Teaching Philosophy in Schools

Harry has a nice post up at CT about teaching Controversial Issues to high schoolers, with a link to his paper about it. I encourage you to read both. The idea is that philosophy is important, because it equips us with certain skills that we need to navigate our moral life (among other skills like reason/logic, critical thinking, etc). An ethics course can equip students to analyze arguments and make their own, all in the attempt to discern some ethical truths. Now Harry rightly points out that this sort of course does not work until you first strike down the pop philosophy concept of moral relativism (which is more prevalent in mainstream thinking than you'd suppose). After all, if there is no moral fact of the matter, however hard it might be to know, then there really is no use discussing these things, because you can't reach a truth that doesn't exist. Assuming you get everyone on board with that, there's a lot that you can do with philosophy, even with younger children. So before I say anything else, I want to be clear that I am definitely on board with more philosophy in schools. My concern, however, is how this can be done well. If it can't be done well, than I think perhaps it shouldn't be done at all.

Take the Controversial Moral Issues class as an example. This sort of class is different than your typical high school class. It does not involve memorizing and repeating facts, and starkly opposing answers can (if argued well) all be given a good grade. The focus is less on the answer, though the moral answer is important, but more on the process of arriving at that answer. Now, teaching a class that focuses on method and not a set of answers is tricky, because as the teacher you have to be comfortable with the method yourself. The method is often called the reflective equilibrium, which is a fancy way of saying that you think of some assumptions we can agree upon and then you reason out to a conclusion. You can argue with each over the truth of the assumptions or the validity of the logic. This is not an easy task, esp not to teach. The Socratic method is also fun, but not easy. How can you make the students arrive at the answers themselves by only asking questions? You don't want to lecture at them, but you want them to learn something. It's a tough balance, and I'm afraid that balance may not be teachable.

Here's a real life example. This past year I taught English in a French high school. In one of my classes, I taught a CMI-like course. I knew the material, the articles, the arguments, etc. I was very comfortable with what I was teaching, having studied it quite a bit as an undergraduate (something not most teachers have done). When I started teaching that class, I was floored by how poorly it often went. Why? I knew the material, wasn't that enough? Not hardly. I had to figure out, somehow, how to teach my students how to think. It seemed impossible. How do you change how they think??? How do you teach them to be critical and logical? I'm not sure I know. I had some classes that went well, while others bombed. I'm not sure I know why in either case. One thing that did work sometimes (though this may have been cheating) was being horribly uncharitable to an author's argument. Flaws in philosophical work are often subtle, and most high schoolers (and college students) will have a really hard time catching them. So to help my students out, I rewrote the arguments and exaggerated the "holes" (as I called them). I made the faults look as obvious as possible, but even then, my students had a hard time finding them (I admit, part of this was the language barrier). Eventually, some of my students learned how to spot the holes. Most of my students did not, but some of those at least started to understand the holes after I pointed them out. One thing I never accomplished, arguably the most important thing, was to get them to argue something for themselves. To be original and creative. Maybe it was my own fault, or the language thing, or just that the students weren't ready to do that yet. I'm not sure. But I do know this much: that class was not easy to teach.

So why do I worry about how well a teacher can teach the class? I worry for the sake of the student, because a poorly taught ethics class is worse than no ethics class at all. Worst case scenario: a teacher teaches dogmatically (either because she wants to promote her own views or, more likely, because she is under pressure from the school and parents to teach a certain view) and the students come out with a certain set of "answers" fed to them in class. Perhaps they were even taught the best arguments for those answers, but even so, they did not learn how to think about those answers critically. In fact, a student coming out of a class like that is more likely to be confidant that those answers are right, than a student who (never having had a class in ethics) is still unsure what she thinks about it all. I'd rather a student be unsure but not brainwashed than the opposite. A commenter at CT replied to my concern with a good point. The response was that sometimes our concern for "impartiality" puts up too many unnecessary roadblocks. Yes, I agree that teachers could never be completely impartial, and that's okay, but that doesn't mean some teachers (perhaps due to school pressure or liability) won't be unacceptably partial. Even without outside pressure, it's very hard not to let your own views creep in and color the discussion (it certainly was for me --in fact, to offset this, I tried to fight for the opposite side more, or make sure I was fighting for the side that was the least popular in class).

Teachers will always have biases in their classes, but some classes should be taught anyways. I think that a college level CMI course, even if biased, is better than none. However, I think a biased CMI course in a high school is worse than none at all. Part of this is a distrust that a high school student could recognize bias and file it away as such. When I was in high school, I was much more trusting of the authority of my teachers than I was at university. Part of that was due to the fact that I had many more professors at university that had contradictory views (making it clear that neither side was decided upon). But a bigger reason, I suspect, was that I was more mature as a student in university than I was in high school. In high school I was too inexperienced to mistrust the views of my teachers, and I was much too easily swayed. Now I'm not saying this is true of all high schoolers, certainly not. And maybe if it is true that would in fact be another reason to have CMI course, so that students could be taught to be more critical. There's also the concern that not everyone, in fact most students, won't go to college (or if they do they may not take a basic ethics course). The CMI's of today are important enough that everyone ought to be thinking about them, so maybe high school is the best place to start that process. And I want schools to have well run CMI classes. That, to me, would be amazing. But I just don't know. If the course is poorly done, that may cause more harm than good, and that wouldn't be a worthwhile trade-off.

So I'll follow the comments over at CT, and maybe if I see some good suggestions for how to train teachers to do this (and give them the academic leg room they need to do so), then I'll be less worried about it. Or maybe the jobless philosophy phds should step up and help out. Who knows...

Radical Teaching makes the news!

My mom and Denise have made the news for the revolution they've been leading in their 8th grade classrooms (using Choice Theory). Holler back. Check out the article here.

From the article: "North Shore is like many middle schools in its search for new ways to motivate students to learn, Principal Dale Fisher said. Choice theory attempts to transfer that motivation from external forces, such as badgering or cajoling by teachers, to internal ones by teaching students why they should push themselves in school."

If you're wondering what her classroom looks like, check out her teaching blog here.

Philosophy in schools

I stumbled upon this short article today from Thoughts, Arguments and Rants. It's about the rise in popularity of philosophy in Scottish schools. That brought me joy. But it also reminded me of how that's far from probable in the US. I would love for elementary-high school age kids to learn philosophy (and so, I'm sure, would some of them), but there are so many obstacles to that ever happening (not least of which is the lack of teachers comfortable with or qualified to teach it). The only high school philosophy class I've ever heard of in the US has been at a private religious high school. But, you never know....

(If my year in a French high school has taught me anything, it has taught me that I couldn't spend the rest of my life teaching high schoolers... so alas, I could not switch career paths and try to become a high school philosophy teacher...)

Free Education: nerd alert

Okay so my joy at discovering this makes me the biggest nerd ever. Now I may be behind the times, and everyone may already know about this, but this is new for me. Apparently, you can audit classes online. No fees, no registration. Just pick a class and watch the streaming video. Wow. The link above is for some of Yale's classes, but I guess if you search the web you can find others (from Notre Dame, Berkley, and others). I got excited because there's a philosophy class I'm going to watch after break. Who knows what else is out there. Get excited. Free education for nerds everywhere. The idea behind it all is to give folks who love to learn, regardless of their qualifications or financial situation, the chance to do what they love. Now you can't get a degree from watching these classes (which does nothing for the positional goods problem with higher education), but you can indulge in some shameless self-edification. So now I can add some educational viewing to my trashy online tv (the OC, the Hills, Laguna Beach, Grey's...I have no shame).

Misusing History in the Classroom

Today's post, as you can guess, is about how history is misused to promote other people's agendas. I used to think, quite naively, that history was about facts. History class, I thought, was about memorizing those facts and then proving on my test that I had memorized them. Wrong, oh so wrong. History is closer to literature than science. It has to be written. It has to be passed on from the perspective of someone else. History isn't pure and indisputable. It's living and active, and controversial. Who knew? You know what else I didn't know? I didn't know that the history I learned in the States was, for the most part, pretty cushy and pro-American. I didn't learn about the uncomfortable periods. Sure we talked about slavery, but it was the south, and not us, and you know, we can focus on the fun stories instead like the few slaves who escaped. Civil rights was much the same. Let's glorify the heroes and sweep the jerks (um, the majority, of us) under the rug. I feel sadly misinformed, to be honest. Recently, I've been doing some thinking about how schools use history to shape students (mainly thanks to Harry's chapter about it). Are schools justified in promoting patriotism, for example, by glorifying past patriots? Of course no one's claiming to do a whole 1984 history change-up, but still, it's meddling by omission. Who you put in the curriculum will vastly change the overall attitude of the student towards the society being studied. Not that I think it should be a completely depressing and somber lineup, but it shouldn't be so gosh darn warm and fuzzy. It's all a bit disturbing, to be honest. I won't go into arguments and details (go read Harry's chapter if you want), but you can see where the problem is.

Okay so I told you that to tell you this. In France, Sarco's doing some history meddling of his own, and it's rather upsetting. I had heard rumors just after his election that he wanted to use history classes "to produce better citizens," but I dismissed it then because I didn't think that was possible. Oh I was wrong; it is possible. And this is how he's started doing it: Guy Moquet. Ever heard that name before this year? I didn't think so. Neither has the typical French student (well, at least not this generation, he was famous for awhile but I think newer generations hadn't heard of him). Anyway, from this year onward they will celebrate the life (and death) of this teenage every October 22. So who was Guy? Well, to be honest, he was pretty cool. He was a teenager that refused to side up with the Nazis, joined the Resistance, and was eventually executed for it. He was only 17 years old when he decided to pay the ultimate price for his convictions, his own life. So what do I have against Guy? Nothing. He's a cool kid, and sure, his story bears repeating in the classroom. The problem is this: Sarco has purposefully given Guy his own day (where his letter will be read and the French Resistance will be discussed) that all schools have to honor because he, admittedly, wants students to emulate Guy's model of good citizenship and patriotism! Yes my friends, Sacro admits to using history to shape impressionable minds into being more patriotic. (Interesting, Guy's communist ties are downplayed.)

Now I can see why Guy's example would be a good example of political dissidence, which can be a very good thing. He was someone who stood up for what he believed in, and kids should know that. But, the problem comes in the glorification of this one story. Sure Guy was cool, and sure you talk about the importance of the Resistance, but what about everyone else? In the newsletter our high school gets there was a huge story about Guy, and then another page with a timeline of important dates for the Resistance. It talked about the Reich, the Jews, and the good French folks... but it left out an important element. There was one sentance about the Vichy government. One. And it pretty much said that it was Petain's fault, and it said that his government (notice, not the French government) collaborated with the Germans. What about everyone else? Yes, a heroic few stood up for humanity, but they are hardly representative of everyone. French students need to learn about Guy, and then also learn about the hundreds of other French men and women who looked the other way. Why should they, because that's what many of us are doing today! You have to learn about history's uglier stories if you really want to produce good citizens. If you lull students into a false sense of righteousness, then they won't be equipped to stand up for justice. Sure we can talk about the heroes, but let's not forget that the villains were one of us too. They weren't demons in disguise, they were regular people like you and me. We are all capable of doing what they've done. We can't turn a blind eye to history's stains, or we'll continue to make the same mistakes.

Okay, I'm climbing down from my soapbox now. Sorry for that. I just don't think it's right, what we do with history. Not only is it bad to purposefully manipulate students, but I don't even think it works the way you want it to. Ignorance doesn't fight for justice, it just keeps things from changing. Though, that may be just what the government wants... Who knows.

Children and Philosophy part 2

At the end of my last post on children and philosophy, I mentioned a project that I've started with a bunch of GT 8th graders. The project is this: they can read whatever they want, and then they have to blog about it. It's simple enough, really. I've compiled a booklist of reads that are on the HS or college level that they may or may not find interesting. Pretty much, I've thought of books that I think I might have been able to enjoy when I was in the 8th grade (that is, before they were ruined by literature classes). The books are actually a little on the risque side, but what great literature isn't? And besides, they'll encounter it eventually, so why not pique their interest early?

I told the kids this: "You should pick any book you want, even if it's not on the list. Try to make it a hard book, you know, so you'll be challenged and stuff. Make sure your parents say it's okay for you to read the book. If you start a book and it sucks, then stop reading it." At this point, they were floored. They were never given the choice to stop reading a book they weren't enjoying. Several of their faces showed mistrust. Was I for real? I continued, "Then I want you to think about what the author is trying to say about life, or society, or morality. You know, the philosophical questions." Now they were confused. "What exactly is philosophy," they asked. Ha! Heck if I know. I only studied it for 3 years, but I can't for the life of me explain it to 8th graders. I explained their mission like this, "You guys are sick of doing plot diagrams, finding the climax, and making character sketches, right?" Total agreement. "Well, I don't want you to write about any of that. I want you to look for the deeper issues, and all of these books talk about them in some way or another. Your job is to figure out what questions the books bring up, and how are they answered. You can agree or disagree with the author. Or maybe the author doesn't even answer the question, but you may think you can. It's up to you. I want you to go beyond the plot when you read. Find what you are interested in. Then, write about it. If you are only interested in one page, write about it. This is not a book report; this is a blog where you can take your interests and develop them. The blog is very informal. Write about whatever you want, but try to be meaningful. I don't want you to tell me what happens. I've read these books; I already know. And frankly, I don't care. I want to know what these books make you think about."

Now I had their attention. They looked excited. For once they could get credit for doing what they do anyways, read books for fun. I also stressed that they should be reading each other's posts and leaving critical/helpful comments on them. I was overjoyed to see them that excited. Several of the students went out that very night to get a copy of Heart of Darkness from the public library. They were ready to get started.

The cons: blogs are on the Internet, and older people are afraid of the Internet. My fun project was not met well by some teachers, and probably won't be by some parents. A blog, heaven forbid. Is that like myspace? Yeah, wonderful. No a blog is not like myspace. Yes, the students can write whatever they want. But, the students are well aware that their teachers, parents and principal plan on reading their blogs/comments regularly. They have been instructed to post at their own risk. Their blog may be on the Internet, but that also means that their parents (for the first time) will really be able to see what their kids can do. I think it's great, and thankfully so do some of the teachers and the principal (and now I think, the superintendent!). We have had one student's parents opt out, which is fine. That student will be writing within the school's network, so it won't be online. The point of having the blogs be independent and online was for them to be able to keep it if they want when they leave the 8th grade. I wanted them to develop a skill that doesn't stop when the grades come in. They may not keep them, but they can, and some might. Sure, a crazy person could find their blog and leave a strange comment. But they have been removed from the listings, and honestly, unless someone goes to the 2 millionth page on a google search, their blogs won't be found. But because the blogs are open, we can show their project to other schools/students/teachers/etc. So we'll see how it all pans out.

Now back to the philosophy bit. These students are not formally exposed to philosophy at their school, and they won't be at their high school. Some may never really come across it at all, depending on what they study in college. But, that doesn't mean they can learn how to exercise some critical thought on their own. Because their blogs are independent, they won't have any formal instruction on how to argue, analyze, etc. But they will start looking for these questions on their own. And they will at least start to think about their own answers. This project is about getting them to start thinking critically on their own. It's not the perfect way to do it, but it's not a bad option. The other teachers and I will be reading their posts and writing comments to challenge them to think harder. The dialogue will begin. It may be the best we can do, and I think it's worth a shot.

Children and Philosophy

In the public school system where I grew up, philosophy was never an option. Physics, yes. Calculus, yes. History, of course. But philosophy, never. To many of you, this is no surprise. Philosophy hasn't been considered a core subject for some time (and by sometime, I mean at least as far back as I can remember, which isn't far...), and the future isn't looking good for resurrecting it. Of course you can sometimes find a philosophy class (or something like it) in some private schools, but especially in a religious private school, it's not likely to be taught as openly as it ought to be. It hasn't always been this way though. Philosophy used to be the subject, and all other subjects were really only subdivisions of it. So where did it go? Why aren't we teaching it anymore?

I think it would be a mistake to think that philosophy, or at least a course in philosophy, is about learning something. Learning philosophy is more like learning some way. Yes, you can teach a history of philosophy course and teach about all the different philosophers and all of their theories. However, a real philosophy class focuses on the method of obtaining knowledge. Whether you're studying what exists, what we ought to do, or how we can know anything, you have to learn a method for reaching those answers. I think philosophy hasn't been taught precisely because it's not a matter of simply presenting information and having students commit it to memory. If it was, then it would be easy enough to include. It isn't easy to teach a method for thinking, for critical thinking. In fact, I standby the rather heretical claim that I never really learned how to think critically before college. I probably did it on my own sometimes, or by accident, but I was never formerly taught that I ought to be doing it or how to go about doing it properly. At this point, you may be wondering, if the difficulty is that it's a method, then why do we teach math? Math, at it's best, is the method for rationally reaching a numerical sum for whatever problem we are facing. When you teach math, you teach a method for reaching a solution that is more than just the memorization of formulas and conversion factors. So why can we teach math and not philosophy?

That's a good question, and the only answer I can propose is that perhaps it's because no one ever fought over the square root of 25. And people certainly don't disagree over the sum of real numbers, or the multiplication of fractions. Math is numbers, and numbers are neutral. You can replace the numbers with letters, and even those letters are neutral. But moral realism, dualism v physicalism, does God exist, etc, are not neutral issues. Philosophy tries to get at basic truths about our world, and these truths are philosophical precisely because they can't be verified empirically. You can't argue about a math solution done correctly, but you can argue about a conclusion reached in philosophy even if the argument was valid. If we only taught a philosophy logic class, that wouldn't be very controversial. But I think children ought to learn much more than mere logic.

I think the biggest obstacle to introducing philosophy into primary/secondary education would be the lack of qualified teachers. Some universities make select students take some sort of philosophy course, but not everyone has to. And even if future teachers did take an introductory course in philosophy, that doesn't mean they would be well-equipped to teach it to impressionable students. If you're going to teach philosophy, you have to do it right. It's hard enough at the university level to teach a philo course without it being clearly biased by the ideology of the professor. If done improperly, students walk away with the ideas of their teacher, not the ideas that they examined on their own. It's difficult to teach because a philosophy teacher can't just lecture, he or she must facilitate open and critical discussion. The teacher must teach students how to think about ideas, but then give them the space to explore the issues on their own and as a class.

I think that the best way to introduce this sort of thing into schools would be to slowly spark an interest for philosophy in the students. You don't have to teach a full blown philosophy class to start raising philosophical questions and to think critically about them. Students should be critical of what they learn in school, whether it be in literature, history or science. We emphasise excellence on standardized tests or AP tests, and we forget that teaching to tests limits students' scope for independent thought. There's no time to criticize when you must learn said amount of information for such and such test to earn said amount of money for the school or said credit for college. Not that these tests are completely bad, but they have become the ends instead of a way of gaging whether the means are leading to knowledge.

Subjects that are already being taught are a good place to start. History and literature, for example, provide wonderful starting blocks for these sorts of discussions. When you learn about the civil war you can ask the students why slavery is wrong. Most just take it for granted that slavery is bad, just like their southern predecessors probably took for granted that slavery was okay. It's bad to blindly accept a moral truth regardless of whether you're right about it. So students should be actively discussing why slavery is wrong, and why we believe all people have equal moral standing. We didn't always think that (still today not everyone thinks this), and they can begin to learn how to understand the moral foundation their lives which may not always jive with that of modern society.

In the same way, literature classes are wonderful starting points for philosophical discussions. From Where the wild things are to The Giver to 1984, books perform the necessary probing to get students thinking. Unfortunately, too many lit classes focus on plot diagrams, character sketches, and other useless time wasters that are designed to analyse books to death. I had many a book ruined by literature classes where we spent more time on conventions, like: what is the climax? the anticlimax?, than on the actual questions of the book. For example, in a course we would have spent more time talking about what happened in The Giver then we would have on what the book had to say about society, diversity and the value of a human life. Even in the classes where we did find those questions, we never attempted to answer them. Even if we figured out what the author had to say about those questions, we weren't really given the opportunity to discuss whether we agreed or disagreed. We didn't even get that far until high school, and before HS we would never have looked past the actual plot of the book. Though, as you can probably guess, I strongly believe we should have.

I think that if I was forced to learn the origins of western society, and the shape of electron clouds, and the inner workings of a cow's eye, then I should have at least learned how to think for myself. Part of being a responsible citizen, or for being a responsible person is to be able to think independently and to think critically about our world. So why aren't we equipping students to do this?

I'm not the only who thinks this, and in one house at one school the change has begun. One of of the teachers at the school I've been helping at teaches literature to 8th graders. She happens to agree with me that the way books are currently taught isn't working. Kids aren't learning to love books, and they certainly aren't thinking deeply about them. So this teacher has let me try something new with the GT kids. The GT kids were singled out because they are the least challenged by the current system, but the method we're experimenting with is not only for gifted kids. I think all kids should be allowed to do what the GT kids will have the chance to do in this class. I'll leave it at that for now, and I promise to explain more soon!

Choice Theory and Nussbaum

So today I started volunteering (for the month) at my mom's middle school. She's an 8th grade math teacher, and this year she's decided to implement something called Choice Theory. You can find more out about it here at her blog. I witnessed the students first debriefing in Choice Theory, and below I've copied what I wrote for my mom's blog about what happened. The reason I'm including this because it seemed to me to be strikingly similar to what Nussbaum has to say (and other political philosophers) about flourishing. The approach with Choice Theory is more stoic, but overall the needs are quite familiar to Nussbaums list (life, bodily health/integrity, etc). I'm not in psych or education, but what I witnessed today was certainly familiar. Anyway, here's what I wrote about today (in the voice of a teacher, but really I was just a bystander):


Today was our first day with the 8th graders, and to start the year off we gave them their first lesson in Choice Theory. We started by having them play the triangle game during the 8th grade bonding time. The goal of the game was to pick two other people (who you aren't friends with) and --without letting them know that you've picked them-- position yourself in such a way that the three of you form an equilateral triangle. The game was a bit of a bust, because the students formed their triangles by talking and signaling to their friends. If done correctly, the triangles wouldn't be obvious, and you wouldn't know if someone else had formed a triangle with you in it. Instead we saw a bunch of mini-triangles comprised mainly of friends, that had clearly been organized amongst themselves. Down further I'll explain what the game was intended to teach, and I'll explain how the students proved our point even though they didn't complete it correctly.

Next we had them fill out index cards.
1. In the upper right corner they wrote a list of 3 people: one older, one younger, and one peer. These are people who have impacted their life in some meaningful way.
2. In the upper left corner they wrote a list of 3 things they would rather do today if they didn't have to come to school and money wasn't an option.
3. In the bottom left corner, they wrote 3 things they are good at or accomplishments they've made.
4. In the bottom right corner they filled out one rule they think everyone should have to follow (always), one rule that they think is really stupid, and one pet peeve.

Next we asked the students who, in the whole universe, they have the power to control (in thought, action, emotion, etc). Some said siblings and pets, but after a short discussion they all agreed that the only person they truly have control over is themselves. We told them that when they talk out of turn (which they were doing quite a bit of) it is irritating to us but there is nothing we can do to make them stop. They must stop themselves and exercise self-control. We also told them that all behavior is purposeful, and if they chose to sit and listen quietly, they were making that choice. If they choice to not listen and think "whoa, I wish they'd shut up," they were purposefully choosing to think and feel that. If someone makes you upset, you choose to be upset. We all try to control other people, but we can't. We can only control ourselves. We can try to coercive, manipulate, or persuade them, but ultimately each person must choose their own behavior.

This brings me back to the triangle game. The goal was to end up with a win-win situation where everyone formed their triangles without trying to control the other people that formed it. Had they done it properly, they would have shown the goal that Choice Theory works towards. However, they played the game by controlling other people, which showed one of their basic needs. At school, to succeed, you have to be right. They all wanted to be right, to get the game right, so they controlled each other to accomplish that. The need they were satisfying was their need to have power. Below I'll outline the four basic needs (taking survival for granted as a basic need), and how they fit into the index card activity.

The first need is love and belonging. The people in #1 represent those people who they love and value as friends or family. Everyone needs to be loved and feel belonged. Our goal this year is to make sure that every student feels like they are loved and like they belong. The second need is fun. The activities in #2 represent every one's need to have fun. Fun can be any activity that they enjoy, which can (and often) includes learning. One of our other goals is to make the learning process fun, so that they'll enjoy their time at school. The third need power. The positive form of power is power within. When you succeed or accomplish a goal, you feel power within yourself. That's a positive form of power. We want our students to learn how to tap their power within to succeed in the classroom. The other form of power that is not constructive is power over. When you try to control people other than yourself, you are using this form of power. We want to minimize the need people feel to have power over (including the teachers). The last need is freedom, which is represented by corner #4. Everyone wants a certain degree of freedom, and we need to determine what we want to be free to do and what boundaries we want other people to respect.

The overall aim of this year is to find a compromise between the students and the teachers. We want to have a win-win school year. That may mean that we need to allow more talk time in class or allow them to listen to their ipods during work time. At the same time, they will compromise by respecting our classrooms and behaving calmly. Ultimately, the choice is up to the individual. We want to teach the students to take responsibility for their actions. The atmosphere we will have this year will be determined by each and every student in our classes. If we can teach them how to choose wisely, then everyone will win. Let the year begin!