I worried over S, the student who sat in the back of his math class day after day, lost in his own thoughts while his classmates appeared to be following the teacher who stood at the board talking through the steps to solving problems.
Then one day, a student teacher joined the class with an opportunity to circulate and help individual students. When she got to S, she kneeled and spoke to him quietly. He sat up and listened intently. She walked him through the steps of the procedure slowly, he asked questions as they arose, pencil in hand, writing numbers and symbols as they talked. When they got through two problems, she asked him if he understood now.
He turned to me and said,”She’s a good teacher.” (The students in this school often report to me how their student teachers are doing, especially when they can assure me that all is good). I asked him what she did that was good, he said, “She was patient so I could think it through.” Not such a big thing to catch a kid who was lost?
The experience of thinking through a math problem, getting it and doing the work has a bigger impact than just that one page in the math textbook. With repetition and reinforcement, he can internalize the experience, the logical sequence, the pause, to apply to other content and even his life.
In Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future, Margaret Wheatley wrote “Thinking is the place where intelligent actions begin. We pause long enough to look more carefully at a situation, to see more of its character, to think about why it’s happening, to notice how it’s affecting us and others. Paulo Freire used critical thinking as a non-violent approach to revolutionary change. First In Brazil, and then in many poor communities around the world, he taught poor people how to think about their lives and the forces that were impoverishing them. Nobody believed that exhausted and struggling poor people could become intelligent thinkers. But it is easy for people to develop this capacity when they see how thinking can save their life and the lives of those they love.”
An observer in that classroom might have looked at this 8th grade boy slumped in his chair and assumed he didn’t care, would never care, would never do the work. As I started to get up from the desk, he added, “She helped me get it so I could do the work.”
Patience with kids’ pace to “get it so [they] can do the work” –often hard to do in this overloaded time but it helps to notice any moment where it is possible, use the opportunity and feel good for having provided an opportunity for a struggling student to succeed in learning.
I see S in the hallways now three years later, a high schooler owning the space. We smile. He says, “Hi, Miss.” I’m sure he doesn’t remember that small moment when we all slowed down to think–he about math, me about a simple lesson in teaching. I do suspect he remembers that student teacher.