Double check the details

This is a story of something that happened to me when I first started teaching in Wyoming. The year was 2009. And I was teaching middle school ELA. Before I get into the store I need to give a little bit of background information. Teaching writing, especially to middle schoolers is not really an easy job. The students really don’t have any writing skill and they don’t really want to work for any writing skill, and so everything is a big chore. Too kind of help mitigate this I allow students to choose any topic they want as long as it’s appropriate for school. If they don’t know if it’s appropriate for school or not they are supposed to contact me. I have found that allowing students to pick their own topics means that they spend a little more time writing about it because they’re interested in it. However, this does come with some pitfalls

On with my story. . . Wyoming has a lot of ranchers. It’s no secret. And a lot of these students are in my program because it’s a virtual program so ranching kids aren’t spending hours on school busses each day. They grew up on the ranch. They were expected to help with the ranch and having an online school instead of brick and mortar seem to help a lot of families out. I, however, was new to Wyoming. I had only lived in Wyoming for about a year and was still getting used to this more rural type of community. One of my students, who really struggled with writing, asked if he could write about ranching. I said “Of course you can, but you really need to narrow down this topic because ranching is quite broad.” He came back and said well can I write about cattle? I said of course you can but again that’s a very broad topic. What are you going to write about about the cattle? Then he asked if it would be appropriate for school to write about AI. Even though this was only 2009, and AI was not as ubiquitous as it is now, I said, of course you can write about AI that would be super interesting. I personally did not know what artificial  intelligence and cattle had in common, but I figured well why not let him go with this. I did not ask him to define what AI was. I made the assumption that AI would be artificial intelligence. This was an up-and-coming technology in which we were seeing AI being used with predicting text spellcheck getting a lot better that type of stuff. Imagine my surprise when I read his essay on AI artificial insemination. This was a good lesson on the importance of defining technical language. I learned more about cattle AI, artificial insemination, and that one paper that I have ever needed to know in my entire life. 

Couple of lessons from this particular incident. First of all this student wrote an in-depth paper on AI, as in-depth as a middle schooler could do. He was very excited about his topic. He even was able to use part of his research for his 4 H beef project. Because his uncle and father were ranchers, I allowed them to be part of his research, so he had to interview both of them, which went above and beyond the regular requirements of this paper. Second of all, it just reinforced me on how little we teachers know about all aspects of our students. This kiddo was just not some student in my eighth grade English class and that’s it. This kiddo, as all of my students, has more to him than just being a student. And although I was a little grossed out about the topic, I really appreciated how much time and effort went into that particular paper. After that particular assignment, this student wrote more for me then I ever expected him to do so. He had found his voice through this his passion, which was cattle. And finding that passion is more important than any topic that I could’ve assigned to him. The last lesson I learned was to make sure I totally understand what the technical languages prior to giving my OK for a paper, although I still would’ve given the OK, even if I knew he was going to be talking about artificial insemination and cattle instead of artificial intelligence.