Skip to main content

Platypus Observant

I teach high-schoolers. It's a rewarding, but difficult job. High-schoolers' minds haven't calcified yet, so they're frank, open, and teachable at their best. However, their personalities haven't hardened either, nor are they fully mature or socialized. It's a lot easier to get forty year olds to hide their boredom in public. High-schoolers let you know when they're bored in the most blatantly rude and obnoxious ways. So it was of great interest to me to be able sit in on several sessions of Wheatstone Academy this week. At Wheatstone, high-schoolers are subjected to hour long, highly technical lectures given by distinguished college professors, visit a world-class art museum (The Getty), listen to 16th and 17th century church music (which they gave a standing ovation), attend community theater, and read and discuss four dialogs from Plato. Their reaction? Unbridled enthusiasm, wrapped attention, and excellent questions! So it was a week, and not ten months and the only homework was reading the dialogs: that's still amazing! So what's the message? Don't give up on high-schoolers; FEED THEM! Feed them to bursting, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. Make what you're giving them so deep, rich, and "tasty" that they'll push through all the pain and discipline to get more. You want to improve education? Put a copy of Plato in their hands. Is Plato baking their brains? Let them start off with Homer. Homer's to hard? Slog with them through "The Lord of the Rings." Don't show them movies just to get them off your back for a period. Show them Citizen Kaine and talk about it with them. Citizen Kaine too much of a stretch, how about "Batman Begins?" You'd be surprised to see how much mileage the students at Wheatstone got out of that one this week. Sports are great, but make sure that there are opportunities where everyone can be involved, not just the best. Bring back theater, music, and the arts. Oh, and let them talk about religion in school, because the most important questions in life SHOULD NOT BE BANNED FROM THE PUBLIC SPHERE. Besides, how can you teach them civil discourse and tolerance if they're never given an opportunity to really and truly disagree about something that matters?

Comments

Linds said…
Amen! After last summer, I thought exactly the same thing. Then, I was pretty disappointed with the reaction I got when I tried it in the classroom. There's got to be a way to get past the predisposition to hate school just because it's school. I'm working on it.
3:20 PM
James said…
Yeah,I hear you. It's that key point that Academy students are there because the overwhelming majority choose to be there. I had some positive experiences with tracking when I was in school in CT, but that only helps with the best and brightest, and not all the time with them. I'd say it was cultural, but even Shakespeare and Plato make cracks about kids not wanting to have anything to do with school. Sigh...
5:53 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...
15 comments
Read more

Tolkien's Dark Tower: The Platypus Reads Part CLXXXVI

Tom Shippey points out in his Road to Middle Earth that the germ of Barad Dur, Sauron's Stronghold, comes from a scrap of Chaucer where the poet makes an offhand reference to a knight and his approach to "the dark tower."  Chaucer expected that everyone knew that story, but somehow in the intervening centuries it has become lost.  Using his imagination, Tolkien tried to delve back into the mine of story and imagine what this Dark Tower might have been.  We see several tries at this image, or several "accounts" in Tolkien's corpus.  The first is Thangorodrim, Morgoth's "dark tower," where he sits "on hate enthroned."  The second, and like unto it, is Sauron's original keep at Tol Sirion.  This is the dark tower before which Luthien, in all her frailty, stands and lays the deepest pits bare with her song (an image oddly reminiscent of protestant poets like Spenser, Bunyan, and Wesley).  Building on these two images, Tolkien constru...
4 comments
Read more

SNES as Money Well Spent: Platypus Nostalgia

I got my Super Nintendo Entertainment System when I was eleven years old.  That's a couple years after it first came out.  The occasion was a little dramatic: to celebrate the end of a two-and-a-half year course of treatment for cancer.  I had no idea that it would be waiting for me at home after the final doctors visit.  It was a nice spring day, the trees were waving gently in the breeze outside the bay windows.  With a cup of tea resting on the coffee table, I set down to play.  What was that first game?  It was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past .  Around twenty years later, my SNES still works as does that Zelda cartridge.  It's been a long way from boyhood in Southern Connecticut to manhood in North Houston, but I'm still playing. Why am I still playing?  There were stretches when I didn't.  Many times, I've just been too busy.  There were also seasons when it felt embarrassing to still be playing video games....
10 comments
Read more