Frank Thoms, Teacher in the Rye

~Girls are ones to show boys that they aren’t sissy and wear dresses all the time, that’s the girl I like to be, ones who don’t mind bugs or worms, rough, sporty, full of energy. Doesn’t mind getting filthy dirty in the mud. Girls are the ones who show “boys” that they aren’t “sissy.”

~Girls are the nicest thing that happen to people. Even when they’re sitting in mud, throwing a tantrum, or writing on walls with lipstick, they can still avoid a spanking with one innocent look. A girl can be sweeter (or nastier) than anyone else in the world. Not all girls are alike. BUT ALL girls are nicer than boys.

From ‘boys’:

~In the summer boys go out to dig worms and grubs and go fishing, but the girls stay and play with dolls, stare out the window, but others come out and play ball with the boys, ride bicycles and play hopscotch.”

~I like being a boy because I like cars, motorcycles, guns, sports like football, soccer, tennis. Girls like to play dolls, hopscotch, jumprope and draw horses. They shave their legs and stay in the bathroom for 30 minutes at a time. When girls take a shower, they take 45 minutes and come out looking like a just-cooked lobster.

And a curious parody from a girl:

~Girls are, from the beginning, quite passive on the whole…I observingly came upon the fact that most girls are quite good time-wasters and that the rest are bad workers.

~Boys are, from the beginning, quite passive on the whole…I observingly came upon the fact that most boys are quite good time-wasters and that the rest are bad workers.

Imagine (though difficult perhaps), today’s middle school classrooms where the focus is on who kids are, what they care about, what they like and don’t. They become front and center, rather than the textbooks, lectures, and teacher talks. Instead, children making choices predominates.

But how would today’s digitally driven kids respond to such an approach? Would it free them (temporarily perhaps) from the pull of their screens? Would they be able to stay engaged and persist from a draft to a final copy?

Face-to-face engagements have been our modus operandi for as far back as we can know. Do we want to keep this part of us front and center? Or will face to face become relegated to the back of the room, allowing the pull of digital dominance to stay in the driver’s seat, its algorithms luring students and perhaps controlling them?

Providing choice in supportive settings would be a radical maneuver for most classrooms. What if inviting students to choose what they want to write about, write at their own pace as real writers do, and have their writing become a center of the classroom? How would students feel? How would they respond? What would they learn? What would teachers learn about them?

Try it in your classroom, if you can and are willing. And if you’re not a teacher, encourage teachers to offer such a possibility. Who knows, they might be surprised.