The five things I have learned from this course

BarcelonaAnother school year is ending. June is an intense month for teachers, many things need to be finalized and we carry accumulated fatigue. Irritable students, final recoveries, tutoring reports, final exams and a lot of heat. These are days for making memories and putting down in writing everything we have experienced. I look back and I'm left with five things that have happened this school year: We have returned to writing by hand. My colleague Cristian Olivé said it in an Instagram post: “AI has become the most dangerous tool in classrooms”. To avoid it and prevent it from completely killing creativity, I have had to dedicate entire classes to writing in the classroom and ask for writings that can be started and finished within an hour. I have avoided assigning digital work and have insisted that everything be submitted handwritten because calligraphy helps to fix ideas. I myself prefer to make handwritten lists of pending tasks rather than on my mobile, because when I transfer them to paper everything looks clearer and less daunting. Talk, talk, and talk. The AI tsunami in education has made oral presentations fundamental for evaluating a topic. I'm at a point where I don't even ask for digital support (like Canva) anymore, because it ended up being a reading of what ChatGPT had created. You know that teenagers save words more and more and avoid phone calls, and I've noticed a decline in communicative ability. That's why I'm also a big advocate for not cutting short the conversations that arise in the classroom and for letting them express themselves even if it's not strictly related to the lesson. The questions or interests that arise spontaneously are unrepeatable and make that class unique. Maybe I'm romanticizing the Socratic method, but I believe there's nothing more powerful than a good conversation. Reading in the age of screens. I have noticed a growth in the number of student readers. I believe we can now banish the refrain that says young people don't read, because I see more and more teenagers reading between classes and even during recess. At first, I found it unprecedented and rubbed my eyes as if it were a miracle; now I've gotten used to it. I've also seen another change in mobile phone use in secondary school. At my school, every morning students have to leave their phones in a drawer, and we return them at the end of the day. All the years I was a tutor in 1st year of ESO, the drawer was quite full, but for a couple of years now, the matter has declined significantly, and this year I've only kept eight phones in the drawer. I believe we are all educating more consciously and responsibly about the proper use of screens.Graduations have gotten out of hand. Here I open a can of worms that might be worth a whole article, but I find the subject of graduations very exaggerated. I'm not saying they shouldn't be celebrated, mind you? It's an important milestone, especially in the second year of high school, but all these identical dresses, in flashy colors and designed for normative bodies, make me reflect a lot on aesthetic pressure (which falls on them) and on the Americanization of this event. The dining hall as an educational tool. The changes in the menus that we have incorporated this course have highlighted the importance of talking about food in the classroom beyond healthy habits. Gastronomic culture is an essential part of any country, and I see it as urgent that at school we incorporate classes where we talk about products, tradition, and territory. Many times people ask me if I don't get tired of explaining the same thing, but as you can see, each course is different, and new challenges always arise that make it a changing and chameleonic job. Teachers, it has been an especially intense course, and from here I send you infinite gratitude for the commitment and vocation you have. The light at the end of the tunnel is already visible. Rest a lot.

Croquettes, lentils and other school canteen dramas