As Gretchen Rubin says, "the opposite of a profound truth is also true." So while yes, I spend a lot of time thinking about and planning/working toward having a better future, I am also clear about how important it is to stop looking ahead.
Every teaching day, I begin my classes with a check-in around the room. While I usually give my younger students a question to answer (for example, What was your favorite childhood game? Where do you hope to live in ten years? What's one food that you like but others hate?), I let my older students select their own topics to share whatever's on their minds. On a Monday before a vacation, many of them said how much they were looking forward to the break starting on Friday. Then, on Tuesday, they said the same thing or an iteration of it, such as, I can't wait to spend next week with my family. Straight through until Friday, every day was a slightly different version of thinking not about the week they were in but about the one to come. Which made me understand that much of their time, my students are so focused on what's ahead of them that they can't enjoy what's already on the table.
To test my theory, I asked my thirteen lovely ninth graders the following check-in question: Would you rather love everything about all of your classes and get all Bs or hate everything about all of your classes and get all As? Nine of the thirteen said they'd take the As. Not surprisingly to me, three of the four students who said they'd rather earn Bs are the most engaged, curious, interactive students in my group.
Of course, my question fails to acknowledge what I think is the most important fact about being a student: when people are more interested and happy, they can pay better attention and retain more information. In my check-in question, I was posing a false dichotomy. In fact, when students innately feel OR better yet find ways to create the feelings of interest and curiosity in the material, they always do better and earn higher scores. The children who can find something that engages them about their schoolwork or make the material engage them are more likely to get better grades than those who grind through work always looking ahead to the next vacation.
While we need to think about our futures, to enjoy life more AND do better in it, we need to pay attention to what's here now. Any thoughts? Please share your responses in the comments.
I love the prompt for the 9th graders. I think I am going to use this for my honors Spanish class – they begin each class with an ungraded writing prompt. This will promote great oral discussion when they finish their 10 mins of writing. Gracias!
It’s always interesting to see what the kids say. Hugs to you, cg