I have a visitor at my school this morning, a visitor and a dear friend. She’s a professor and researcher and requested some visits to classes on our grade 11 and 12 campus. We’ll make short stops in several classes. It’s a little intellectually frenetic, as an observer, going from one thing to the next. Yet, I suppose, it’s not all that far removed from the student experience … they just stay in each class longer, switch from one to the other all day long, and follow up the next day, and the next … 

We drop into an English classroom first. Eight students around a table, analyzing a poem by Wilfred Owen. He is describing the experience of World War I veterans in a mental hospital. War messes you up, is the short summary. The longer version is what the students are discussing, what the teacher is gently pulling out of the conversation. “Be as short and concise as you can be,” he suggests, as the students talk about the central themes. “Excellent,” he says, as a student suggests this theme: “the extent to which war is a waste of young male potential.” The teacher pauses and says, “You could even get rid of male. And young. To what extent is war a waste of potential.”

Heavy. So hard to know what exactly you will encounter when you open a classroom door. We hear as we leave, “Find a propaganda poster from WW I.” He’s setting up a contradiction to make the poem even more poignant, I think. Heroism, bravery, strength … that sort of poster. Contrasted with the loss of potential, with a life in a mental hospital, of a life not lived.

***

Downstairs we step into a biology class. They are comparing vegan and non-vegan meat and considering what intervening variables they would need to consider in some sort of experiment. They mention controlling factors like how much heat and how much time is needed to cook beef and vegan beef, chicken and a vegetable based substitute, meat and tofu.

I’m not sure what to think! It occurs to me that this could well be an example of teaching Sustainable Development Goals within the curriculum. The goal is setting up a good experiment, while the content is touching on sustainable living. But I’m not sure that’s the goal, I’m just thinking, based on what I know about the teacher, that exploring non-meat alternatives is not a coincidence. 

The conversation turns to allergies, and anyone who has had a reaction is eager to share their experience. The energy is good, the students start sharing pictures of fruit and other foods from their computer as they search for obscure vocabulary in English. Prickly pear and dragon fruit, for example … I wonder what the words were in Turkish, Arabic, and Chinese?

The teacher refocuses by turning the conversation to consent forms. Apparently, in their experiment, students are going to ask their friends to sample foods. Consent is a natural thing to ask here, and a good time to talk about the research process again. No tricking research participants into doing what they don’t want to do! Not anymore, anyway.

******

We wade through the current of students during passing time. A five minute reshuffle of who is where. An opening and closing of the sluices. Snippets of conversation in English, Chinese, Spanish.

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Tinkercad. Creating 3D digital designs. A design class. The teacher wants to make sure the students believe in Tinkercad. He plays it up, “it’s really useful.” He gets the students to open online tutorials, tells students to do the first short tutorials. “This is a low stress class. I’m going to put on some music, just make your way through the tutorials.” Even before he finishes his introduction I can see how the students are manipulating a cube on their screens. There’s a bit of feedback built into the program when the tutorial is successfully completed: confetti flies across the screen. The first student calls out “I’m done.” Done with the first tutorial, anyway, the teacher tells him to keep going. 

Within minutes the students are heads down, working. One student asks what a torus is. The teacher is working with an individual student on the other side of the room. He gets up off his knee and circles around the desks to talk about toruses. Tori? (Looks like either is acceptable, after a quick Google search.)

The teacher moves to another student to answer a question. “This is cool,” he says. “If you really want to cook with gas” – and here he looks at the student to see if she understood the idiom, looks like she did – “you might use different software. But Tinkercad is good for now.” He shows her the next step in the tutorial. Something about that torus again. He explains what diameter means. If she isn’t familiar with the term diameter, I bet she didn’t really understand why the teacher suggested cooking with gas! But she’s getting individual attention, she’s moving forward, one-on-one learning with a patient, attentive teacher.

But where’s that music he promised?

********

¡Hola! 

Spanish class. I don’t know what the task is yet, we are just finding a seat, but projected at the front of the room are short biographies and pictures of da Vinci, Tesla, Mistral, and Earhart. I know them all but Mistral. She was a Chilean poet, diplomat, and professor, I read online. A Nobel prize in literature in 1945, teacher of Neruda, who wasn’t so bad a poet himself.

It seems the grammar content is past tenses. Present perfect and simple past. Examples from the four short texts are on the board. The students must have been searching for past tense verbs in the texts before we arrived. They are strengthening their awareness of what is going on here grammatically, comparing the past tense forms in Spanish to their individual native languages. French, Portuguese, and Italian speakers are going to find nice, similar patterns that help them out a lot. Chinese speakers not so much. Maybe Chinese speakers are comparing Spanish to English, there is some correspondence there, at least a bit more than Chinese. I’d love to be able to see their thinking process. And of course, I might have it all wrong. Are they really comparing across languages they already know, checking for patterns, transferring knowledge?

I don’t have to remember the lesson, so my focus differs from the students’ focus. I notice that I’m enjoying the sound of the Spanish the teacher produces. Northern Spain, so suave somehow. More so than the halting, hesitant attempts by the students. They switch to English often. But they are putting in some good effort.

There’s so much to enjoy about language – the rhythm, the intonations, the puzzle of grammar, and the patterns that are always interrupted with exceptions, just when you think you have a handle on it. And then there are the little words that come up again and again. “Vale, vale,” the teacher says repeatedly. “Ay perdón,” she says when she misspells a word on the board. How fun is that?!

The bell rings. Buena suerte, students of Spanish, and good luck in design, science, English, and all of it, all day long, today, tomorrow, this semester.