Greylcok Plays: More than a single story...

Student Art I'd Love to Own

I've been thinking about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story a lot lately: So about a month ago I wrote about TED talk that I had come to appreciate about the dangers of a single story: History May Not Repeat Itself... March 8, 2015. As I thought about it more and more, I decided to assign watching this talk to my students and get their input. Boy, do I love reading my students' ideas when they have something to say. Here is one of the many lines that resonated with me:

If someone wanted to know about me, and only asked someone who barely knew me, or asked someone who don't like me, they would get the wrong information and make that person think poorly of me. If they asked someone who knew me well or loved me, they would get a completely different story and hopefully their opinion of me or my story would be a good one.

Some Music Enters into my focus about story: I attended a student concert during a "directed study" block last week. It was glorious: I watched a math teacher and a newspaper editor become an Irish influenced folk duo. I listened as cross country athletes edged into pop/garage rock, I reveled in the student organized and hosted event that is quickly becoming tradition in my school. I heard one song after another thinking to myself, "Our students are so cool!"

It's a trap: While I listened to the concert, thinking how talented these kids were, wondering when and how they had tome to develop even more talents that I had not known about, I had a worry. My worry stemmed from how often I had tried to connect to my students over the years by getting to know them beyond their abilities in social studies class... but I had fallen into a trap. The girl who loves horses, the kid who lives to play D&D, the football player who turns heads with his abilities, the artist who makes me want to buy student art. Each of these kids who I had connected with, who accepted me in because I had taken an interest, had sadly become students with two stories; social studies, and their special thing. Although I made the correct first step to know more about my students than what they shared academically, I stopped once I found one passion. I had replaced a single story with another single story.

I have a lot of work ahead of me I think: The solution is simple, I think. What if I make my class more personal? What if the questions we ask both address the "content" and the "personal relevance"? Maybe I get to see more and learn more while still remaining the teacher...