FAded Bulletin Boards: Don't Tear them down yet

The year is 2021. My classroom has thirty desks lined up in rows. No teacher desk. I am in this middle school classroom for one period a day. The students do not leave their seats except to go to the bathroom or to lunch. The teachers rotate rooms.

There are three bulletin boards in my room. On my front bulletin board, I have the seating chart and a TRACKS poster, the school’s behavior chart.

On the opposite side of the room power words frame the wall. Adjectives and nouns: humble and humility, courageous and courage, determined and determination. These are posted as sentence strips and a few are coming off the board, barely hanging on.

In the back corner there is a massive bookshelf. Mine is filled with books. YA books.

In the back center, over the shelves, I have four pieces of student art and one piece I created at a paint class — two flowers reaching for each other.

Next to that shelf is a bulletin board. It is titled Earth Day 2020 with a large world in the center surrounded by trees, made entirely by construction paper and student hands, paper now fading.

Then there is a shelf close to the entrance where I house my coveted books, the books that have spoken to me, have stayed with me in some way. They sit next to a stack of composition books and the medicine kit. My very own nurse’s office. I deliver these books and notebooks and Band-Aids as medicine to any student who needs it.

Our setting and our environment communicates with the world who we are-- our traits, our personalities, our dreams. What we see may not, though, always be the truth. Perspective and experience impacts the way we take in the world and the way we take in others. There is power in symbolism but there is a danger, too. Not everyone sees what we want them to see. Sometimes we must be direct, so here’s what I want you to know about my faded bulletin board.

The Earth Day 2020 bulletin board symbolizes my focus — students — and my struggle to let go of a meaningful idea or relationship. At the beginning of March 2020, my students watched Rob Greenfield’s Ted Talk titled Be the Change you Want to See in the World. Greenfield starts his Ted Talk with a personal story and then follows it with evidence (a picture of himself wearing all the garbage he created in a month) followed by more evidence (a picture of him dumpster diving for food). He uses these startling images and stories to make a point and he couples it with facts and logic. Greenfield ends his speech by encouraging his audience to start by making one small change in the world, one action — a call to action. His speech is perfect for introducing the concept of Ethos, Pathos, and Logos and how argumentative writing skills transfer to other mediums of writing.

After listening to Greenfield’s Ted Talk, students discussed it in a socratic seminar format. They were part of a committee that mimics one they might find in the real world: a town hall meeting. Some students were school board members and others community members. One student posed as the business manager; another one the township manager. This “committee” had to work together to agree upon a common goal: What is one small action we can take to improve our community or school?

I had planned for this to simply be a simulation activity focused on speaking and listening skills, but the students took it to the next level.

“We can create a garden!”

“Let’s clean up trash around the school!”

“Let’s make art with empty water bottles!

“Let’s do something for Earth Day!”

Their enthusiasm was contagious and the committee decided they were actually going to plan an Earth Day event where students cleaned up trash around the school.

Instead of saying, no, I replied: “Okay, what would the day look like? Who do we need to persuade? Who makes the decisions? What do we need to make this a reality?

The students knew the superintendent and principal were the people who made decisions, so we set a plan to write persuasive letters to them asking for a special Earth Day event. We brainstormed what they cared about (audience and purpose) and then we found evidence appealing to their desires. The students researched facts about the environment and how student learning improves with movement and brain breaks. They knew money would be an issue, so we researched local businesses who were willing to donate trash bags and gloves, eliminating cost as a potential reason for them to say no (counter argument).

Then we wrote letters.

My favorite memory was when one student, a student who normally resisted writing or reading, explained to me that it made more sense to call the Manager of Lowes than write him a long email.

“We only have so much time, Mrs. Melhorn.”

I thought about his argument and agreed. Sure, write down a script of what you will say on the phone.

He did it. Then he went into the hallway with his cell phone and notepad.

Two minutes later he barged back into class and shouted to everyone, “Mrs. Melhorn, guess what! I just spoke to the manager of Lowes and he said they would donate trash bags for us! All we need to do is write a letter and have you sign it!”

I smiled, “Go write that letter then.”

I have been teaching for fifteen years, enough to know that if a student is excited about writing or reading on any level, you go with it, you build upon it, you encourage it.

This is rare, and it is a gift. I felt this. I knew this.

We did the work. We wrote the letters. We made the phone calls. We organized a schoolwide Earth Day event.

Then March 13th happened. The pandemic.

The 2020 Earth Day bulletin board still stands in my room, serving as a reminder of this beautiful, rare teaching moment, this gift to me and my students that we never got to open, never got to see. I am not overly sentimental about it. I just can’t replace my bulletin board with meaningless compound sentence stems yet.

When some people walk into my classroom, they might see laziness when they look at my bulletin board, the construction paper now fading.

But I see hope and inspiration. I am not ready to tear that down yet.