In my position as a gifted support teacher, I have the opportunity each day to work with regular education students and their teachers. Last week, I had the pleasure and privilege of joining a first grade class, taught by a wonderful, talented young teacher. (I can say that now that I’m no longer in the “young” category.) It isn’t often that I get to work with primary grade students, and my experience in that classroom got me thinking about the way we do things in school and about the verbs we use to describe it.

During our lesson last Friday, we were doing a science experiment. The students have been learning about rocks, and the investigation that day was called “Washing Rocks.” Sounds like a yawn-fest if ever there was one, even to me, a science geek.

But when the students heard we were going to do science, there was such obvious joy and excitement in the room. The teacher, Miss Hill, briefly reviewed what the students had done the previous day, then announced (with what I have learned is typical first-grade-teacher enthusiasm) that today they would get to wash their rocks! One little girl in the room was so full of glee at this announcement she couldn’t contain herself. She cheered, “Yay!” and clapped her hands as only a six-year-old child can. This was a revelation to me: she couldn’t wait to learn something, but even more important, she walked into every experience, no matter how small, with the expectation that she would learn.

Throughout the half-hour experience that followed, while the students were dipping their rocks into cups of water and watching what happened as a result, there was an intense buzz and energy in the room. Every single child was engaged in the process, every one had perceptive observations, and every one was having his or her world expanded at least a little.

Those students were learning, and more than just what happens when a rock gets wet. In a half hour, they learned about how to look closely at something and see the details; they learned how to share, both materials and responsibilities; they learned that sometimes you make a mess…and then how to clean it up; they learned how to communicate an idea with someone else; they learned the power of a shared experience; and they learned that learning is exciting.

Too often we spend our time in school doing the wrong verb. So much of school is about educating instead of learning, and the differences are vast. Students learn, but teachers educate. I look at a room full of first graders and I see children who are thirsty for knowledge and understanding.

I fear that the response of many educators to that thirst is to pour a bucket of water on their heads. The results are about as effective, too. After years of telling teachers they need a drink and getting doused instead, I think our students become soggy and cold and uncomfortable. It’s no wonder that when I visit many fourth or fifth grade classrooms, I see students who simply want to get through the day. They’ve learned how the game is played: education is going to happen to them regardless, and it makes little difference whether they bother to learn. When they ask why they need to learn it, or whether they may learn something they’re interested in, or how it connects to their real world, we just educate them harder or slower or louder or faster, pouring on more water. We quench the fire instead of the thirst.

I for one am beginning to choose my verbs more carefully. I want to focus on learning, not educating. I want to engage students, not deliver instruction. I want to discover, not cover. What other verbs do you need to use more wisely?

This morning I read an article that, among other things, made me reflect on school assemblies and their relationship not just to the curriculum but also to the culture and the environment around them.

In my school, assemblies typically revolve around cultural enrichment, exposing students to experiences they wouldn’t otherwise be able to have, celebrating student achievements, character building, how to prevent bullying, and such.

The students at a middle school in the Gaza strip yesterday had &th&emc=th" target="_blank">an assembly about how to handle mortar shells and other dangerous materials if they find them lying about. One of  the English teachers at the school commented about the assembly: “They are not ready to learn yet. And I am not ready to teach.”

I think sometimes, in our drive to complete the book and cover all the content before the state test begins so that our school once again can be deemed adequate, we can lose sight of the fact that we may have students sitting in front of us who are not ready to learn. And sometimes we are not ready to teach. I realize that my realities and those of my students are not nearly as harsh as many others’ around the world. But they are still real, and they can still affect learning. The only way instruction can possibly be effective is if we deal with those impediments to learning before we get to the prescribed content.

The New York Times this weekend posted a fascinating interactive feature at their web site: Inaugural Words – 1789 to the Present. (Thanks, by the way, to Angela Maiers for pointing me to this, via Larry Ferlazo’s blog.) The site gives a word cloud based on the inauguration speeches of each president.

Here are a few ideas about how you could use this with your gifted students:

• Select one of the speeches and have the students infer whatever they can about the historical context in which it was given.
• Research the historical period and compare/contrast what was mentioned in the speech with things that were left out.
• Compare how vocabulary has changed over time. Figure out a way to illustrate these changes (perhaps with a graph or timeline).
• Combine the text from several speeches (perhaps all the speeches over a 50-year span, or all the speeches from the top-ranked Presidents) and create a Wordle to look for broader patterns of words.
• Create a Wordle from President Obama’s speech and compare it to those from other Presidents. (Thanks to Lee Kolbert for this idea.)
• Imagine you’re elected President. Which other Presidents would you emulate? Use words from their speeches to begin building your own.
• Research which Presidents wrote their own speeches and which used speechwriters. Is there any difference in the vocabulary?

This is admittedly a very rough list of ideas, and none of these are fully fleshed-out lessons. What other thoughts do you have?

My youngest son has some very specific food preferences—think “Mikey” from the old Life cereal commercials. Meaning that most of the time, when we sit down at the dinner table, the first words out of his mouth are, “I don’t like that.” My wife and I have slightly different views on how to handle this. Often, she will make something special for him just so that he’ll eat. That’s what moms do, especially an Italian one. My view more often than not is that he’s just being overly picky and he can eat what we put in front of him.

Now before you start writing your comment chastising me for being a cruel dad, most of the time when we insist he taste what we’ve made, he likes it and will eat it. And he has yet to go to bed hungry. So my wife and I actually balance each other nicely. Don’t tell her I said that, though.

My attitude towards my son’s eating habits would change, though, if it were a matter of health and nutrition rather than preference. If he had a condition that required a specific diet, I would go out of my way to provide it, even going so far as to cook special meals for him. I would give him supplements to replace deficiencies in his body and keep the nutrients at optimum levels.

We tend to treat education like nutrition. The regular curriculum is designed around the recommended daily allowance of reading, math, science and social studies. The content is nutrition, and we provide the amounts that are needed to keep children’s brains growing and learning. Some students have deficiencies, and we spend extra time, effort, and money to customize their diets to bring them back to optimal health.

But what about the gifted students? I fear that many people look at them in the same way as the child who likes to eat a lot. We’re worried that if they eat too much, they’ll get fat, so we carefully regulate their diets, keeping them to the recommended amounts, making sure they don’t go overboard. It’s the same thing my wife and I do when our kids equate being bored with being hungry. Instead of giving them snacks every half hour, we redirect them and give them something else to keep them occupied.

But this model is wrong. Instead of looking at gifted kids as overeaters, we need to realize that they actually have an entirely different kind of metabolism. They consume more not just out of preference but out of necessity. They have a condition that requires much higher amounts of complex and different nutrients just to stay healthy. But when they balk at eating the same diet we’re giving to the rest of the family, we tend to see them as whiny brats and respond just as I do to my youngest son: “It’s good for you. Just eat it. And if you clean your plate, then you can have dessert.”

It’s not a matter of keeping their appetites under control. It’s recognizing that their nutritional needs are completely different than ours. The learning they crave isn’t dessert, and forcing them to eat the meal first doesn’t keep them healthy. Withholding the challenging content, or keeping it carefully controlled, or ignoring the messages they give us about what they want and need isn’t actually preventing obesity, it’s malnutrition.

After writing about 1000 Things That Matter and describing how I would use it with my students, I spent the week doing that activity with several groups in the three elementary schools where I work.

The results were fascinating. In every group, the students were thoroughly engaged and personally invested. Their analysis of the comments already posted at the site was particularly interesting. Though there were some slight differences in the vocabulary they used to describe it, they consistently identified the same themes recurring in most of the comments:

• Love
• Joy
• Peace
• Relationships

It was also interesting to notice that the students’ own thoughts about what matters to them tended to fall into these same themes, with family being by far the most commonly mentioned idea.

I think what I found most exciting about this was seeing the kids debating the relative worth of all of the things different people thought were important. Their insights were rather mature, actually. When I first planned this, I was concerned that the students might not take it seriously. But they did, and when I closed the class period by recommending they have the same conversation with their parents, they seemed eager to do so.

The power of this activity came from the way the students could readily access opinions of people from around the world. What I would really love to do is take this even deeper by sharing their work with other students in other schools. If you have used the 1000 Things That Matter web site and you’re interested in sharing your students’ work with mine, post a comment here.

When I saw the site 1000 Things That Matter this morning, my first thought was about what I’d post there. I decided to give it a couple of days and ponder what really matters before putting in my two cents.

Then I considered how I might use this with my gifted students. The obvious application would be to have students write ideas they’d post there. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and I could even have the students post their ideas to the site. But I want to stretch my gifted students, and I’m sure that if I just put this question to them as is, they’d choose the first things that came to their minds. I’d rather take them into higher levels of analysis and evaluation.

One of the interesting things about the site is that the things people are sharing are available as they are posted. I think it would be rather enlightening to have students do a 3-phase process with this site:

1. First, answer the question individually: If you had to tell what matters to you in two sentences, what would you say?
2. Then, look at a sampling (or perhaps all) of the ideas that have been shared already. Consider some of these questions:
   • What do you notice?
   • Are there any patterns?
   • Are there any common themes that keep coming back?
   • Is there anything that seems to be missing?
   • Is there anything surprising?
   • What can you tell me about the people who are submitting their ideas?
3. Now look at what you wrote originally. Would you change it? How? Why?

I encourage you to try this process yourself and contribute a comment to the site. I’d also be interested in what other ideas you have for using 1000 Things That Matter with students. Share your ideas here in the comments.