Discipline of Desks

Please read the following poem and contemplate on the meaning of this expression:  "discipline of desks":

Outing


Out the back past buses
out a gate
we crossed a dry field
chatting in twos and threes
then poked and scratched
along the thick wood's edge.

Three girls giggled with their heads together,
whispering about the smell of leaves.

By the ball field
the sticker bushes parted,
shallow ruts
led beneath the trees
up the hill.
We gathered wild roses, black-eyed susans,
ferns and thistles
lavender
and burrs.

Boys scrambled recklessly ahead.
Some stood like paintings of explorers,
one foot set firm atop a mound of dirt.

Stopping still, we listened for the cheeping
of crickets and the clicking of a leaf.
falling through leaves
--not the click of pencils
no locker slams
or voices in the hall.
We dreaded leaving,
imagined hours on the sun-dappled hillside
watching the leaf showers, counting saplings,
watching birds chase-dance through light and shade.
with the smell
of heated dust.

Time between bells
with the discipline
of desks.
-David Burk, English Journal, March 1992


To be honest, I had never quite placed such a connotation on the meaning of school desks.  Maybe because I have always enjoyed school?  Maybe because I am not really the "outdoor type"?  Give me a book any day!

The desk, though, is a discipline tool. A cage.  "Sit down."  "No one out of their seats."  "You do not have permission to get out of your seat."  And the directives go on...and on...and on....

Then, we line the desks in rows...military style, further discouraging conversation, a tool which we hope the students have mastered, especially after attending thirteen years of this institution we label as an education in America.

But my students sit at tables.  My desks are arranged in lit circle format.  Is this better?  ANSWER:  What do the students DO at these tables?

• As I write this, I am picturing my classes over the last couple of days, where I had them working in groups, but guess who still did too much of the talking?
• As I write this, I am thinking of too many students who looked bored.  Bored!  Really?  I spent a lot, let me repeat....A LOT of time preparing that lesson!  Being bored in my class is not part of the legacy as a teacher that I want to leave behind.

Now picture this,  a classroom in our building that has tables with NO chairs.  Why?  According to that teacher, they work at the computer stations and then use the tables to confer...without sitting down.  Without the discipline of the desk.

This leads me to my next personal challenge as a teacher:  to increase the amount of inquiry within all my classes within each of students and between the brains sitting in those desks.  Ooopss...just transformed that desk into a neuron-growing machine!  "Our minds thrive upon the driving process of inquiry--our striving to find and figure out what seems strange, unusual, or novel." ...from John Barell's Developing More Curious Minds.

The Theory of the Iceburg...according to Hemingway:  "If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water." - Death in the Afternoon, Scribner's, 1932, Chap. 16, 192. (Source)

My proposal: 

• Teach one eighth of the time.
• Students inquire 7/8's of the time.

Okay..seriously?  Those numbers make me a bit nervous.  That GOLD person inside me is going to have to practice being quiet!
Goals:

1. Students become engaged in group inquiry projects.
2. Culminate this nine-week unit with a Socratic Seminar.
3. More and more open-ended questions.  Then....
4. More wait time.
5. No...wait...wait for it....give them time to think...

 NOTE to Student Interns in Methods for Secondary English 2011:

• Plan...begin right now...to Never Work Harder Than Your Students.
• That's right...do as I encourage, not as I have taught in my 20+ years of teaching!
• I have you to thank for the inspiration for this post, for as I was pondering on our next class, I came across the above poem.  So...thank you! 

Not sure that I will ever look at a desk in the same way!
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Poem retrieved from Poems by Adolescents and Adults, "School Life,"  Chapter 5, pp 108-109.