Running Their Own Race
Supporting Students As They Move at Their Own Speed
I am a runner. It’s taken a weirdly long time for me to be comfortable calling myself that, as I’ve always thought of “real runners” as these speedy gazelles, effortlessly cruising along in their short shorts at paces I could never dream of matching. But after lacing up my shoes and getting out there consistently for the past five years, I decided it was time to embrace the “runner” label for myself. And, I’ve told myself, a runner is simply someone who runs. That’s me.
When I’m not running, I’m teaching. As a high school teacher, I’ve spent these past few weeks watching the slow realization that spring graduation is near creep across the faces of my senior English students. At our alternative high school, all our students come to us pretty credit-deficient, and many have had to double-time it to get to the point where on-time graduation is even a possibility. It’s now crunch time, and seniors have been glued to their Grad Plans, the individual documents where we track the academic credits they’ve earned. The Grad Plans list out all the skillsets in which we expect them to demonstrate mastery in order to get their diplomas, and we mark off each quarter-credit skillset as students complete them.
I’ve done a lot of work with these Grad Plans, especially when it comes to the English skillsets. Students must earn four full credits in English, with each credit broken down into more specific skills--analysis, expository writing, persuasive research paper, narrative writing, compare/contrast essay, etc. These Grad Plans were developed in-house, and have served us well for the past few years. Lately, though, as I’ve watched students try to check off the skillsets required to graduate, I’ve found myself questioning how well the Grad Plans and their specific skillsets are truly serving our students.
Take Josiah, for example. Josiah is a student of mine who loves cars, and who spends pretty much every moment he can working on them. He knows how to assemble an entire car engine from scratch, and I know this because he documented the process as part of a project last year. That project was a real victory for me as Josiah’s teacher--it was the first time I got him to do any real academic work. I had spent a lot of time trying to talk Josiah into writing something (anything!), but he had outright refused. He rejected every essay idea I had, and practically laughed in my face when I told him he could earn some narrative writing credit if he wanted to write a story or poem. When in his future, he asked me, would he ever need to write a poem? I honestly had no good answer to give.
Josiah works at a local automotive shop, and he is so talented and respected there, they’ve already told him he’ll have a full-time position when he graduates. It’s his dream-job, and his eyes positively light up every time he talks about it. Will he be writing any poetry there? Any literary analysis essays? I can’t lie: of course he won’t. He will need to be able to clearly explain the work he’s going to do on his customers’ cars, and to communicate the accompanying costs. The bottom line is, when it comes to the English skills that Josiah is going to need for what comes next, our Grad Plans list a whole lot of extra stuff that he simply won’t use. Knowing this, the question I’m left asking is a big one, and one that has me looking at the Grad Plan in a whole new way: are we going to hold his high school diploma hostage because he doesn’t want to spend time on those skills?
When I run a race, I almost always try to PR. My goal isn’t to win the race, or to beat anyone specific, but to run that distance faster than I have run it before. My friend and training partner, April, wants to qualify for the Boston Marathon. We’ve run the same half-marathon before, each of us finishing with individual PRs. Her PRs are decidedly faster than mine, and there have been times when she’s been personally disappointed by a finishing time that beat mine by quite lot. We have different goals, and we both came to the sport of running with very different strengths and backgrounds (she ran for years before I ever started, and she happens to be one of those speedy gazelles I mentioned earlier). In the end, though, I want people to respect my PR times and celebrate my achievements just as much as they do hers. My personal victory may not look like hers, but that’s what’s great about running to meet your own goals--it’s all relative, isn’t it?
It’s also relative when we’re preparing students for their post-high school lives. The level of proficiency and the specific skills we require our students to master should align with where they start and what their ultimate goals may be. I’m not talking about tracking, but rather, listening to students when they tell us what they need to know how to do. It seems silly to ask all students to achieve mastery in all the same very specific skillsets; in doing so, we risk losing them to skills they may not even need. Let’s stop breaking down English into super-specific types of writing, some of which are almost exclusively put to use only in higher education (or, honestly, not at all--compare/contrast essay, I’m lookin’ at you). Let’s pull back our focus and require all of our students to write. What that writing actually looks like, along with the requirements necessary to show mastery in writing, should be personalized based on the student’s own goals.
It took me years until I gained enough courage to call myself a runner--far too long. I want all my students to be confident in calling themselves writers now. The way we can help them do that is to show students how writing will play a role in whatever lives they have planned for themselves, and help them practice the skills they know they’ll need to meet their post-high school goals. Instead of hesitating or protesting because the practice of writing doesn’t feel worthwhile or authentic for them,I want students to be excited to lace up and get out there. Some may plod along while others find their stride right away. Some may choose to run marathons while others have to push hard to finish a 5k. No matter what their individual races look like, we can help all students can cross that finish line, arms raised in triumph, joyously setting their own PRs and being celebrated for their individual achievements.
