A month ago Anne wrote a most poignant description of seeing one of they Hogs recently and how the scene in her school this next year is not what it was over past years with a new administration team. She described how the pressure against her using comprehensible input in her classroom weights very heavily on her shoulders. Here is the link to that July 15th blog post:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/07/15/anne-matava-9/
If this kind of thing can happen to a master like her, it can happen to any of us, right? I suggested, in a private email, among other things, that she just slow down more. She responded:
Of course you are right about slowing down. I also think that kids don’t want a steady diet of bizarre details. If the story is going to be about them, they want some accuracy. Case in point, and I know I told you this story: I had a great first-year class last year, just awesome kids, and two of them were hunting/fishing/black-T-shirt-wearing boys. Early on, in my version of Circling with Balls, I brought up that one of them fishes. When I asked the class where does he fish, each of the boys contributed an idea. Both suggested local fishing holes. When I instead chose the toilet or the sink or whatever, I watched the light go out of their eyes. Now, the light brightened in the eyes of the rest of the class! The non-fishing kids in the class were now engaged. It’s hard to explain. But I can’t get rid of the image in my mind of those boys shutting down, disappointed, not heard.
I think I follow my own agenda too much, my own sense of what is funny. I take their ideas, to be sure, but I take the ones I like the best. It’s a matter of tuning in more closely to them. If only there were a cohesive “them”, a group consciousness. Last year I often felt that a story would go in a direction that pleased some of them, and would turn the rest of them off.