In Total Awe...

I committed to updating this blog once a week thinking that that would be a stretch given my history with journaling. However, after just four days, I wish that I could find a way to pour all of my observations and thoughts on paper as soon as possible. I'll try to keep this one brief.

Here's a bit of background first:

This "program" was designed to help meet the needs of students who have not been successful, for whatever reason, in a traditional classroom setting. There are as many different reasons why they haven't been successful as there are students in the class. This program will be as rigorous as a traditional classroom, but every effort will be made to meet the individual needs of every single student. I could go on and on about what I want this to be and my role and yadda, yadda, yadda. Two of my students articulated the heart of this program with the phrase, "The freedom to learn in our own way." Boom. (For more info, there is a quick overview on one of the pages of my website A New Path at WJHS

Now to the part that I cannot communicate without getting choked up. We were building off of an activity from yesterday where they were put in charge of coming up with a name for the program. For a bit more detail, read the post from yesterday.

How they applied their learning from yesterday to today was extraordinary. There were small groups meeting to discuss potential names. Leaders arose and went back and forth between students who were not engaged or not participating. The names were focussed on trying to represent who we are and who we want to be. The silly names were a thing of the past. They looked like they had been doing this for months. On day four.

I stopped them at the end of ten minutes and read my observations and we discussed how they felt it went. We all agreed that it was much more productive than yesterday. We then decided to go through and see what we came up with for names.


There were lots of suggstions involving paths, pathways, new beginnings, etc.

Awesome.

Then they hit me with it. The name that they voted for is the acronym OOTA.

It stands for

Out Of The Ashes.

Boom.

I cannot say that or think it without getting tears in my eyes. When I asked what that meant, multiple students communicated the following (I am combining several students' statements), "We have all had a really rough time with school in the past and felt buried in ashes. Now we want to rise from that, kind of like a Phoenix, and become something better."

Yeah.

I'm going to let that speak for itself. I cannot wait to see them again on Monday.