The zinnias on my new front steps. I don't know much about gardening, but I'm learning as I go. The hydrangeas and peonies in the backyard inspired me to add some color to the front. The more you know, the more you know how much you don't know...
It's been a month since we moved into our new home. The New Place is, ironically, right down the block from the Old Place, a house we rented for two years. The New Place is the sixth home we have lived in since we got married. The New Place is what I like to call “the forever house.” “They can carry me out of this house in a pine box,” I tell my husband, as he climbs into the driver’s seat of the rented moving truck to drive it down the hill. He shrugs and grins, because we have both joked that as soon as we move into the New Place, he’ll get an offer to relocate somewhere around the world. That would be just our luck.
The New Place is great. It has all we’ve been looking for in a home, and we should know, because we’ve been looking for the past two years. When we relocated, we had to close on our home in North Carolina within two weeks. We needed to decide upon the town we wanted to live in, even though I had no idea where I’d be working. We needed to decide quickly, because our children were school aged, and we had to get them registered and transferred. So we found the Old Place to rent. We didn’t think we’d be in there for two years, but we were.
I wasn’t a fan of the Old Place, nor was my husband. It was a house in the town where we wanted our kids to go to school, and it fit our family. It would suffice short term, but it wasn’t Our Home. We had, prior to this had three of those, so it was kind of weird to be renters instead of owners. The owner of the Old Place was a nice guy, a family guy. He lived right down the street, which is how we know that he knew how to keep a house nicely. His front walk always had nice plantings on it, his yard was fenced and his two car garage always fit both cars . This is why we know our Old Place could have looked nicer. But it didn’t. The words “orange” and “burlap” and “wallpaper” should never appear in the same sentence, let alone a singular phrase, but this house had it: orange burlap wallpaper. (I expected to turn any corner and find Carol and Mike Brady.) The Old Place had old stuff. Drafty windows with lead paint chips crusting the edges. A basement and a garage full of coffee cans filled with rusty screws, half filled paint cans and old miniature light bulbs. A garage door opener that was so cracked you could see the battery at the other side. Old washer, old dryer, old fridge, cheap, tiny oven, and a vent fan over the stove that was broken.
It was awful and soul killing to live in that place. As we rounded the corner on the final months of our lease, we started not to care. At all. If a lightbulb went out, we didn’t replace it, unless it was essential to do so. When it looked like bees were building a hive near one of the gutters in the back yard, we just told the kids to stay inside and watch TV. Our floors needed to be “broom clean” as per the terms of the rental, so we swept and Swiffered as needed, but the steam mop stopped coming out. In short, it wasn’t our home. We did our due diligence and very little else.
There are some things the landlord could have done to ensure that we enjoyed living in the Old Place and cared more about its upkeep. He could have:
1) installed an outlet in the master bathroom so that I could dry and style my hair there instead of in the kids bathroom,
2) had the leak in the chimney fully repaired instead of patched so that cards and school projects on the mantle didn’t get soaked periodically,
3) purchased a new garage door remote,
4) cleared all of the workshop crap out of the garage so we could park our car in there,
5) planted flowers in the front yard, pruned the shrubberies and weeded,
6) nailed lattice board beneath the raised deck so it wasn't a death trap for children;
7) replaced the drafty windows, and;
8) installed a fence in the backyard.
I hope you’ve predicted the analogy I’m about to make. If not, you have already stopped reading and assumed it’s about my real estate woes.
It’s not.
It’s about the state of our homes as educators and the state of our students’ homes as learners. For far too long, students have been trained to rent their knowledge. They’ve passed through classrooms as tenants and not owners. They’ve been conditioned to hunt for correct answers, to be dependent on their instructors to give them answers and, when that doesn’t suffice, to read their instructors (far more closely than they have any text) and target their answers to align with their instructors’ preferences. They’ve been trained on due diligence, and they do that work well.
If we feel as if our students have successfully gamed the system more than they have learned, if we have experienced a classroom environment in which students have engaged more in the cost benefit analysis of what the bottom line of their grade will be if they do X amount of work for Y result, if we resent the cooperative enterprise created by students who cheat on coursework, then it’s time for a change.
If we want our students to own their learning, to build equity in their own futures, they’ve got to be in it to win it. They have to believe that their education is an investment and not an expense. I could have bought the Old Place from the landlord, but why would I? He never took care to spruce up the place more than was necessary for it not to look bad. The Old Place was livable, but it certainly wasn’t enjoyable. I could never imagine building my own home in it. It was a stopgap and that was all.
How many adults today feel that their schooling was simply a holding pattern they had to endure and wait out in order to get to their true passion? How many more students will feel this way before the changes they deserve are implemented? How many students want to be success oriented and not failure avoidant, if only we ask them what changes they would like, what repairs we might make?
As stewards of learning, it’s time for us to build the homes our students truly want, not the ones that are easy to maintain. It may mean knocking down some walls, pulling down the ugly wallpaper that went out of style long ago. It may mean making some investments that we don’t see a return on for quite some time.
We work for the future, and it’s uncertain for us all, but sticking with what’s comfortable and easy isn’t the answer. It’s time to start asking some serious questions of ourselves and of our students, to build our house on a foundation of inquiry, not image. It’s time to approach this profession with the mindset that change is constant, and the changes that matter most stay the longest. It’s time to own the house, not to rent it out.
Fantastic article, Oona, with an apt analogy. Teachers too often blame the students for not investing in their learning when we as teachers are not providing them work worth their time or effort. Are instances of cheating, cutting corners, shoddy work signs that students may actually have better things to do with their time? Not always, but it's worth asking the question.
Posted by: Phenry18 | 08/14/2015 at 09:08 AM