So Fly Like a D6

Gangsta Introduction Is Going Medieval on this Blog

LAST TIME, ON BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER... I MEAN... MY BLOG, WHATEVS:

“I’ve totally hit the October Wall.”

“Not the October Wall!” said no one.

“Indeed.”

There are certain things that, at one point or another in your life, you promise yourself will never happen.  Some of those things, in no particular order are: robbing banks, rapping in public, puppy hunting, being a railway car hobo, and climbing on top of refrigerators.

"Go ahead.  Do it.  I dare you."

Sometimes you break promises to yourself.

For me, one of those promises was that I would never play the game Dungeons and Dragons. I'd already been pulled into sufficiently nerdy games like Arkham Horror, which is based on H.P. Lovecraft. I felt that I had reached my quota.

Before I get into this, let’s just all agree that Dungeons and Dragons is for nerds.  Whether you love it or not, it’s the third most ridicule-worthy game of all games, closely following World of Warcraft and bridge. Even people with no IDEA what goes on in a game of Dungeons and Dragons beyond the assumed commentary on the state of someone’s mother’s basement know that D&D is for nerds.   As a new player, I'm happy to admit that and go on enjoying it.

There's an entire introductory college course to achieve this level of judgment.
Or, you can just be around people who play Dungeons and Dragons.  

And if you want more proof, I’ll give you some background in girl-shorthand: As far as I can tell from the four times I’ve played it so far, D&D is a game set in The Hobbit as produced by Jim Henson, where each player plays with miniature dolls who represent their imaginary character. Each player then goes around talking to each other about their made-up lives while they fight monsters and whatnot.  Really it’s not that different from a video game, except instead of a computer letting you know how the story is going to go, the combined efforts of a Dungeon Master (narrator) and many, many dice determine how strong your enemies are, how fast your reflexes are, and how much of a BAMF your character is.  

I guess?  I had to roll a D20 to determine whether or not I understood the directions.  

 When I started working at NTO, I came from the same background as my college professors, and I approached my students the same way I did when I taught 101/102.  I didn’t really want to get involved in their personal lives; I didn’t want to know anything about who was dating who or what their parents were like or how many siblings they had, because GROSS.  In college, students are hardly even people; they are just miniature paper mills that you have to go home and GRADE for HOURS.  If a bad student stops showing up for class, you do both an internal and external happy dance, because that’s one less set of papers you have to suffer through.

Are you... crying?  There's no crying in American Romanticism.  

 

In November, I started playing games with myself to get through the school day.  One of my games was to pick a colleague and see if I could get through the entire day without seeing them, even though I work at a tiny school and we all share two hallways, a staff room, and a cafeteria.  It wasn’t that I didn’t like my colleagues; it was just something to keep me on my toes.  Another game I played was to figure out what my principal was going to say to me as I walked up to the building, where he waits outside to greet the learners.  

Vega: "On time, on task, on a mission!"
Me: "Yes! I win."

Because my give-a-crap was broken, I became less worried about what my kids thought of me.  I became more inflexible and more confident in my own authority, in a matter of weeks.  I learned to love the phrase, “I know it sounds like I’m asking you to do it, because I respect your autonomy-- we’ll talk about that when we get to Shakespeare-- but I’m really telling you to do it.”   
Strangely, the more authority and confidence I collected, the more my kids seemed to like me.  I started joking around with them more, I started learning about their personal lives, and over the last two weeks, I realized that I really like my learners. Like, as people.  

"I don't see people.  I just see small, loud papers."

And that’s where Dungeons and Dragons, and a lifetime of broken promises comes in.

Above: Pencil, character sheet, figurines, dice,
 and the revocation of all the coolness that I won from that one party I threw in grad school.  

I joined the D&D club at the behest of another teacher and stayed because I was so warmly welcomed by them, or maybe because they laughed at a couple of my jokes.  What I learned while I was there was that a) the learner acting as the Dungeon Master is a very good storyteller and b) those kids are hilarious and c) it’s kind of amazing and shocking that a game which would have gotten someone beaten up at the high school I attended is treated with such openmindedness at New Tech. The sole exception might be our principal, who totally judges us.

Vega: "How was Pokemon last night?"
Me: "Huh.  I was not expecting that one."

It’s not worth teaching at a New Tech if you don’t buy into the culture of family, I don’t think.  Sure, the computers are shiny and delightful.  The Project Based Learning is engaging and exciting.  And that’s all great, but it’s also stuff that you can take anywhere, into any school, and implement.  The really great thing at NTO and the thing that finally got me over the October Wall and the thing that makes me keep showing up at these D&D meetings is that these learners really care about each other and I think there’s something special about them knowing, without a doubt, that all of their facilitators care about them, too.  I don't think I really felt that with many of my teachers, if any, when I was in high school.

I play because I care.

We get really hung up, I think, on our own excellence.  I don’t know what it’s like at other New Tech schools, but ours gets a lot of love and attention from the community, which means that we are constantly aware of the need to be on top of our game.  We know that we’re different, we know that we’re special, and we know that what we do matters not just to us but maybe, one day, to the future of education.  When people come through our schools, I know they want to see that excellence and the easiest way to see that is in the project teams, the common areas, the laptops, and so on.  That's the STUFF that makes us different.  
But I think the most obvious and immediately important way that the New Tech system differs from other educational systems-- and the one that has changed me forever as a teacher-- is that this model is so inherently humanistic.  When someone from the community walks in here, the one thing I really hope they see is how much each individual learner is cared about.  I hope they see how the prickliest learners, the ones who are always watching to see whether other people are noticing how cool they are, will really get into a project, because they know that everyone is counting on them. I hope they see the yearbook club staying after school to watch D&D, because they really want to understand what's going on-- and also, because some of the players are pretty cool, I guess. I would have hung out with them when I was their age.  Rather than being ostracized for being in something nerdy, these kids get the full support of their peers and facilitators in their pursuits.
In most schools, teaching is like Dungeons and Dragons-- you create a character and you wear that teaching persona like a mask.  What pulled me from the misery of the October Wall was the realization that wearing a mask like that is repulsive to these learners. They hate falseness. They want to see that you genuinely care; they want to see you get genuinely excited; they want to see who you REALLY are.

Are you happy now?

And, really, it's probably just as important that the education system becomes more humanistic towards facilitators as it is important that it becomes more humanistic towards learners. And, if that happens, we will have facilitators who are rolling natural 20s every time they enter the classroom.

"......."