There is a saying in public education, “bell to bell”. It means every teacher should be instructing and every student should be working from the moment the bell rings to start the class until the moment the bell rings to end the class. In fact, in faculty meetings we often talk about lost instructional time when a teacher fails to teach “bell to bell”.

Lost instructional time is a sin in public education. After all, there are high-stakes tests to get ready for.

When we operate in this way, we fail to nurture the human element in our schools. We miss out on what is going on in students’ complicated lives because we are so busy and moving at an unsustainable pace.

This unsustainable pace is reality because of our made up educational world – fake circumstances someone in an office somewhere outside the school decided were important. Every initiative, whether good or bad, effective or ineffective, is fake, made-up. And when we only focus on these made-up initiatives, we miss what is not fake but very real: struggles, realities and truths.

Every single student brings his or her own unique perspective and experiences to every situation. Every teacher, administrator, media specialist, cafeteria worker, assistant principal, and secretary does the same. There are an infinite amount of realities within a school building and if we slow down enough, we may be able to understand each other better.

A teacher may discover the reason Jose is sleeping in class is because he didn’t sleep well the night before as his mother and father were up all night arguing. Jessica doesn’t want to participate in the cooperative learning activity because she is obsessing over her mother’s surgery happening today. Andrew was combative in class because he is struggling with the fact his father has moved to Dallas and he hasn’t seen him in over a year.

The other day a freshman was brought into my office for skipping. Our security guard had found him walking around when he was supposed to be in class. I thought to myself, “I would be walking around too if I had to sit through that class.”

As he sat down to receive the prescribed punishment for skipping, he got a call on his cell phone. He looked at me in panic and asked if he could take the call as tears instantly appeared in his eyes. I said, “of course, take the call.” I noticed right away something was wrong; so I excused myself from my office to give him some privacy.

I sat outside my my door on the bench where all of my offenders sit – waiting to be called in to receive whatever punishment their crime calls for. About three minutes later he opened my door, his face red, eyes puffy. I asked him if he was ok. He said yes. He reluctantly told me it was his father who called and he hadn’t seen or heard from him in three years. Apparently he had been struggling with this all day and when the security guard found him wondering, it was because the kid just needed some air. So he took a walk. But taking a walk doesn’t align with the “bell to bell” philosophy. Taking a walk will land you in all day ISS.

Doesn’t the kid deserve some time to do something as human and basic as take a walk to clear his head? He’s a human being, not a standardized test score or a warm body to occupy a desk.

There are hundreds of stories just like this in every classroom in every school. But we are so busy with fake initiatives we rarely have time to ask students about the multiple realities playing out their lives: divorce, poverty, hunger, stress. If we all slowed down for a minute before getting angry with a student for taking a walk or putting her head down in class when she is supposed to be reading from the history textbook, we may really learn something.

Schools are a microcosm of our society. When we ignore the human element within our schools and replace it with made up bureaucracy and mandated ascendancies, we are ignoring who we are as people and the real circumstances impacting our lives.

If we truly want to educate, first we must discover the people we are and the stories that describe us.

2 Responses

  1. Matt

    I suppose that an alternative to such ‘bell to bell’ management would look something like the trivium or quadrivium from medieval/renaissance time, with modern delivery systems. Finding ways to provide students with convergent disciplines, which in essence may eliminate the need to firewall or transition the class to class, subject to subject, bell to bell mentality.

    As a long time student, I realized the Hegelian Theory long before I knew Hegel: Planned Change + Create Conflict + Force a Solution = Created real/unplanned problem with no solution. This principle is staple in public education, as well as much of ‘higher’ education.

    Another way to annihilate the antiquated ways of ‘bell to bell’ partitioning is by finding teachers whom are poly-specialists, i.e. those who have skilled backgrounds in more than one subject, and are able to teach those backgrounds into one bundle of time. Why have bells at all? So we simply shuffle students from one classroom pasture to another?

    Story telling should exist in all disciplines, incorporating them into our personal lives is even better, but coupling that with what we are learning in the moment is the best. Not only does current education sterilize personal understanding of disciplines, but it has sterilized much of the subjects themselves. There is no concern for application of subjects, because frankly, some subjects have no application outside of the classroom, the most clinical of all! Re-networking school with the real world is paramount. To ‘de-academic’ the academic world is a must.

    Reply
    • Kathleen Jasper

      Hi Matt,

      So glad you are here, reading and commenting. You bring up several important points. First, really we are using the trivium and quadrivium now without the modern delivery system. There are seven subjects a day based on skills and subjects students are uninterested in learning: math (algebra, geometry, calculus, etc.), science, history, language arts, reading, writing, and art or some other elective. The model has not changed since the renaissance period. And although I believe the renaissance period to be very important, we need to modify this delivery method of instruction.

      We do have poly-specialists, especially in high school where many teachers are career changers – they entered teaching after starting in a career somewhere else. However, those poly-specialties are wasted because there is no time to tap into that resource with all of the running around and testing going on.

      And I ask the same question you ask, why have bells at all? It is strange that we have evolved in so many areas; however in public education, we are still holding on to archaic practices.

      Finally, maybe some of our core subjects should include ways to navigate life’s hard realities. Currently, life training consists of a few sayings on a teacher’s wall like, “Life Isn’t Fair; Get Over It” and “Shoot for the Moon and You’ll Reach a Star”. It’s completely useless. However if we can show kids how to use meditation or visualization or even breathing to navigate some of the tough situations in life, we may get closer to building a better society.

      Reply

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