Monday, November 5, 2007
What does who want?
Like I said earlier, I cannot personally say whether or not choice theory works. I have not seen it work, but I'm new and I haven't seen a lot of things. However, I am troubled by it because it hinges on the question "What do you want?" Teenagers don't always know what they want. They don't yet have the ability to scrutinize their thoughts and feelings for the truth behind their actions. Also, teenagers who are "at risk" are "at risk" because, for whatever reason, they want bad things. They want to be loved, sure, but they also want to smoke a joint. One is okay the other is destructive. So the answer to the question, "What do you want?" is sometimes simply irrelevant.
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I have actually seen this question asked to a whole classroom of students. The question, "What do you want?", was followed by others such as: Why do you want it?; What good will that do you?; How long will that last? etc. The person asking gave them lots of time to sit and think, explore authors, discuss in small groups, and take the first tentative steps of their voices.
Often times, kids have the ability of metacognition, it's just that it takes persistence and belief (i.e. time) for them to pursue it in a classroom full of potential threats (i.e.peers). I have seen kids change to abstract thinking in a couple of days. It is possible.
I think with your class, the real risk is not realizing what these kids really need. If they are "at-risk", shouldn't the curriculum address that? I mean, shouldn't the curriculum be about them? If these kids truly don't know what they need, how else could a curriculum really be for them? Obviously, they need to learn about themselves. Why even fight with them to do otherwise? You will just be like every other teacher getting in the way of the real knowledge they have to fight for elsewhere.
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