Throwback Thursday: My Day as a Student

I looked past my khaki skirt and purple polo to my black-clad legs.  Are the girls at Darlington wearing tights these days? Do these boots look weird with tights? Which is worse, exposing my legs or wearing the wrong thing? Yep, I was definitely living the high school experience, and I hadn’t even left my house yet.

It was the day I would shadow junior Hunter Manning from the time he sat down at the breakfast table to the time he took off after lacrosse practice. My goal was to better understand the Darlington experience from the most important point of view—that of our students. Here are my biggest takeaways from the day:

• Good class discussion—engaging, relevant, challenging—still works. In AP US history, a discussion comparing the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie and Warren Buffett challenged students as intellectual and ethical human beings. Mr. McDurmon used classroom management to involve many different students, and his questioning and feedback strategies helped them develop their own perspectives. He affirmed or corrected history facts but left broader issues unresolved to encourage critical thinking. The small class size supported his efforts. The lesson plan was tech-free, but a student used web research to back up her comments. I took two pages of notes and struggled to keep my own thoughts to myself.


• Genuine project-based learning that requires applied learning and problem-solving makes for deep engagement. In Hunter’s art class, we quickly reviewed for the upcoming test, and then settled in to work on the current project—charcoal reductions. The atmosphere in Mrs. O’Mara’s studio was both focused and relaxed. We chatted while we worked, but everyone had clear goals and pursued them. Art is a great model of what project-based learning ought to be—not a “performance” of learning that happens to be a poster instead of an essay, but an undertaking that requires students to apply knowledge, experiment, fail, and keep trying. 


• Athletics offer many models for good teaching and learning. At lacrosse practice—in which I did not participate, for everyone’s safety—young men immersed themselves in a learning activity that lasted longer than any class. Advanced players guided novices while the coaches were elsewhere on the field. Following Coach Hight’s plan, the manager transitioned the team from one activity to the next, and those transitions were frequent. Players tried new things and received immediate feedback—a goal, a missed ball, a teammate’s suggestion. Classroom work is more abstract than learning on the field, but we teachers certainly can repurpose these elements for our own ends.


• Note-taking should support cognition. No one in Hunter’s classes took as many notes as I did; they said they’d learned which classes required notes and which didn’t. In their minds, taking a photo of the white board, referencing the e-book, and taking class notes all served the same purpose—record-keeping for later access. With such a utilitarian view of note-taking, they were missing out on the ways that writing down our thoughts helps us have thoughts. We need to teach them this explicitly.


• Students are continually shifting gears. I enjoyed changing classes all day, but it also meant repeatedly re-orienting body and mind toward a new topic. If the instructor re-introduced the instructional arc of the current unit, it was much easier to make meaning in class instead of simply recording information. What seems very obvious to the teacher—“We’re studying the so-called ‘robber barons’ of the late 19^th century,” “We’ve begun the chapter with an overview of organ systems,” “Tomorrow’s test is on trigonometric functions and the unit circle”—is useful to a student who has been in classrooms all over campus.


• School is intensely social. We may worry that today’s kids lack face-to-face interaction, and some students probably do, but I was surrounded by and interacting with other people for every minute of the day—even more than I do as a teacher. As much as I was energized by all these fun teenagers, I can see why some might get home, tell their parents that “nothing” happened at school, and proceed to veg out in their rooms.

My experience of a school day doesn’t represent that of every student. For one thing, I find learning easy and don’t mind sitting still and listening (heck, I even like taking tests!), so I cannot truly feel some of our students’ biggest challenges. I couldn’t shed my identity for this experiment, so I embraced it by shadowing a student whose course load and school involvement are similar to what mine were, ahem, twenty years ago. In comparing the life of today’s high-achieving high school students with the one I remember from my own years at a college-prep independent school, I found that not a lot has changed.  In some ways, that’s bad—school today is still modeled on the assembly lines of industry, as it has been for 100 years. On the other hand, good people are in our classrooms building relationships, responding to student needs, and offering thoughtful instruction. Do we in education want to offer a wider variety of learning experiences to our students? Of course—and we have many models for this if we look around us—but are we doing a lot of things really well? After a long, fun day as a student, I believe we are.

Many thanks to Hunter Manning for being a great sport, and to all his friends, classmates, and teachers for making me feel welcome. I had an awesome time!