The following is an excerpt from
One-on-One With America's Most Inspiring Teachers.
We need to focus
more on the immeasurable things that help students become a better person. Some
states have gateway tests that students are required to pass before moving to
the next grade. That’s a lot of pressure.
RAFE: When we are giving kids a
test we need to understand our students. I have 34 students in my class. I have
a young boy in my class that is new to our country. I had some of the older
kids, my former students, after school. I had a box of granola bars and a
couple were grabbing granola bars because they were staying late with me. This
young man was leaving about 4:30 and he asked if he could take the box home for
dinner. I said Feliz, “What do you
usually have for dinner?” He said, “I
don’t. I don’t get dinner.” He comes home to an empty house while his
family is trying to make a living. He gets a free lunch at school but he does
not eat dinner. Surely the following day when he is taking a standardized test
the odds of him doing better than a kid who has two parents at home who feed
him dinner is different. We have to take those things into account.
The real factor on all of these
standardized tests, obviously the quality of the teacher is very important, but
it is NOT more important than poverty, it’s not more important than hunger. We
as a society are missing this point.
I totally agree.
RAFE: And by the way, yes I’ve
already figured out a way to get this kid dinner every night. Again, when I
became a teacher I didn’t think I would be working on making sure my kids were
fed. I don’t think that should be my job. But it has become my job.
It
goes back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in that you have to have your basic
needs taken care of before learning can take place.
I
know from reading your books that you spend a lot of your personal time
teaching, mentoring, tutoring, and traveling with your students. You are great
at getting your students to recognize that the hard work now will improve the
quality of their life later. How do you get your students to display this type
of work ethic year after year?
RAFE: First of all let’s be clear. I
don’t get all of them to display it. That’s something that I want young
teachers reading this to understand. I don’t save everybody. I fail all the
time. Let’s be clear about that. One of the jokes I tell young teachers is when
they fail early on and then go home and put on the latest Hollywood
movie about teachers and the teacher saves everybody and everybody passes the
test. They feel terrible because that’s not them, so I always remind them, yes
I’m pretty good at what I do, but I still fail all the time.
Now with that being said I do
get a lot of kids working very hard. I do it in a couple of ways. There is a
line I use all the time in my class which I’m going to write about in a book
one day. I hope teachers start to use this line. Here’s the way I frame a
lesson. If you go up to most children in school and they are working on a math
paper or writing an essay and you say to them, “Why are you doing this?” Most kids will say, “Because my teacher told me to” or “because I have to” sometimes they say, “I don’t know why I’m doing this.” If you ask one of my students,
and I teach them to say this, “Why are
you doing this?” They will answer, “If
I learn this skill my life just got better.” EVERY lesson I explain how
they will be using this skill in their life. EVERY LESSON, whether we are
learning how to hit a baseball or learning our states, or learning subatomic
particles in Chemistry, I want to show them how they will be using these
things. There is relevance in my classroom! That is one of the reasons the kids
work hard. They are not working for me. They are not working for grades. They
are working because they know the skills they are learning will make their
lives better and increase their opportunities. EVERY LESSON is framed like
that.
The second reason, and this is why I want
to get young teachers to stay put and not stop teaching after 3 or 4 years, is
my former students. The reason my kids work so hard is that I have so many
former students come back and talk to them. These 9 and 10 year olds that I
work with meet kids that are 15, 16, 18, 21, or 25 who are doing very well.
They come back to the class constantly and say to them, “You are having the best year of your life. You don’t know it yet, you
don’t even know what Rafe is teaching you but you are going to know in about
five or six years. Listen to this guy.” That is a huge motivation in
getting them to work hard. The little ones get to see the finished product. I
really encourage teachers to stay put because they are going to have their
disciples that come back and help them.
You’ve
got my wheels spinning about how we can get some former students to come back
to visit.
