aboutlearning

After I spent an hour listening to David Simon and Bill Moyers on Moyer’s Journal talking about Simon’s award-winning series on urban life,The Wire, I decided to watch the entire five seasons.
       
I have a passion for inner city kids and have personally witnessed the immoral lack of opportunity afforded many of them in our urban schools. Simon uses Baltimore in the series; but in my experience, the same situations exist in all our large inner cities. Nothing but an entire sea change will ever give the kids who attend these school the chance to rise to their potential. The unbelievable conditions I have seen in my work with teachers is nothing less than education malpractice and should be treated the same way we treat medical malpractice. 

I have been watching episode after episode for the past six weeks. The fourth season deals primarily with the Baltimore schools and is a realistic and poignant look at the modus operandi in urban America. And yet somehow Simon and his writers have managed to let us watch how some teachers have success in reaching these kids.

Pryzbylewski, (Prez) an ex-Baltimore cop, walks into his battered classroom finding it strewn with overturned desks and papers. He starts by hacking away at the gum stuck to the undersides of the chairs with a screwdriver. But, ironically, he loves the possibility of what he might be able to do for these kids.

Prez goes along with his fellow team of teachers on the mundane standard rules like spacing on papers, where the students should put their names and so on. He is also told it helps to keep the classroom as warm as possible so the kids stay drowsy;
and to send troublemakers to the office. He is warned not even to try to deal with them.

Prez has a few really bad days, but he begins to interact with his kids. He starts teaching math by connecting with where these kids live. He opens his teaching segment with the odds they are dealing with when they shoot craps . He uses these odds to teach probability. The kids are interested, even fascinated with how the numbers work. At one point, he says to a supervisor who has walked into the class. “They don’t even realize they are learning.”

Real learning is always fascinating, and Prez’s kids are finding that out for themselves. He starts where the 4MAT Learning Cycle starts in Quadrant One by giving them a reason for learning, by answering the “Why?” question. The changes he seeks begin to happen. As the season progresses many of the kids choose to hang out in Prez's classroom during lunchtme rather than the cafeteria to work on their homework and to talk with him informally. It is a joy to watch the way he builds his relationships with them.

If anyone were to ask me if any part of the 4MAT Cycle were left out, would it impair the entire learning process, and which part, which quadrant?
There is only one answer, Quadrant One. We must begin by knowing where our students live, both mentally and physically, and know our content well enough to connect it to their lives. We have to believe in them and care about them. In this amazing series, Simon’s Prez shows us how that works.

The Teacher’s Reader Network recently put out a challenge to teachers to sum up their lives as teachers in only 6 words. Here are the six words of one of the winners:
“They talked, I listened, we learned.”  The character Simon has created in Prez knows that.

*http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04172009/profile.html