A repost from 2010:
We were talking about how important it is for us to understand that we don’t have to get our students to learn. I would like to expand on that thought just a bit. The deal is, that when we as the teacher have a need, visible or hidden, that our students learn certain material, the students can smell that need, and that affects the entire dynamic of the classroom, manifesting as a kind of suck.
The kids feel our need that they learn a certain thing. Some, when they sense it, choose to respond in open heart and kindness by learning what we ask them to learn, without giving it much thought. Others do it, but unwillingly, always with some kind of (often verbal) complaining.
There are others, however, the ones who don’t like having their attention forced in a certain direction by anyone (a natural human tendency), who, when they smell the smell and sense the suck, just say no to it. The very fact that we need them to learn it turns them off – end of discussion.
A main reason for this smell, this suck, this need, is standardized testing, which makes teachers smelly and sucky. It makes teachers connect what is normally a free and easy process in human beings – learning things – and say to our students such preposterous things as “this is going to be on the test in the spring and if you don’t learn it bad things will happen.” It destroys what teaching is, and replaces it with a false suck kind of teaching.
Now, we are climbing the high mountain back to real teaching. It is not easy, is it? We have countless teachers hissing at us from the safety of their classrooms, and even the kinder ones, the ones with open hearts, think that, on some level, we in TPRS are off our rockers.
Actually, being off one’s rocker is not a bad thing, if you think about it. It means that you aren’t making sucking noises with your false textbook-resembling teeth. I hope to stay off my rocker for some time! Luckily, what Blaine and Joe Neilson have invented for us guarantees me that.
C’mon! It isn’t enough of a reason in a kid’s minds to learn something just because their teacher tells them that they have to learn it for some test. That is especially true in the light of the current technological revolution in social networking and internet access to knowledge. Kids need to know that they are part of a social web before they want to say something in it.
Some kids actually want to be honestly interested in something before giving their minds over to it. If that isn’t an oddity! They want their own interest, their own social and intellectual reality, to drive their instruction, not some need emanating from some teacher.
There’s that word interest – when the CI that we deliver to our kids in TPRS is interesting and meaningful and fun and compelling and personalized and easy to understand, well, then we are out of the smell and suck zone. How nice!
When I used traditional methods, the suck factor in my daily professional life was about a 9. Now, it’s about a 2, maybe a 1, even on the worst days. I just don’t feel a need to “get them to learn” any more. THAT IS NO SMALL STATEMENT. Sometimes, when the CI is flowing strongly, I don’t smell or suck at all. Isn’t that great? I no longer suck at teaching. And I’m happily off my rocker!