More on rigor

Hello everyone,

You must forgive my continual return to the idea of rigor.

I was in a special day class at a middle school today where the students were reading THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET. I couldn't help but think about how popular the book is in the regular (and sometimes honors) English classes of Garfield.

I remember the slap in the face I felt when I was teaching honors English 10 for the first time. A girl from my class transferred out to Shurr High School, then transferred back. In the interim, she had read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in both Middle and Modern English--as a classroom assignment.

Our students are sometimes resistant to rigor, and they will try all sorts of strategies to avoid the sort of rigor that is common in other school districts. This is understandable; when I was a teenager, I never wanted to work hard in the subjects that weren't my favorites. I avoided hard work in everything except what I liked the best.

The biggest problem comes when, rather than give them what they need, we give them what is easiest to give. We look at the state standards, and we know that--for whatever reason--the kids are below the standards, so we assume that they are incapable of the standards completely, and we teach what is easy to teach.

What I see in all sorts of special ed. classes is the concept that the kids are able to learn anything (usually), but they need help with it. I think that's a good concept. The kids can learn anything. Nothing is beyond them (speaking of the generality, not the individual). What our profession is supposed to do is break difficult things down into acceptable chunks (it used to be called "chunking," in fact; now it's called "scaffolding"; the concept is similar: they end up at the place they are supposed to be, but some take a few big steps and others take a lot of little steps), and serve them up in a way that is digestible.

We are not supposed to wheel ourselves around like a dessert cart, placing ourselves in front of them until they eat all our sweets. That's not what I mean by "digestible," and I deplore the practice of pandering to our students tastes for sex, or glorifying thug culture, or fomenting rebellion in naturally rebellious teenagers (a colleague of mine some years ago told students that they should never believe adults, but he never understood why his students doubted him--he thought that encouraging their rebellion would make him one of them, even though he was more than 20 years older than the oldest student).

The best way to get students to rigor is to set a tone of rigor in the first day of class. Avoid parties and free days. Avoid teaching them things they have already been taught (review, yes; completely re-teach, no). Take them in orderly fashion from low to high. Enhance their vocabulary. Remember what college was like, and prepare them for it. Demand high standards.

Jeff Combe