Second reading of #tlap

In his book Teach Like a Pirate, Dave Burgess writes about the importance of passion in teaching.  

Passion is the number one thing that turns kids on to learning.  Don’t believe me? Just ask your students.  

It’s hard to deny passion.  I hate Ted Nugent and his political vitriol.  However, there’s no denying his passion for his hardcore views.  I can tolerate him simply because of his passion for what he is talking about, even if I totally disagree with him.  

So just imagine what happens when you line up passion with something kids need (and maybe even eventually want) to learn about.

Now, he notes that we can’t be passionate 100% of the time.  That is simply impossible.  Be honest with yourself on this one, you know there are parts of your curriculum that you aren’t exactly passionate about (for me it’s works cited and in-text citation and anything related to grammar).

So Burgess seeks to solve this problem of always having to bring your passion to your classes by looking at passion in three distinct realms.

First, Burgess writes that there is content passion.

He asks, “Within your subject matter, what are you passionate about? In other words, of all of the topics and standards you teach as part of your curriculum, which are the ones you most enjoy?”

For me this one is easy - writing and literature.  But those are incredibly broad.  And to be fair, I’m not fired up about all types of writing (if I have to teach another persuasive essay, I’m going to burst!).  But I certainly can narrow the broad topic of writing down into several areas that I’m getting fired up about right now just thinking about teaching them -

• the writing process
• how to craft engaging leads and introductions
• how to teach revision as more than simply copy editing
• descriptive writing
• narratives
• the braided essay
• hyper-text essays
• the multi-genre research paper

As far as literature goes, short stories are perhaps my favorite.  How can you not get fired up about some of these stories?

• “The Lottery”
• “Young Goodman Brown”
• “The Yellow Wallpaper”
• “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”
• “The Black Cat”
• “The Storm”
• “Lamb to the Slaughter”
• “A Rose for Emily”
• “Doe Season”
• “Listen to the End”

Now that I’m on a roll here, another thing I love to teach is what I call the Sticky-Note book report.  I have my College Comp 2 students list 3 topics they are interested in and want to know more about.  I have them list 2 topics that they absolutely are not interested in.

From there lists, I select one book from either my classroom selection or our media center, and have them read it.  While they read it, they must respond with 50 Sticky-Notes (actually placed in the books) to annotate their thinking, learning, and comprehension as they read.  

After that, they will give a 10-15 minute book talk to the class.  

Finally, they will create a blog on their book and post a 5-6 page hyper-text essay on one aspect of their book that they are interested in and want to research more.

Some of the texts students read are

• The Devil and the White City
• Teach Like a Pirate
• Into the Wild
• The Invention of Air
• Tuesdays with Morrie
• Lies My Teacher Told Me
• The Digital Divide
• Money Ball
• The Tipping Point
• Freakonomics
• What You’re Really Meant to Do
• Food Inc.,

And on and on and on.  

The importance of content passion is to try and spread this throughout your curriculum so that you don’t use up all of your content passion in the first month of the semester and then have to trudge through everything that you hate for the remainder of the semester.

Also, even when you exhaust your content passion, Burgess argues that’s where the second time of passion comes in to play.

The second type of passion is professional passion.

He asks, “Within your passion, but not specific to your subject matter, what are you passionate about? What is it about being an educator that drives you? What ignites a fire inside you?”

Since I teach mostly college in the high school classes, the simple answer is to prepare students to be successful in college.  And for a few years that was enough for me.

However, as I began to grow as a learner and teacher myself, my mission changed.  It’s still to prepare students to be successful college students, but now, though, I’ve added a second mission: to get students to discover their “why.”  I know I’m channeling Simon Sinek here, but I want kids to leave my class with an idea of what they are passionate about and what they might want to spend the rest of their lives doing.

That, friends, will get me fired up in a nano-second.

So here is the key to using professional passion: “On all of those days when you don’t have passion for your content, you must consciously make the decision to focus on your professional passion . . . Incorporating an LCL (life-changing lesson), my true passion in education, also allows me to consistently ‘bring it.’”

So even when I’m struggling with works cited and in-text citation, I can fall back on my professional passion about teaching them how to do this because they will have to have this mastered in order to be moderately successful in college.

When it comes to in-text citation and evaluating sources and even finding sources, one thing I love talking about is not collecting dots (such as amassing sources) but connecting dots (which means actually seeing how the sources and their authors connect and relate to each other).  That is a skill that they will have to use throughout their lives, especially when it comes to their passions and whys.

Finally, Burgess argues that teachers need to make use of their personal passions when possible.  It’s simple: “To keep your passion for teaching alive, find as many ways as possible to incorporate your personal passions into your work.”  Burgess uses one of his passions, magic, whenever he can to make his classes unique and engaging.

I agree.  But I also think bringing in your personal passions will pay off in other ways.  First, it humanizes you.  Students have passions - even if they aren’t prone to state them.  And when they see their teacher get fired up about something outside of the classroom, it helps them relate to the teacher.  Second, it is a great chance to be a role model.  We want passionate, driven, life-long learners, right?  Then we have to model those same things in our classes.

For me, my personal passions are my family, so I’m always bringing in stories or examples of my wife and kids to illustrate what we are studying.  I’m passionate about running and trying to get into shape, so I bring that into the class.  I’m passionate about fashion and looking sharp.  You can be sure I bring that in to my classes.  That’s why I harass many of my students about their yoga pants, mandals with socks, or - gulp - Crocs!

These three passions are vital to not only keeping us fresh as teachers, but, more importantly, they are vital in also making our classes unique and engaging.