Campus Voices
Middle School
I enjoy the fact that I am constantly impressed by my students during my first year here at BB&N. And, I am pretty sure I had nowhere near this amount of raw knowledge when I was in middle school. This became evident to me during a recent assignment in my eighth grade history class. But, I discovered that today’s raw knowledge does take some refining and a little bit of old school “know how” to get the job done right.
The assignment turned out to be an organic process for me. Since December, my history class has been following national politics and studying U.S. Government. I often use the digital projector and my laptop to display current primary results, polls, and the like and I find that my students are genuinely engaged. I see high fives going around the room when I display the results, these coming from 13 and 14 year olds who will not be able to vote until 2012 at the earliest. I quickly learned that my students were well informed on many 21st century issues. One student was easily able to deduce the complex process of stem cell research into a 60-second lecture better, I imagined, than any medical school professor could ever do—and my wife is a doctor.
That is when I decided to take the current events within our class and make them real. I first brought in a map of the Massachusetts Congressional districts which also showed the mailing addresses and phone numbers of the representatives’ Washington offices. Many wanted to whip out their cell phones and give them a call, and a piece of their mind, at the same time. I decided to take a more subtle, and old-fashioned approach to long-distance communication: a typed snail mail letter that included…a STAMP! “No,” I told them. “We will not be using our cell phones to call, nor will we be emailing, text messaging or ‘IM’ing’ with our House representatives. We will be sending them a letter.”
So that was the homework, to craft a one-page letter concerning a national issue that the student personally cared about. The next day, the students shared the letters with each other. The topics varied from gun control to No Child Left Behind and even one on the Mass Pike toll increases. As we shared these letters, it hit me: none of my students could correctly format a proper letter. And, upon further inspection, I realized that most of them had never even written a letter like this before.
This was where the path of my students diverged from my own middle school path. When I was in junior high school in Vermont, I had a required course called “Life Skills” which included how to write a check, sew a patch, and of course, how to write a letter. I shared this history with them and after studying the letter format for half of a class and going through a peer editing process, I had them produce a final draft. These newer versions had everything aligned and looked very professional. The final step of the assignment was to bring in an envelope and a $0.41 stamp. On that Friday, we had everything ready to mail. But, some still needed to learn where the return address went, where the stamp went, and how to properly fold a letter to fit into the envelope. Once they were signed and sealed, a student brought them down to the front office to be picked up. Two weeks have now passed since we mailed these letters and one student has already heard back! She brought in the letter, which addressed her specific issue and was personally signed by her representative. I expect everyone to hear back in the coming weeks and be able to share their letter with the class.
What started as a simple assignment on politics turned out to be a life lesson on how the rest of us used to communicate with the outside world before all the conveniences of modern technology. And, I imagine, before long these students will be writing cover letters and sending resumes of their own, all the old-fashioned way.
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