The Big Fresh August 22, 2015 Whining and Learning

If you took one-tenth the energy you put into complaining and applied it to solving the problem, you’d be surprised by how well things can work out.

                                                                                                                Randy Pausch

This is hard. I can’t do this. I don’t know what to write.

We’ve all heard variations of this in our classrooms, and I certainly hear them as I work with teenagers. We find the beautiful, well-crafted mentor text that we’re excited about sharing with students. We prepare them and share it. We look at craft elements. We send them off to write. And then the whining starts.

How do we get past it? We get them writing and practicing. We sit beside them and encourage. We pair them up – one who is struggling with one who gets it. We know they just need to get past that hurdle of the insecurities and struggle.

Once they get something on the page and start writing, they often surprise themselves with how good their writing can be. Sometimes they even surprise themselves with how much they enjoyed doing it.

Huh, this is pretty cool. I was feelin’ this.

Teaching and learning is like this much of the time, whether we are the teacher or learner. We go through stages of it’s too hard, to I’ll try it, to I’m getting the feel of it, to realizing we enjoy the work.

As teachers we’re almost always prepared for a little whining or fear when we start a new lesson. Goodness, when we’re planning the lesson ourselves we often experience some whining in our heads and a bit of fear the lesson could flop. But when students discover they are more capable than they thought, as writers trying a new skill or readers trying a new text, they find the surprising fun in challenging work.

That was good. I like doing this.

This is what having high expectations is all about — knowing our students, supporting them, and helping them see what’s possible until the new skills are second nature. Even if the bridge between the fear of the unknown and the new learning involves a little whining.

Jillian Heise teaches 7th and 8th grade language arts at the Indian Community School of Milwaukee. She also serves as Chair of the Wisconsin State Reading Association Children’s Literature Committee. Jillian (@heisereads) blogs at Heise Reads and Recommends and Heise Teaches and Writes.