Back at It

Spring break 2024 has come and gone. As always, I remain. Still at it. Back to the old grindstone.

What am I at it?

Well, I’m lost in an Outlook Calendar that populates with meetings. A sea of emails. Little work fires as far as the eye can see. Somebody send a life raft.

One of the more interesting things I did the week I got back at it, was to walk into a middle school in Iowa City and lead improv with three sections of 8th grade English Language Arts.

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Middle school. What a place. Young people inching towards the cliffs of adolescence. Staring at the precipice. Trying to drag their poor teachers with them.

I’ve had plenty of K-12 teaching experience at this point. Middle school students are truly unique. Hormonal, childlike, resistant, insecure, awkward, energetic, creative, brilliant, stupid. Ah, humanity.

I agreed to visit three sections of 8th grade English Language Arts that one of my doctoral students teaches in Iowa City. I facilitated improv as a way to invite students to consider power dynamics. Improvising against oppression. They were reading Punching the Air. It’s a cool book. We connected our improv work to the text.

It’s been a long time since I was a high school teacher. And I’ve never been a middle school teacher, though I’ve worked with middle school students before. The three sections took it out of me. My voice was gone when I was finished. It took most of my chutzpah to flow with those students. I almost collapsed when it was over. We did energy sharing games, character walks, and image theatre. Technical terms. Mostly, the students wondered around the room and hip checked each other. Middle school kids have a hard time keeping their hands off their friends (and enemies). Especially when they’re nervous. And improv can make folks nervous.

I won’t unpack the sessions in this blog. Students were engaged, wild, and said a few brilliant things about power. Two of my doctoral students were there. One was taking notes. The other was participating and trying to make sure her students didn’t die. They’ll write about the experience. Educational research.

Spring break came and went and there I was, taking a break from my Outlook calendar, to work with middle school students. What a strange job I have.

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Teacher after teacher has told me how much school has changed since the pandemic. I could see some of that in the classes I visited. Things were unhinged. Truthfully, classrooms have always felt a little unhinged to me. So many agendas converge in a classroom. Power. And no two schools are the same. No two classes. The context matters.

Students at the middle school I visited complied and resisted in all sorts of ways. Teachers too. I do think things are probably different in this school than they might have been 10 years ago but, for me, things also felt the same. The same energy of trying to work in solidarity with kids despite the constraints of our limitations. The institutional, racial, and socioeconomic realities that contextualize the ways we can and can’t come together to build something worth building. That’s always the game for me.