In the spirit of Patricia Polacco, I would like to take the time to thank someone who helped me overcome an obstacle in my life. While I have had many wonderful teachers, mentors, and colleagues to help guide me in my career, none of them has had quite the same impact as Will D.
Will was a student in my second grade class early in my career. I was at the point where I was just beginning to feel that I had some semblance of knowing what I was doing—or so I thought. He entered my class and from day one he began to question everything I did and said. He had the knack of doing so at the most inopportune times, like for instance when the principal was conducting an evaluative walkthrough.
He was a wealth of information. One day a young lady innocently asked Will for a blue crayon to color the sky blue in her picture. Will began to tell her quite loudly, “You know the sky is not actually blue, it just appears to be.” He went on to explain how light travels, atmospheric particles, and such. To be honest, he lost me after the first couple of words. The young lady said, “never mind” and returned to her desk to color the sky pink. Will, on a roll now, started asking me questions about the sky, our solar system, and the universe. I did what any frustrated teacher might, I sent him to the library and suggested he ask our librarian to help him find a book.
I am ashamed to say, I began looking for a way to turn down his volume. I asked a colleague for a suggestion. She suggested a talking chip (a small token item) that Will would have to turn in to me when he wanted to contribute something to our class discussions. Once he had turned in his talking chip, he could not talk again until he earned another one.
On the fifth week of school, something happened that would forever change the way I approached teaching. We were watching a segment from a video. Our unit of study was Our Planet Earth and we were learning about the surface of our planet. In the video, the narrator made the claim. “Our planet has more water than land.” Will began to question the video. He said he had looked at plenty of maps and felt that there was more land than water. I let him finish his thought and took his talking chip.
Thinking that was the end of it, we returned to the video. From the corner of my eye, I saw Will digging in his desk and pulling out his social studies text book. I quietly approached him and asked him to please put the book away (after all it was science and not social studies, right?!? <insert sarcasm here.>) Will complied but within a few minutes began pulling out the book again. I asked Will again to put the book away. He began to frantically mime to me that he wanted to show me something (I had his talking chip, remember?) He opened the page in the back and pointed to a map of the world and through a series of gestures and grunts tried to convince me that there was more land than water. I explained how some maps were not drawn to scale--a perfectly logical explanation, or so I thought.
I showed him another map which clearly proved my point. He crossed his arms and told me he didn't believe me. My mind raced on how to handle this situation. In desperation I said, "Will, how do you think you could find out for sure?" "Measure it," was his reply. I challenged him to come up with a plan to do so. Will fell into a silence and you could almost see the wheels turning in his little head. Sadly, at that moment, I was just grateful for the silence.
The next day Will told me he had a plan. He noticed that we had green and blue centimeter cubes in our math buckets. He would cover the land on the map with green cubes and the water with blue cubes. Then, he explained, he would just use a balance scale to see which there was more of, green or blue. I told him to go for it. We set up his "experiment" as he called it on a back table.
During breaks from instruction, he meticulously covered the map with the cubes. Eventually, other students joined him at the table. Through a group effort, the map was covered later that day and the moment of truth arrived. Carefully Will sorted the blue cubes into one side of the balance and the green cubes into the other. The entire class looked on. We all cheered when Will proclaimed that there was indeed more water than land, at least on that map he added. Over the course of the week, Will went on to cover several more maps and found that indeed on every map there was more water than land.
I realized, from Will's "experiment" that I was spending too much of my days telling kids things rather than providing them opportunities to explore concepts through inquiry. I was a young teacher struggling to make sense of the jumble of messages that teachers get from national, state, district, and campus mandates. I was teaching content and not teaching children. I had been so concerned with keeping up with the district pacing guide that I had lost sight of the true purpose of my profession to inspire kids to think, to ask questions, and to problem solve.
While I know that I am not the perfect teacher and that I have many more lessons to learn, thank you Will D. for helping me overcome the biggest obstacle in my career…myself. You helped me understand that I do not need to be the dispenser of knowledge in the classroom. I hadn't fully realized the power of giving students a voice. You helped me begin to give up some of the control I thought I needed to have and to allow students to take ownership of their own learning. Finally, you helped shaped my career and change my life. While I may never be an award winning famous teacher, I am a better teacher because I had you in my classroom!
(Special thank you to Will and his mother Heather for giving me permission to tell this story.)
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