Life Changing Lessons... How I found myself standing on a table, blaring the Mission Impossible theme song, while wearing a police hat.

by Katie Kinder, Kenneth Cooper Middle School in Putnam City Schools
7th and 8th Grade English Language Arts
kkinder@putnamcityschools.org

I avoided the call into the classroom for several years before I succumbed to what was clearly in my blood.  I worked in Public Relations.  I planned events, golf tournaments, social events, fundraisers, and even a popular telethon, but nothing made my heart pitter pat like driving by a local middle or high school remembering the texts that spoke to me most clearly in my youth.  Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Oh English Language Arts friends, need I go on?  All I could think of was my rock star, educator of a mother in my ear, “You are missing your calling, sweet girl.”  I didn’t want to live her life, but try as I may I could avoid the call no longer.  Taking the Alternative Education route, I had no formal, college training to be a teacher.  Being in the classroom for the first time was scary and exhilarating and absolutely what I was meant to do with my life.  The relationships with the students came easy.  Teaching procedures, getting compliance, that part of teaching I was able to do well when I put in the work on the forefront.  I’m a naturally outgoing person and I enjoyed being around the kids and leveraging relationships to get the best possible work from my students.  But… and there is a big ‘BUT,’ I was teaching the exact way I had been taught.  I pulled my ‘English Teacher Stool’ up to the front of my class; I sat my students in straight rows facing the front; I plopped my booty in my stool and I read from the literature book.  When the story was over, I handed out what I affectionately nicknamed later as a “Shut up Sheet.”  Honestly, I didn’t know any better. 

A few years later, I happened across a YouTube video of Mr. Ron Clark of the Ron Clark Academy.  A former Disney Teacher of the year, author of The Essential 55, and I mean, come on, a made-for-TV movie played by the one and only Chandler Bing…Matthew Perry.  I watched enthralled as Ron Clark described the exact stool I perched on and he called it, “The Stool of Drool.”  I shuddered in abhorrence as he explained how education should be different.  As educators, we should up the ante.  As educators, we should up the rigor as well as the entertainment level in our classrooms.  It was the first I had heard of such a thing.  I started to change.  I YouTubed exceptional teachers; I went and observed mentor teachers and master educators in action.  Who needed a gym membership if one could move in the classroom in such a way that 20,000 steps were achieved on a daily basis?  I immersed myself in brain research; I learned that gum chewing was good for students’ brains (no, I did not just speak teacher blasphemy).  Brain research also shows that children should never sit for more minutes than their age.  Meaning in a class that is 55 minutes, my students needed to get up and move three to four times in an hour.  My mind was blown.  The change in my teaching continued.  We learned to make up songs to remember and apply grammar; we worked collaboratively in groups.  I gamified my classroom, so students would compete and work on leveling up.  I learned that in our ‘everybody gets a trophy’ mentality and culture, my students really believed that ‘everybody gets a trophy.’  They were beside themselves when they didn’t win the vocab competition for the week.  “But, it’s not fair,” they would whine, “Can I have a starburst anyway?”  It motivated them; they started to take charge of their own learning.  Gamification speaks to the students.  In a world with Playstation 1-8, Minecraft, iPhone, iPad, iChat, Instagram, SnapChat, iEVERYTHING, we are competing with the changing face of technology, and video games.  Gamification speaks to the video gamers; it speaks to the athletes; it speaks to our youth.  When I gamified my teaching, I saw huge gains in student engagement and achievement.  Gamification was another piece in my education puzzle away from the ‘Stool of Drool,’ and the land of straight rows and ‘Shut up Sheets.’  But something was still missing.  That is when I got ahold of Dave Burgess’ Teach Like a Pirate.

If you are not a fan of Dave Burgess, I urge you to jump on that #tlap bandwagon.  I read his book cover to cover and then I read it again.  Like a lifeline, the book came to life on the page; it spoke directly to my heart.  Burgess teaches history to high schoolers.  He was known to come to class dressed as Rosie the Riveter, or in full, head-to-toe Salem Witch Trial outfits while he was in the classroom.  He did this in order to hook his students into his content.  He writes about creating experiences for your students.  “What are your LCL’s?”  he asks, “Life Changing Lessons!”  He poses the question, “If your students didn’t have to be there, would you be teaching to an empty classroom?”  He transformed his classroom into a Speakeasy while teaching about prohibition complete with sprite and cherries, him dressed as a gangster, and the students had to have the password to get into class.  WHAT!?  How fun!  Engaged children are rarely a behavior problem.  “How can I tailor this for English,” I thought to myself.  I went to the store and bought fake candles on sale for half price; I used black butcher paper to black out my windows when I taught anything by Edgar Allan Poe.  As we said goodbye to Anne Frank after reading her play, my students took the fake candles, held them up, and switched them off; we sat in almost, utter darkness listening to a somber song as we said goodbye and grieved the Frank family.  It moved their emotions and tears were okay I reassured them.  I transform my classroom into a poetry lounge during National Poetry Month complete with hot chocolate, hipster scarves, bongos, and instruments as we recite poetry we have analyzed.  The ideas for ELA are endless.  Just last week my 7th graders read Rod Serlings’ “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street.”  I stood on a table as the Mission Impossible theme song blared in the background.  I set up my room with a crime scene.  I bought a cheap police hat at the costume store; I encouraged the students to get inside as a crime had just been committed.  My 7th graders ate it up; they called me ‘Officer Kinder’ the whole day. We worked in collaborative groups trying to find the culprit with cut up pieces of text on their desks. 

What is that saying? “If you haven’t failed in the classroom recently, then you are playing it too safe.”  Oh, and fail I do.  Sometimes a lesson doesn’t quite work the way I saw it in my mind’s eye, but onward I trudge.  I Teach Like a Pirate with Life Changing Lessons; I have left the ‘Stool of Drool’ behind me, ‘Shut Up Sheets’ are no more because life is fun and learning should be fun and teaching is most definitely fun.