something small, like candy or donuts.
The key to this activity is that since there is no text yet, students can focus all of their cognitive energy on building fluency with the skill of unique theme identification. At the same time, the opening conversation about why theme matters also give the students the bigger, more expansive picture for why we are learning this skill and how they will use it going forward.
I eventually repeat this competition with short stories and poems (having them dig into potential themes of Jabberwocky in particular is a favorite of mine), with the goal being that they have built enough fluency with the skill of identifying intriguing, personal themes that when they are asked to do it in an essay, it won’t be a particularly big cognitive lift for them!
Thanks for reading, and yours in teaching,
Matt
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