I am a hoarder.
I just can’t throw away old lesson materials, notes from units, handcrafted essay organizers, or outdated supplemental newspaper articles. Please tell me some of you are with me on this. Please??
As the school year ended and my enthusiasm for our final book, Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson’s Chew on This, waned for the second year in a row, I knew it was finally time to confront my fears of recycling and purge my filing cabinet.
Don’t get me wrong, this nonfiction book with the subtitle “Everything you don’t want to know about fast food” is quite good. It was excellent when I started teaching it TEN years ago. But now it is just good. That was part of my waning excitement about the unit; it just wasn’t as relevant as it used to be.
Over those 10 years, my students have also changed. Back in Portland in 2009, a mentor suggested that instead of focusing my middle school nonfiction writing unit on animals, I should incorporate a topic relevant and important in their lives. Duh. (It was for sure one of those moments when I just couldn’t believe I didn’t think of something so obvious.) So I looked at my students and their high poverty neighborhood and its abundance of fast food restaurants, and chose this book on which to focus our nonfiction reading and writing skills.
It was life changing. Many of my 6th graders caused problems at home when they suddenly decided to try being vegetarian or when they refused to order dinner at the drive thru. I had more than one perplexed parent contact me about the material their children were reading. As a fresh from graduate school teacher, it was a great learning experience, helping me refine my skills for anticipating parent reactions and defending my curricular choices.
But when I started teaching at a private school in a liberal college town, telling kids that soda causes tooth decay, McDonald’s ads purposely target children despite childhood obesity rates, and industrial chicken farming is cruel falls a bit flat. They already know this. They can analyze ads better than some adults. They tout their preference for grass fed beef. They brag about how many times per week they visit the local food co-op.
So even though we practice nonfiction reading strategies while reading the book, the passion and fire and eye-opening thoughts and questions just aren’t there. So I have to say goodbye to this book and the hundreds of pages of notes, resources, articles, and activities I have cultivated over the past decade. (Also, how is it possible that I have been teaching for that long? I mean, aren’t I still 26?!)
Anywaaay, so today I pulled out all my files related to Chew on This and did the ultimate purge. Ninety-eight percent of it went into the recycling bin (leaving me with about 372 file folders!!). I reminisced on my fresh-from-grad-school “anticipatory sets” I created to whet their appetite for industrial farming. I marveled at my extensive collection of supplementary and differentiated newspaper articles. I was embarrassed of the essay organizers I thought would be helpful but really were not. At all.
Look all those freed paper clips and file folders!
Purging these materials helped me reflect on my work as an educator, which is something we rarely find time to do. Think about it: When was the last time you got to truly reflect on your work over the past year? 5 years? 10 years? It just doesn’t happen what with the grading, planning, head in the weeds, trying to master the next lesson, the next day, the next unit.
So, at least for this book study, I am no longer a hoarder. I have purged and not only found more room in my old-school filing cabinet but also more space in my mind to appreciate how I’ve grown as a teacher. Plus, I unearthed some teaching strategies I totally forgot about, like Give One Get One as a review activity and I Say, You Say as a partner activity. This was a total win-win…but I am not so sure I ready to purge the rest of those filing cabinet drawers…yet. (Ooh, look at that Growth Mindset!)
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