Seeing the students as co-creators

Reading through the names, letting them roll off my tongue, there is a language to it, I memorize these words because I need them, is it for communication or love or power or control or is it just rote?  Something teachers have been told to do from time immemorial? I look at the faces, let the consonants and vowels and the way they feel in my mouth establish themselves as I see the young people blush and giggle and embarrass and distract and spew.  These are my co-creators.  Even as I write this I sense the difficulty in my task of ceding power, giving away the illusion of my control and letting them have it to manipulate meaning as they will.  I want them to name the world, know themselves, know their neighbor.  There is something whole and true about naming things as they are, an opening up of possibility in pointing out the window at the rise in the land and saying hill or mountain or butte or plateau or colina or loma or montaña or cerro or mesa.  And knowing that others know the meaning of such things when you say them, there is the power.

Day one was uneventful in the way of first days.  Introductions and syllabi and the normal blah blah blah.  Unfortunate but necessary as administrative tasks tend to be.  Having 90 minute periods does allow me to unfold a bit more each day, though, and I took the opportunity to see what the sophomores and juniors think an ideal Spanish student looks like.  They formed groups quickly and efficiently, which impressed me more than a little, and then sat together working out the kinks of a first morning of work together, trying to visually represent the ideal student, labeling things in a broken third semester Spanish that indicated a wide range of language levels and a whole spectrum of interpersonal and intrapersonal strengths.  It was telling that several groups drew the textbook, subtly indicating in their scritch and scratch on poster paper who their true teacher has been these past few years.

Walking through a sea of adolescent timidity--they were dipping a toe into the water--I had a glimpse of the mountainous task before me.  A generation of children bred for following and filling in blanks and bubbles on tests and sitting waiting to react to the teacher instead of acting purposefully on their own will.  Hoping for a list to memorize and some worksheets to fill out quietly while the teacher nods and smiles and says you get an A.

Today is day two, and a chance to begin the process of handing back the learning to the students, who wait for the crumbs of learning to be brushed from their teachers' tables.  They must create purposefully today, or I will succumb to the current of what is, instead of rowing against it to give students the opportunity to transform their world.