working through struggle

I seem to have lost my last blog post. it's okay. writing it and thinking through the issues has already made an impact in my classroom.
i was thinking about my 1st period 3U's. They're a solid bunch of kids academically- smart and responsible. They're finding this composition thing more difficult than the other class. I've speculated before that it's because they're too obedient. They've learned how to play school too well, so when we do this dramatic shift where they're the ones who have to determine what will work in an essay and what won't, they get paralyzed.

I'm not worried about their ability to eventually get it. i know this takes time. but in the meantime, their marks are in the 70s, and that's going to cause problems at home (for some, it could mean physical violence)- but it's also causing them personally a great deal of internal empotional and psychological stress.
so, i *am* worried about how to keep their spirits up along the journey.

and this thought took me back to ratchet and clank and the sheepinator, an idea which i never did fully post here, because before i could get to it, i found that many people have been thinking about this stuff. so, I've got some reading to do. but my basic point is that in a video game, working through challenges is the point. you don't stop playing once it gets hard. what i'm interested in is the ways that video games motivate you to push beyond the limits of of your skills. in the ratchet and clank games, among other things, they use innovaive and playful weapons as the carrot. i will work my ass off trying to get enough bolts to buy a crazy little weapon called the sheepinator that, as you might have guessed, turns my enemies into fluffy little sheep. it isn't even very effective (at first). only works on small creatures. yet the rewards of pleasure and delight are enough.

i don't think the rewards of writing well are pleasurable enough to motivate my students through the real struggles of thinking and writing. and i still haven't figured out a way to create authentic publishing venues for 50 students without going totally insane with the work involved (and blogs are not a viable option, for reasons too painful to get into here). it's the logistics of the thing that keeps getting in my way.

so i've been thinking about ways to create a meaningful narrative around their struggle. the best i could come up with was the "once more unto the breach" speech from Henry V. i gave them a copy of the speech, with some of the most invigorating words highlighted and bolded (i trusted that most of them could understand the idea of imitating the action of a tiger), gave them a bit of the historical background, (allowing for some of shakespeare's mythologization, but quoting the most impressive yet historically probably odds of the battle), and then read the speech to them. at the end, i had them raise their arms and cry "For harry, england and st. george!" along with me a couple of times, and i think i'll make this a regular thing we do. i want them to see themselves as soldiers in a battle. i want to acknowledge that in order to face uncertainty, it takes courage- because you're risking failure. if they can see themselves as soldiers in a battle, maybe they'll be able to rally their courage.

will it help? we'll see. they seemed to find it fun yesterday. they've started working on their independent study project, where they write a persuasive essay on a topic of their own choosing. the paper involves a lot of working through obstacles. most of them, as soon as they hit a bump, ask if they can change their topic. this is what i'm talking about- as soon as they confront a struggle, they think that they're doing something wrong. struggle in learning is to be avoided, not worked through. so the soldier metaphor will be especially helpful here.

a related issue came up in an unrelated class discussion. we had discussed the different kinds of strength of the characters in the colour purple, saving celie for last, because her strengths initially are more difficult to see. so yesterday we were discussing celie and one of my students was really distressed, because she felt that it was wrong to attribute to celie the strengths that she had gained from the women in her life. since they weren't her strengths to start with, they weren't properly her strengths.

to me, this represents the whole problem in a nut-shell- this is the myth of autonomy. you're either smart or stupid. you either know it or you don't. if you don't have it on your own, it's not yours. people do well in school because they are smart. struggles can't be overcome, so avoid them.