Dear Parents,
Welcome to what I hope will be an exciting year of learning,
discovery and growth for your children. Your students will write across many
different genres this year—memoir, short fiction, poetry, analytical essays,
op-eds, speeches, and satire. They will read novels and non-fiction in book
groups and with the whole class. They will engage in discussions that will
challenge their ways of thinking about the world and open their minds to new
perspectives. And, in addition to all of this, I hope to foster your children’s
growth into mature, responsible, resourceful, self-aware high school students.
Eighth grade is a tricky year because students are still in
middle school (although many of them already think and behave like high
schoolers) and have a lot of middle school learning to do, yet we are already
preparing them for the higher academic expectations of high school. Thus, there
is a tension for many teachers and parents between giving children the
structure and support of middle school—plenty of scaffolding, hand-holding
through each step of projects, and communication between teachers and parents
when students receive disappointing or surprising grades—and a taste of the new
freedom and responsibility of high school, where students will be expected to
advocate for themselves and take responsibility for their own grades and
behavior. Thus, I believe that it is important for students to begin the
growing up process of advocating for themselves, accepting full responsibility
for their learning and feeling the natural consequences of their choices in eighth
grade. It is important preparation for high school and the world beyond.
I see us (teachers and parents) as one team in the endeavor
of helping your children successfully reach adulthood; it truly does take a
village to raise a child. I feel great love and compassion for all my students,
and part of this means accepting them and their imperfections, while
simultaneously helping them to learn from their mistakes. No, your children are
not perfect, because nobody is, but I don’t expect them to be. We all have days
when we’re not at the top of our game, when we feel lazy, when we want to take
the easy way out, and why shouldn’t kids, especially 13 year olds be the same?
I will not be surprised when students are tardy to class, nor will I hold their
excessive socialization against them. I will not fault my students for being 8th
graders and engaging in eighth grader-ish behavior. Yet, my goal is to help
them develop into their best selves over the course of the year, and part of
that necessarily means holding them accountable for their actions and allowing
them to feel the natural consequences.
I’d like to begin with an example from my own high school experience.
As a student, I myself was conscientious and dedicated, yet as many of my own
students do, I saw school as a place to catch up with my friends as well as to
learn, and my attention had a tendency to drift during lectures. Once, in high
school, I did not listen carefully to the directions for a quiz, and as a
result, I failed it. The teacher had apparently instructed us to fully write
out the words “true” or “false” as responses, not “T” or “F” as I had done. I
can imagine now she’d encountered some difficulty with students who wrote
indistinguishable letters and would argue that what looked like a “T” was in
fact an “F” or vice versa. In any case, I felt embarrassed and angry because
had I not made that mistake, I would have received a score of 100% on the test.
However, I didn’t push the teacher. Was it fair, I ask myself now? Maybe not, I
had certainly demonstrated my own knowledge, although I did break the cardinal
rule of listening closely to directions. However, I also did not advocate for
myself, or make a case for why I deserved those points, and my silence cost me
the grade I thought I deserved. Would I ever make those same mistakes again?
No. I never did.
I learned several important lessons in a fairly innocuous
way that day in high school. I learned to pay attention in class, I learned to
accept responsibility for my faults and mistakes, and I learned to be
resilient—that one poor mark would not significantly affect my overall grade.
Thus, I’d like to suggest the same to you as parents. Please allow your
students to make mistakes and learn from them. Sometimes, the growth and
lessons learned from a poor performance or score can be worth more than the few
points that assignment is worth to one’s overall grade. If your children work
consistently and strive to do their best overall, a few blips or screw-ups will
not affect their grades, and it can be worthwhile for students to see clearly
how these choices they make do affect their performance.
This knowledge, the knowledge that the locus of control is
internal not external, that students have the muscle to earn their own grades
is empowering. In How Children Succeed, Paul Tough,
acclaimed author of several articles on character and parenting for The New Yorker and New York Times Magazine, argues that children need adversity—the
chance to fall down and get back up without parents’ help. This knowledge, that
they have the power, the skills and ability to manage their own lives is
essential. As one coach quoted by Tough says, “her job was not to prevent [her
students] from failing; it was to teach them how to learn from each failure,
how to stare at their failures with unblinking honesty, and how to confront
exactly why they had messed up. If they could do that, she believed, they would
do better the next time” (Tough 183).
8th graders need middle school-sized adversity; it prepares
them, helps them develop resilience, for the larger challenges ahead in life.
Indeed, this issue to me, is not just personal. It’s not
just about helping your children achieve their personal best, although I do
want that for them individually. This is an issue of social justice. When I
look out into the bright eyes of my students, I know that I am looking at the
future leaders of our country. I want them to be better leaders than the models
I’ve had. I wish for leaders who are humble and sensitive. Who have a strong
sense of integrity and responsibility to their constituents—who are responsible
and follow through on their promises, who are unselfish and strive to fulfill
the noble goals of the Declaration of Independence or Martin Luther King, Jr.’s
“I Have a Dream” speech, visions that require continuous struggle. I believe
that the feedback that students get from their their teachers, and their
parents grooms them for the important roles they will later play in our society
and cultivates their sense of accountability and responsibility for their
actions.
The challenge for me, as a teacher at Mill Valley Middle
School is to ensure that my students in turn are challenged. Often, though that
challenge comes in the form of discomfort, or maybe even failure. In How Children Succeed, Tough studies the
situation at Riverdale Country School, an elite private school in New York
City. Dominic Randolph, the head of the school says, “The idea of building grit
and building self-control is that you get through failure, and in most highly
academic environments in the United States, no one fails at anything” (Tough
85-86). I tell my students that if they’re learning, they may be experiencing a
feeling of “disequilibrium”—the discomfort and unsettling feeling when a task
or concept is foreign and uncomfortable. This feeling arises when students find
themselves in what Vygotsky, an important educational theorist refers to as the
“zone of proximal development,” a space where their thinking is simultaneously
supported and gently pushed forward. In fact, at Riverdale school, teachers
explain that many parents, “while pushing their children to excel,
inadvertently shield them from exactly the kind of experience that can lead to
character growth… ‘Our kids don’t put up with a lot of suffering…. They’re
protected against it quite a bit… We try to talk to parents about having to
sort of make it okay for there to be challenge, because that’s where learning
happens” (Tough 84). I see my role
as teacher as your partner, to work with you and ensure that your children are
challenged.
On a day to day basis, I strive to challenge my students
academically, but sometimes I have to challenge them personally, ie. with
discipline or natural consequences for behaviors in class. Teenagers test limits;
risk-taking and exploration are an important part of adolescent development. I
firmly believe though, that when kids do take risks, they unconsciously desire
limits. They need the adults in their lives to act as a rock to come up
against. Firmness, limits, enforcement of rules and natural consequences for
breaking them provide kids with a sense of security and structure that is
reassuring and supportive. These limits and consequences are also essential to
the maintenance of a classroom environment that is safe, respectful and
productive for all students to learn. Sometimes, the needs or behaviors of individual
students may conflict with the group’s learning goal, and it is at this point
where I may sometimes institute non-punitive consequences for students’
behavior. Please be assured that I take the utmost care to maintain all
students’ self-respect and dignity in my classroom in these instances, and that
I will communicate with you if any serious discipline issues arise with your
child. I’d like to request that as my teammates, you also support me in this endeavor.
Here are some ways I try to encourage accountability and
self-awareness in my classroom, and that you can help, too:
1) Phrase compliments in terms of the work or effort
students put into something, rather than about their aptitude or skills. This
give students an internal locus of control—how hard they worked, rather than
external—their intelligence, which they have no power over. Rather than saying,
“This essay is so strong because you’re a really good writer,” say something
like, “This essay is so strong because you put a lot of attention to detail in
your revisions.”
2) Encourage students to track their own grades and scores
on assignments. This way, students can begin to understand how test scores or
homework assignments add up to affect their overall grade.
3) When students earn a grade that they are unhappy about,
encourage them to read the teacher’s comments and reflect on why they earned
this particular grade, and what they could have done differently. If students
are unsure, please tell them to come talk with me about it. You might even
email me with a heads up that your student would like to speak with me, but it
is important for them to do the work of setting up the meeting themselves.
4) Engage in conversations with your son or daughter about
what he or she is learning and is excited about at school. Ask him or her about
classroom discussions, what she’s reading, or what her writing goals are. Try
to make the focus more on the intrinsic rewards of learning and knowledge
rather than the extrinsic and more fleeting rewards of points or grades.
5) Treat minor set-backs for what they are, and don’t
over-amplify the gravity of a missed homework assignment or a tardy. Allow
students to feel the consequences of their actions, and perhaps the
consequences given by the school or yourself, and then move on. We want to
prepare students to handle true adversity, to push through huge challenges when
the going gets tough. What does it teach our students if a lunch-time detention
is treated as a minor catastrophe? Children are resilient; the natural
inclination is to learn from their mistakes and not dwell on the past. Rest
assured that I do not hold grudges against students for their misbehavior,
either. Let’s get out of their way this year to allow them to learn and grow as
they’re ready and eager to do.
Thank you for your thoughtful attention and consideration of
my educational disciplinary philosophy. I am excited to learn and grow with you
and your students this year!
Sincerely,
Annie Sterling
