Tools of the Trade

My first year of teaching 7th graders was at a Catholic school. I left Our Lady of Mt Carmel the next year to teach at a public school and for the next 20 my first years, I taught high school ELA until a few years ago when my principal called me in August to tell me I would be teaching 7th grade ELA for the second time in my career.

I may have been entering the second decade of my teaching career, but I felt like a first-year teacher all over again.

The standards have changed. Technology has changed. Have the kids changed too? In between my first year of teaching and my twentieth, I had raised a daughter, so I knew the kids had changed. I just didn’t understand how much.

My school provides Chromebooks for students, so I was familiar with my high school students periodically needing to charge their Chromebooks if it was late in the day or if they forgot it in their car, but the only way some of the 7th graders’ Chromebooks would work is if they were constantly plugged in. Charging cords were everywhere.

I remember asking my students, “I don’t get it. Why aren’t your Chromebooks holding a charge? They’re not that old.”

My students just shrugged their shoulders looking at each other and then at me mumbling, “I dunno.” Then I heard under someone’s breath, “snitches get stitches.”

At that point I knew something was up.

I discreetly asked around and someone finally fessed up: some of the students had broken open the screens of their Chromebooks to remove the magnet inside which told the computer to go to sleep when it was closed.

With no magnet, their Cool Math Games were able to continually run in the background and they would never lose their place.

I had to laugh to myself. These kids were resourceful. The teaching tools that worked with my high school students were not going to work with them. I needed to change how I approach teaching them.

***

I met Darlene in graduate school. We were both in our forties getting an MFA alongside students in their twenties right out of college. She’d arrive to class from her job as a carpenter, and I’d save her a seat.

When I was desperate to get and keep my students’ attention, I contacted Darlene to see if she was interested in working with my students on a writing/carpentry project.

We based our project on Stephen King’s toolbox metaphor from his memoir, On Writing. The idea is that a writer or anyone really needs all sorts of literal and metaphorical tools for projects. They could be writing projects or life projects. We planned to do a half dozen classroom visits where Darlene would guide my students in building their own toolboxes after the work session, she would conference with them one-on-one to give feedback on their writing.

Darlene’s first visit for “Tools of the Trade” was in February 2020. The year started chaotic which became even more so when I decided to have 7th graders build toolboxes in an English classroom.

During the first session, the students struggled with measuring and using the hand tools. Darlene and I would meet after every session noting what worked and making plans for how we can improve for the next session.

It was March 2020, and nobody knew what was about to happen. Schools throughout Ohio and the nation closed a few weeks later.

“What the heck are we going to do now?”

The toolboxes were half made. My students were just getting comfortable sharing and talking about their writing with Darlene. We were making progress. We all thought schools were going to reopen after two weeks. Then it was two more weeks until finally the governor announced schools weren’t reopening at all that year.

Darlene ended up finishing the toolboxes for the students, and she joined our Zoom classes online. I arranged to have students pick up their toolboxes outside the school at the end of what was supposed to be the end of the school year. We packed the toolboxes with writing activities, books to read and sandpaper with instructions on how to smooth out the rough edges. It wasn’t the same though, but then nothing was at that time.

Fast forward three years. I had those same 7th grade students s last year as 9th graders and now I have them as 10th graders. I’m happy to say: they are a delight to have in class, eager to learn, and no longer vandalizing school property to play Cool Math Games.

Darlene Glass prepping for Tools of the Trade