First Full Teaching Week for PAGE
As I reflect back on this week, I realize that now, more than ever, teaching middle school is something that I want to do for the rest of my life. Any time that I mention that my life’s dream is to teach 7th — 8th grade Language Arts, I am usually met with a combination of hearty laughs and remarks about how you have to be such a strong individual to accomplish a feat such as that. After a week teaching rising 7th and 8th graders and leading/organizing a literature discussion group mostly on my own, I’m discovering that it’s not as scary as people make it out to be. Nor are middle schoolers the terrorizing demons that many popular films and TV shows make them out to be. Anna, one of the girls in my group shared at the end of the week that “Middle school isn’t all Hollywood makes us out to be, we’re not all angsty all the time, and we don’t hate everyone, actually we’re just trying to figure a lot of stuff out.”
That ‘stuff’ that she mentioned, I’m learning is a mix of everything; both heavy and light, and ranges in everything from how many friends that they have at any given time, to their gender identity.
The first week as an active member of the PAGE teaching team started out with an alarm clock gently chiming at the early hour of 6:15 am on Monday morning. I rolled out of bed, easily easing myself into the first new and exciting day which will no doubt be followed by many more over the next six weeks. The PAGE program has been divided up into two “sessions” each characterized by a thematic activity that will set the tone for the beginning half of each of the days. For the first two weeks, that is the garden project that is led by Jamie Calloway and Lindsey Montgomery, the two 7th grade science teachers that we were able to work with that first training week. During each day, the mornings start out by having the girls eat breakfast and then walk down to the garden. Here, Mrs. Montgomery presents them with a prompt: usually something relating to the garden and the connection that the girls have with it. Some of my favorite prompts from this past week (which yes, the interns were also encouraged to participate in as well!) were things like how a garden represents community and the relation that the girls might have to that in their personal lives. As the session went on, I came to learn that most of the girls had gardens of their own at their homes, which was a point of community and connection for a lot of them. For example, Maria — one of the students told me how her family raised chickens and cows, along with a multitude of produce, and sold it to local markets. This was something that she shared and connected to with Laci, another one of the students. My personal favorite prompt from the week was on a day which we planted trees in the beginnings of a permaculture orchard, Jamie’s pet project, where we were asked to consider the impact that trees had on a garden, and the impact that they had on humans as well. As I wrote, I considered the grounding impact that trees, and for that matter the mountains themselves had had on my life. Frequently this week, I found myself outdoors, sitting on the grassy field behind my apartment and looking up at the Blue Ridge Mountains which seem to be indinately suspended in the sky.
Along with the garden project, the other main component of the program is the literature groups, which meet for an hour and a half each day after lunch. These groups were largely left up to the design of fellow Berea College intern, Lilly Rice and myself. Each session we set a different theme for the girls to focus on. While the over-arching theme for the entire program is “discovering your roots through storytelling”, for this first session, I decided to minutely hone in on creating an ‘name for yourself’, and talking about the importance of that in the girls lives and how that ties into who they are as a community of Appalachian young women.
In order to accomplish these goals, I wrote down some specific objectives — and organized them into a standard lesson plan, also drawing on the skills that I have garnered from my time spent learning through the Berea College Education program. While the girls were split between two groups: mine and Lilly’s, we usually gathered together to do some sort of active activity such as duck, duck, goose, hide and seek, or yoga after lunch to get everyone’s minds and bodies alert and ready for the next portion of the day. At this point we spilt up and focused on our literature groups individually.
Each of our groups had a different theme: mine was writing portrait poems about a person or place that was particularly important to the girl’s identity. Since it was the week of Juneteenth, I also centered a lot of material around that holiday and the concept of ‘Affrilachia’, a term coined by Kentucky poet laurate Frank X Walker. On Wednesday, I, along with all of the other interns encountered our first what you could call “difficult day” It was on this day where I seriously considered if I could handle the weight, responsibility, and emotional trust that comes with being an educator. Two Duke university interns, who work primarily with rising high school juniors encountered a specific problem when girls in their group expressed concern about sexual assault allegations at their high school not being taken seriously. In my group, during individual reflection time, one of my students wrote about her sexual identity and how she considered herself an outlier at school. Both of these topics were things that weighed heavy on my mind this week as I thought through how I might teach about these sensitive issues without directly calling anyone out. In the end, I chose to read a poem — ‘Wild Geese’ by Mary Oliver the next day which generated a very honest and vurerable discussion about the concept of identity and both how we see ourselves and how others see us as well. The discussions that took place over the course of this week, which focused on race, sexual identity, Appalachian identiy, and assault were all things that at times were definitely difficult, but certainly not topics that any of the girls shyed away from or were hesitant to speak their mind on.
