“My god, what has happened to you?” I think, looking at the tell-tale signs: their glassy-eyed expressions, their alarming pallor, their shuffling gait. They’ve become “well-schooled” zombies.
We could get bogged down with discussing how doing school has sucked the joy out of their lives, how pressures about grades or teachers or parents or SAT tests (extrinsic motivators) have caused them to care less about learning and perform less well. Instead of finding joy in learning, they focus on the most pressing or most threatening enemy to be dispatched: 50 math problems in need of annihilation, 50 pages of meaningless prose to slog through, armies of forms and applications to destroy.
But let’s not prowl around in that particular dark corridor too much. Let’s try, instead, to reclaim our zombie students’ souls by bringing their love of learning back to life.
1. Read Dan Pink’s Drive with your students.
It helps to understand how motivation really works, and it’s not necessarily how you might expect. Pink’s book, written in his conversational layman’s style, draws on the substantial research of noted scholar Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and others, so you and your students will learn something about psychology, one of those weirdly neglected subjects in school, especially considering how students’ identities are morphing is one of their key interests at this point in their lives.
They will quickly grasp the concept of autonomy, one of the three key ingredients Pink describes as essential to motivation for doing creative work — something teenagers are certainly hungry for. Help them translate their desire for autonomy into an authentic undertaking driven by their passions and guided by your experience with scaffolding projects toward completion. Discuss mastery: the consistent, painstaking practice it requires, the moments of trial and error and learning from failure, the fact that true mastery is never reached but how it draws you on nonetheless.
If you don’t have time to discuss the book, at least watch the RSA Animate version of a speech by Pink outlining the central points of Drive (already viewed by millions). Converse in person and continue your conversation online in blogs. Teach your students to push back respectfully and to share their thinking transparently. Value reflection.
2. Listen to and share inspirational stories.
When I share my own story, I hold up a prop: a 12″ square canvas painted with a black background given to me by a former colleague just in case I might want to paint some day. I keep it out in my office as a reminder that creativity awaits me any time I’m ready to pick up a brush. I am not a painter, but the canvas tells me I can become one.
3. Don’t underestimate creative brainstorming techniques.
Photography is your ally here. Many of our students create stuff every day — on their cell phones. They take pictures of things they notice and find visually appealing, sharing their most interesting finds with friends via texts or Facebook status updates. As John Berger writes in “Understanding a Photograph,” photographs “bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation.” Empowered by the images they create, our students can begin to decipher the secrets of their own meaningful choices.
I once created a lesson based on my students’ most recent phone photos. Commenting on the success of the app Instagram in Wired magazine, Clive Thompson declares, “Photos are the global lingua franca.” Back in the dark ages, I had to scrounge up enough digital cameras for a class photo project; now I can count on my students to have access to cameras by reaching in in their pockets. Why don’t we liberate that tool to help our students make meaning from what they see?
Resources for brainstorming are numerous. CreatingMinds.org offers an exhaustive list of tools for giving a jolt to zombie students’ listless imaginations. The Literacy Through Photography program developed by Fotofest International offers an entire curriculum that employs the synergy of language and photography to help students access their switched-off imaginations. It doesn’t have to be digital. I like the technique of having students create a vision board to rediscover what they love. Or consider the concept of a hackjam to help your students rework the zombie code in their brains.
4. Empower students to construct knowledge together.
Recently, I found myself about to set out with half my AP English Language students on a week-long school trip to Washington, DC. So I asked my juniors, who remained behind, to propose what they would like to learn during that week — it would be a treat to drop the structured AP curriculum for a bit. When no concrete proposals emerged (I should have followed my own brainstorming advice above), we discussed focusing on some of the “classic” poems that might help them get a jump on AP English Literature for next year.
Meanwhile, through my professional learning network (PLN), I learned about a website called Book Drum, which breaks down novels page by page and provides images and sounds for readers to better grasp the context of their reading. For example, the entry for To Kill a Mockingbird provides a photograph of a bowl of scuppernong grapes that might be unfamiliar to readers outside the South; another page offers a video of a Bobwhite issuing its distinctive call. Why not, I thought, do this with poems, and in a Google Document? The result was an exhilarating week of co-constructed learning.
5. Get up and dance.
Last October when I found myself staring into the wan, vacant faces of my AP English students, I knew I had to do something drastic. I walked into the classroom and began to clear out the desks. The students exchanged curious glances. “Let’s get up and dance!” I entreated.
Looks of horror gawked back at me as I cued up the first of three Youtube instructional videos for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” dance. I gave the truly mortified an out – they could videotape the rest of us, but we were going to set ourselves the task of mastering Michael’s moves. After the last of the videos, and a good deal of rollicking hilarity, we desconstructed the videos – which was most effective? Why? What did they learn about detailing and analyzing a process for our upcoming essay assignment? What did they learn about the King of Pop? What did they learn about learning?
If Joel Miller can dance his Ph.D. dissertation, why can’t we crank up the music to learn about the positive and negative attraction of electrons and protons or break dance to the parts of speech?
Sometimes it does seem as if the educational world is coming to an end. But I know that as teachers, we can do more to create a happy ending to the horror that has become our students’ schooling – we can motivate our zombie students, bring them back to life, and rekindle their souls with real learning.
The old school paradigm is really as dead as a zombie..
I just saw a translation into Italian that Montale did of the Hopkins–that was a really important text for him.