Concluding Post: An Open Letter to My Students

To My Past, Present, and Future Students,

When I am pondering how best to approach a lesson, I often start by trying  to deconstruct my own learning. I ask myself, how did I come to develop this skill or build this understanding? What engaged me? What challenged me? What would I like to take from that experience and what would I like to change about it? I do not believe that my experience is the only one that matters, but it is a starting point. We all interpret the world through our experiences, whether we realize it or not. And so, to best connect to you and help you learn, I must first understand my own learning journey and what education means to me. 

Essentially, my development of curriculum is a dialogue, a conversation that I have between myself and you, or at least who I understand you to be, the context of our learning, and the desired learning outcomes. This conversation takes place before you even enter the classroom. In my early years teaching, I often fell back on how I was taught as a student and what was the most manageable way to devise and enact curriculum, even though I wanted to teach how I learn. How I was taught and how I learn are not the same. I was taught, often, by the “banking model” of teaching, where the teacher would lecture and deposit information in my head that I was then expected to process and spit out in various forms. (Unfortunately, you all are familiar with this model, although I have tried to eliminate it from my own teaching.) In my areas of interest, I was able to pick up a lot of information, but in the areas where I really struggled, such as math, I checked out. I did not see myself as a “math person” and I did not see it as relevant to the teaching career I wanted to pursue. As a teacher, one of my biggest revelations was understanding that how I felt about math was the way some of you felt about English. You do not see English, as it is taught, as relevant to your lives and yourself as readers or writers. This hurts me at my core and it is why I started telling you all on the first day of school that you are readers and writers, no matter what. I hope that as we co-construct experiences and knowledge, I am also helping you to construct an identity that sees reading, writing, and communicating as practices that help you grow and discover more of the person you want to be. 

I have learned as a teacher what I implicitly knew as a student: that just because something is “taught” or “covered” doesn’t mean it is learned and internalized by students. So how do we get you to see our time together as relevant and meaningful to you? I have found that I learn best when I feel like I have a voice and I have support. I have learned through exploration, expression, pursuing my own passions, and being open to the perspectives of others. I have learned so much from teaching all of you and I hope to create an environment where you can learn in a way that allows for you to find yourself and enjoy the process. 

One of the biggest issues I have found with the school model is that ways that curriculum can coerce, push, you all as opposed to letting you take the lead. Grades are a central part of this coercion. Grades make school outcome oriented and instill a fear of failure in students. I know this because I experienced it myself, as a student and as an adult. And I see the effect grades have on all of you. This year, when I asked you all something you want your teachers to know, one of you said, in a poem, that being wrong is  “far worse than treason.” Sometimes I feel as if the gradebook is a wall between myself and you; it makes us connecting and forming a community harder than it should be. That is why I have stopped penalizing you for late work and started giving you all the opportunity to revise much of your work. I know this doesn’t change your relationship to grades entirely, but I hope that it has helped you understand that your learning is more than a number or letter. I will continue to move towards a gradeless classroom that centers feedback. 

I usually learn best through reflection and conversation with others such as my colleagues, but I have also learned to look inward more. I know that school can often feel like a constant drive forward, so it is important to build in mindfulness practice to allow ourselves to stop and step back from the grind. When I practice mindfulness, I find that I not only am more calm, but I am able to have a better perspective on what I want and what is important to me. As you seek to grow as a learner, mindfulness and reflection will be key tools for you not only in practices such as writing revision, but in how you think of your own education. 

When I can sit with other teachers and discuss lessons together, we both become better for it. And the best moments I have had this year and many years in the past are the conferences with you all where we could really dive into what you did well and what you enjoyed as well as what you wanted to improve on. I find so much joy in, and learn so much from, just asking you what you like about the work you did. Some of you have been surprised by that question because discussions of your work haven’t ever been phrased that way. I have realized the power of that celebration of your work and giving you the chance to express it. That conversation centers you and your learning process as opposed to me as the judge and jury of a grade, and I plan to build in even more time for conversation in the future.  

I also know about the issues with limiting artistic and creative expression. I think one of my greatest strengths as a learner is my curiosity. How can we learn without being willing to ask questions of ourselves, our peers, the texts we read, and those in power? I think that curiosity and creativity go hand-in hand with being given room to fail. And I know about the dangers of taking away creative expression because I used to write poetry frequently and in the last ten years I have barely finished a poem. When one’s own self-worth becomes tied up in the scores and accolades given by others, one can lose the ability to find value in one’s own work or the desire to use one’s voice. In other words, I forgot how to write for myself and I didn’t think my words mattered enough to write them. The most I have written in a single sitting were two poems I wrote recently about the kind of curriculum and school environment I want for you. In a way, this letter is an extension of those poems, but they also helped me to make connections and express ideas in ways I never would have considered in this letter or a formal essay. I hope to be able to create a space for you all where you can feel comfortable expressing yourselves, asking questions, finding your voices, and seeing that expression as a part of the learning process. 

Some of the best learning experiences I ever had were as a Boy Scout. Although I loved to learn through reading, Scouts centered experiential learning: walking the Freedom Trail in Boston as we were told tales of the American Revolution, learning to make pancakes by cooking breakfast for the troop, tying knots to hang a hammock, hiking in the woods to identify native trees. There were no rubrics or points, but I learned because I got to make mistakes and ask questions and experience what I was trying to learn first hand. When camping, I often was able to get outside of my conception of myself and understand the power of the natural world and my place as just one living thing within it. I was taught to always leave a place better than I found it, and I try to apply that principle to all aspects of my life. I also got to have responsibility and eventually, to teach others the skills I learned as a way to demonstrate mastery. It was actually the joy I found in helping others learn that led me to pursue education.

I have also learned so much through my experiences traveling, especially traveling on my own. One of my favorite experiences is wandering through a new city with nowhere to go, taking in as much as I can. I want that to be how you all approach a new work that we read. I know that we have books that take place all over the world in our world literature curriculum, and I hope to be able make those experiences even richer to you all by going on more field trips and bringing in more speakers from the cultures we discuss, such as Afghanistan, Iran, Sierra Leone, and Cuba. Some of my favorite work is reading your parallel papers, making connections between the texts and the world we live in. Think of how rich those could be with even more experiences outside of the classroom!  I also want to learn from each of you and create a welcoming space for you to share your life perspectives and backgrounds in conversation with one another. You don’t have to have the answers. That’s okay. Asking questions and being willing to seek the answers often leads to finding more than you ever expected. 

The diverse texts that we read represent exposure to different perspectives and cultures, but what I sought to do, especially in the last two years is to foster more genuine reflection and discussion of the biases we have as readers and how acknowledging them allows us to empathize better with others. This is work that I have done, and continue to do myself. I recognize that as a white, cisgender, heterosexual, college educated, middle class, man, I have privilege that may lead me not to consider or understand the experiences of characters unlike me. That is why you completed the reader identity profile, expressing how your various aspects of your identity are privileged or not and how that affects your reading. We really dove into issues such as identity, racism, privilege, white supremacy, and Black affirmation. Through my work with the AP Lit classes on Audre Lorde’s “Coal” and the many students who struggled to understand it, I realized that it was more important to me that you all were able to reflect on the curriculum many of you had been exposed to and identify that narratives of Black suffering and Eurocentrism were at the core of much of it. That exploration and conversations as class and one-on-one that led to a new perspective was, to me, much more valuable than any essay you could produce because the insight it gave to you. I have also learned about the importance of letting you process complex emotions and experiences. Allowing you all to free write on difficult days such as those following the murder of George Floyd and the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol seems so simple to me, but I was really heartened to see how many of you appreciated it. As we explore challenging topics such as violence and oppression in many forms, I will give you more room to articulate your feelings and have an outlet for them. 

I know that I have grown, as a man and an educator, since I first began teaching seven years ago, and reflection has been an essential part of that growth. This letter has helped me to reflect as well as to focus on how I want to create a better curriculum for you. And the answer, in short, is less of me and more of you. I can bring more grace, more empathy, more preparation to my teaching, but the thing that is most important is to truly center you. And that means giving you choice. In what and how you learn and how you choose to express it. And in shaping the environment and values of our classroom. I know that to do that, I need to learn more about areas such as inquiry-based learning, culturally responsive pedagogy, and social emotional learning. But I also need to learn more about you. I need to make more room for you and your lives, your worries, your hopes, and your questions in our classroom. I know that I tell you how much I care about your well-being and your learning, but I can do more to show it. I understand now, better than ever before, that it is the written curriculum that expresses the hidden curriculum. No matter what content is addressed, if you are not at the core of the curriculum then I do not think it can succeed, if success means helping you develop into the person you want to be. I promise, for as long as I am an educator to keep learning, innovating, and opening my mind to all that you are and can become.

Mind, Heart and Soul,

Mr. Collins