Whatever you teach and wherever you teach it, there are resources and allies around you that you have probably never noticed. I first learned this during an in-service.
“Inventory your community!” the speaker said. “What is in and around your school? How can you connect with it? Who is nearby? How can you solicit their involvement?” The suggestion changed my outlook and helped me to teach differently and better.
One of my first outreach efforts involved an elderly couple who walked the halls for exercise every afternoon about four o’clock to avoid icy sidewalks. The man was slightly stooped and the woman fixed her white hair in an elegant Gibson girl style. As I speculated about their age, I wondered if they had family stories about the 1930s, the era I was getting ready to teach.
The next afternoon I watched for them and went out to introduce myself. I asked if they had any stories about the Depression and whether they would be willing to talk to my students about them. They agreed immediately.
A few days later they were telling my sophomores how President Roosevelt closed the banks just days after their wedding. They described scrip, unemployment, WPA construction projects, and creating meals with other couples in their building based on the meat left over at the butcher shop where one of them worked. They told stories for 45 minutes and then let the students ask them questions. I recorded them and showed the tape to classes who missed the “live” performance.
I realized other teachers were resources too. A teacher who emigrated from Pakistan described how people apply for a visa, sell their possessions, and come with the only two suitcases in order to meet the U.S. requirements. A teacher from Vietnam described fleeing the Viet Cong with nothing but the clothes on his back; this changed students’ views of the 1960’s.
The oak relief carving on the War memorial in the lower hall was a visual representation of FDR’s Four Freedoms speech, so we walked down to look at it and the speech was suddenly easier for students to understand and remember. The names inscribed on the memorial were those of former students. We took down the names and looked them up in the yearbooks the school librarian had stored in the back room. Tenth graders looked up the school activities of long ago students just their age who went on to serve and subsequently die in World War II.
This research spread to the downtown library, city directories and phone calls by some students to people with the same last name as the war dead in search of information about “their” guys.
Soon I moved beyond the school itself. The senior citizen housing up the hill was within walking distance. I arranged with the manager to recruit seniors who would be willing to be interviewed about World War II. I had my students develop interview sheets and we visited the center for a two hour field trip that required no busses at all. We wrote short stories based on the interviews and went back for a reading.
Walking in the opposite direction took us to a city cemetery with gravestones that listed deaths as far back as 1840. There students did rubbings, math problems about life spans and developed plots for stories based on ideas gleaned from epitaphs.
Then I checked the distance to the branch library using my odometer—1.3 miles. This meant that the public access radio and television studios on the second floor of the library were also within walking distance. The public television center provided free orientations and low cost training for videotaping, editing and directing. I applied for a grant to cover training costs and began to build a media cadre. Any student who went to the orientation I scheduled on a no-school day was eligible to get free tuition to the public television classes. I was amazed when 22 kids showed up on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving!
I found helpful individuals too. A local realtor coordinated an essay contest for Memorial Day. A local business recruited volunteers who helped students develop their writing skills. People willingly brought in their scrapbooks and shared memorabilia and artifacts rarely seen outside museums and the students responded eagerly. Best of all, it wasn’t hard or time consuming, yet it brought new excitement into my teaching and re-energized me.
So, the take-away message is that assessing all the resources in your building and neighborhood can yield a wide variety of people, activities and approaches that you can use. You can enrich whatever subject you are teaching in no-cost or low-cost ways that bring the real world into your lessons.
