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Don’t Forget the Tough Kids…

Lindsey Fairleigh

            To many students the American Revolution debuts as insignificant and irrelevant.  We, as teachers, are often met with pleas and whines of “What does this have to do with me?” and “Why are we doing this?”  To my happy surprise, I have never heard those words from my students in regard to the American Revolution or any other subject, albeit, I am only in my second full year of teaching.  Discounting myself completely due to my relative lack of experience is an injustice to myself – I have, in fact, been successful teaching the founding principles and other elements of the American Revolution to the toughest kids in the Yakima School District. 

            To most people Washington State retains the image as an uncivilized frontier of the Wild Wild West.  Most people don’t think of Washington as having a gang-ridden, migrant population.  Most people, when they think of Washington, are bombarded with mental images of soggy Seattle and the Space Needle.  For my students in Yakima, the rains of Seattle are as distant as the blood-soaked battlefields of the American Revolution.  Because of where we live, almost all of my students know that their lives could easily be cut short on a walk home by a well aimed bullet or blade – so it took me a while to figure out how to convince them that learning about the origins of their rights is as important as trying to stay alive. 

            Just to make it clear, I am responsible for teaching the diverse group of students who have been removed from the regular classroom setting due to their inability to behave appropriately in school.  They are either immersed in the gang life, tagging, or drugs.  Obviously, my students are not really different from student all across our country, as the nation is constantly changing as a result of migration and immigration, linguistic barriers, and an increasing feeling of entitlement.  Like others, my students are ungracious, disinterested and disrespectful.  I have found that through conversations and journal writing, my students are able to express their colorful experiences and voice what they view as unfair in their environment.  Both they and I have been shocked to discover incidents in their lives have denied their rights as citizens. 

            The only way that I have found to teach these students about the American Revolution and the importance of the founding documents is to teach them about their own rights as citizens.  Once they realized that hundreds of thousands of people have died throughout the existence of their own country so they could have the rights and opportunities that they have (and are almost to afraid to take advantage of), my students began to positively alter their behavior. 

            My group of geniuses in their own right has been focusing on a parallel study of the American Revolution and the Civil Rights Movement.  We are focused on discovering the origins of their own rights and the ways that citizens have continued the struggle for the rights of all Americans.  We are engaging in huge projects including a giant timeline of the rights of US citizens that covers an entire classroom wall to creating individual flipcharts describing and illustrating the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights.  As a class, we have even been commissioned by our school to create a photographic slideshow for our Martin Luther King, Jr. assembly which displays the meaning of the Civil Rights Movement.  Despite being the students who have been kicked out of every regular class, my students are now the experts in our school on the rights of American Citizens.  They have gained this expertise through studying our fight for our rights as Americans from the American Revolution to the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement. 

            My school and I have already been amazed at the progress my “difficult” students have made in both academic abilities and behavioral skills.  More than anything, I think finding a way to teach them about the American Revolution and their rights as citizens has helped them progress.  As a teacher, the opportunity to attend the Freedom Foundation Summer Graduate Teacher Workshop is the perfect opportunity for me to discover more strategies and knowledge that will enable my students to be successful.