Bow Making In English Class

I don’t know what everyone else will be teaching next week, but I’ll be flintknapping with my English students. When they prick their fingers, I’ll give them a piece of tape to close the wound. They’ll be making arrowheads–carving them out of obsidian with granite hammerstones and antlers. I don’t know how else to teach them to read.

I’ve been teaching English for seventeen years and feel confident about my technique. Sometimes I look around at the country, the state of affairs in education, and I just don’t understand it. It seems self-evident to me that we ought to test what we want students to learn.

I want my English students to be curious, to rediscover the joy of learning. I want them to be passionate readers, to be critical thinkers. To know when they’re being duped.

So we’ve been making bows. I gave them some oak, a draw knife. Built them a jig so they could make their own bow strings. Then we sewed quivers, built arrows and targets. Now we’re shooting.

Yes, at school.

The first time out half the kids couldn’t nock an arrow without it falling off the string. They’re getting better.

But I never wanted them to become good archers. I wanted them to invest themselves in a difficult project, to persevere, to fail and to overcome that failure: their bows broke; they split their arrows; they cut their nocks too fat, their strings too short.

I wanted them to experience the rewards discipline yields. I worry that that particular type of commitment might be dying in our culture.

We’re reading The Hunger Games trilogy. But I didn’t think that was enough to draw in the kids who never read. The video-game kids. The parents-who-never-read-to-them kids. It’s a rule of mine: no student can hate reading. Because I know that they love it. Some of them just don’t realize it yet. That’s my job, to surprise them.

To tell you the truth: I can’t stand The Hunger Games. But it engages my students. It’s where they’re at. So I meet them there.

This year we’re making bows.

I’ve met them at other places in the past. Last year we studied organized crime. We read The Godfather, Killing Pablo: the Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw and Against all Enemies. The year before that we studied America’s wars: Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10, Robert’s Ridge: A Story of Courage and Sacrifice on Takur Ghar Mountain, Afghanistan and Generation Kill. The year before war was the year we studied the two Bobs: Catch a Fire: the Life of Bob Marley and Chronicles: Volume One.

I read widely each summer, looking for texts, themes that will both educate and attract kids.

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You know the curriculum works when the students want to teach it.

One of my students fell in love with John Muir, an iconic American naturalist. The student wanted to teach a class about the man. He also wanted to lead a trip to Yosemite National Park in order to see, first hand, the landscape that had inspired Muir. It seemed like a good idea to me. So, together with one of my colleagues, I sponsored the student’s class. The student read everything John Muir wrote and lectured these kids for a semester on Muir’s life. The kids in the class became experts on the man: his reading habits, the names and fate of his children, his preference in footwear, the details of his travels.

The itinerary for the trip was detailed and pages long. In short, my colleague and I drove the class in a bus from Colorado to Yosemite, to SanFrancisco, to the Muir Woods and back. We hiked through the mountain valleys Muir fought so assiduously to preserve. We camped along the same rivers, slept under the same trees. We talked to a number of the nation’s leading experts on John Muir. This is no exaggeration: everywhere we stopped, the students on this trip were educating the experts. But that wasn’t because of me. I wasn’t much more than a driver, that and one of the sponsors who made the whole thing legal.

A few weeks ago, the science teacher in the room next to me took his archeology class to Harvard. These high school students have a permit from the Navaho Nation to work in a canyon system in the Four Corners area. The class traveled to Harvard, among other things, in order to be the first to transcribe the original field journals of Alfred V. Kidder and Samuel J. Guernsey, a pair of archeologists who studied the same canyon system in the early part of the last century. When they’re not at Harvard, the students are in the field documenting ancient artifacts.

In January, the teacher across the hall from me took her Spanish class to Nicaragua for three weeks. The students lived with their Nicaraguan host families, learned Spanish and volunteered their labor building a community center.

Trips like this take place every month. It’s what we do at the Open School.

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The first thing a new student does when they arrive at our high school is to prepare for the Wilderness Trip: a four day backpacking experience in the Mount Evans Wilderness. The trip is a very effective way to communicate to new students that our school is different–that we are going to educate the whole child.

While we hike, the kids tell me about their lives. They talk about hurts: being bullied, relationships. They share their fears, their hopes. The magic of the trip is this: I become a real person to my students, and my students become real people to me.

When you spend that type of time together: sitting out thunderstorms, hiking under a full moon, eating tortilla sandwiches–there emerges for each kid a theme. That theme tells me who they are. For example, there’s always one looking for the easiest way out. There’s usually one who picks up the slack–a kid who takes care of the needs of the group. I listen as they talk to each other. Their language gives me insight into their passions and the emotional scars they carry. They way they hold themselves tells me how confident they are. I begin to see what makes them tick, what their gifts are, what they’re guarded about. So before we ever meet in the classroom, I know them.

The Wilderness Trip is more than a powerful educational tool, it’s the best pedagogy I’ve ever experienced. The trip puts into practice the secret of quality education: like just about every other human endeavor, it’s about relationships.

Which brings me to my confession.

Although I’m an English teacher, English is not really what I do. I spend hours every week just listening to kids. It’s my job. They tell me their stories. They talk about their girlfriends. About their abortions. About their parents, or the lack thereof. Their family members in prison. The alcoholism in their homes. They share their dreams with me. Their college plans and ambitions. They consult with me in order to layout a path to their future careers. They consult with me about the classes they, themselves, are teaching. About ways they can give back to our school community. They share their research projects. Their photography. Their poetry. They show me the razor scars on their forearms. Their sketch books. They paint murals in my classroom. And talk to me about their addictions.

In that sense, more than I am an English teacher, I am a witness.

Our curriculum provides the time for me to learn who my students are. As a matter of fact, I’ve come to rely on the patterns I see in my students during the course of the Wilderness Trip to guide me. The theme I become aware of on that trip typically unfolds in a student’s life over the years to come.

So I hold a vision for each of my students. My job is to help her to see it, help her to appreciate her strengths and help her to be aware of her weaknesses. To encourage her to write her own story so that it won’t be written for her.

It’s not enough that I hold a vision. The kid needs to hold his own vision. When we talk together about his life–whether it be steeped in a ruin not of his own choosing or love and happiness–I want him to learn to chart a course for his heart. I want him to begin to decide who it is he wants to be. What type of father. What type of partner. I want to hear him make those choices, and if I’m lucky, he will keep me in his life long enough so that I can witness it as he begins to actualize them.

Here’s one for the reformers: at the Open School we formalize the conversations I outlined above into curriculum, self-directed student projects. We call them Passages.

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How do you know if a school is any good?

Here’s a test: I wish we’d standardize it. Ask a kid whether or not he likes school. The answer, you’ll find, is depressing. At my first teaching job nobody liked school. They liked seeing their friends. Socializing. But, at best, the students tolerated their classes. Most of them, ninety percent of them, just endured it. There were exceptions, but they were the minority.

Ask any student at my school whether or not they like it. I know the answer. Ninety-nine percent of them do. They hang out in my classroom after the end of the school day. They come back for years after they graduate. Because it’s a safe, loving community, it’s hard for them to leave.

If that sounds unbelievable to you, you need to come and see it for yourself: see what it’s like for kids to be passionate about their education.

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Just what is it I’m trying to say about school?

Maybe I can persuade someone of this: humans are curious. We love to learn. It’s in our nature. Pair that fact with the observation I made earlier: most high school students hate school.

Something is wrong.

In Colorado we have a statewide assessment, and it garners too much money, too much attention. Are we really going to focus our worry on a test score when millions of kids who are hardwired to be curious, to love learning, hate being in the classrooms designed to meet that need?

I’m not.

When I conduct my assessments, I’m going to test what I want my students to learn. I want my English students to learn to practice. I want them to learn discipline and perseverance. Since most of them have no experience with that type of ethic, it comes easier, much easier, if they are allowed to enjoy the work they do. I know, even if the kid doesn’t yet, that she likes to read. As soon as she realizes this, she will want more. And once she starts, she cannot be stopped.

So I taught her to make a bow.

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