This week would be my Dad's birthday. If he was still here, spice cake with thick caramel frosting would be in order, and a beautiful cross country ski outing through the snowy forests of Duluth.

He taught sociology at the University of Minnesota when I was growing up. Once, while teaching a weekly three-hour Monday-night class, he dressed as a different famous sociologist every week to help get his students interested in the history of his discipline.

Isn't that nice?

Over the course of his career, he was voted both adviser and professor of the year at the university by his students.

There was always a new sociology book lying around our house, with half the text underlined and his untidy notes scrawled in the margins. Whatever had just come out, he had it.

He crafted new courses about the civil rights movement, religion in Northern Minnesota, and corporate corruption, to name a few, trying to make sure his classes taught both what he thought was important for students to know more about AND what was current and interesting to them.

He took his students to Chicago by train over spring break many times to study the city and its neighborhoods, arranging police ride-alongs (since many of his students were planning to become police officers) and museum visits.

He offered extra credit to anyone who would challenge social convention and stand up on a public bus to sing the National Anthem. More than one student boarded a bus with a friend ready to videotape and then changed their mind, realizing just how strong the pull of convention really is.

He invited students to examine the role of technology in their lives - way before rejecting screens was all the rage - with his assignment to watch someone else watching T.V. for an hour.

I thought about Dad this month as I read Harvard School of Education professor David Perkins' book, Make Learning Whole. Perkins asks educators not to let school become "a bag of information" (173). It's easy to see how that could happen. Students can graduate in a voluminous swirl of facts. Facts from five or six subjects times twelve years. Facts that often got crammed into corners of the mind awaiting tests. Kids could easily leave high school, or even college, with a backpack of facts and very little understanding of how to use them.

My Dad didn't let that happen. He had his Sociology of Religion students out in the community visiting different centers of faith and learning about their history and practices. He had his criminology students riding in police cars to learn from actual police. He had students questioning and challenging social norms on buses and in living rooms as they learned about how sociology works. When he had to lecture late on a Monday night to quickly cover the history of sociology, he did so in a costume, trying to help the voice of a historic sociologist come to life through his impersonation.

Perkins calls for the idea of learning in a real context, devoting his book to a framework in which students experience the real-world work of a discipline on a level that's reasonable for them. Throughout his book, he calls it "playing the whole game at the junior level." There's a lot to it, and I'd really recommend the book, but at the crux, it's this: kids practice baseball skills so they can play the game. They're willing to play catch, step in the batting cage, and practice their slide because they know they're building up to something that matters to them. In school, we can offer the same thing. Skill practice embedded in a context that's meaningful to our students.

Maybe that means researching ethical AI use and presenting solutions to the teaching faculty.

Maybe it means writing narratives they eventually enter into the New York Times memoir contest.

Maybe it means interviewing local business leaders, learning about graphic design and website construction, and then creating a tourism website for their small town.

There are so many ways to bring the real-world work of English into the classroom, and this week, I just want to highly recommend that you plan a whole game of your own.

Source:

Perkins, David. (2009). Making Learning Whole. Jossey-Bass.

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