The Real Mr. Fitz: Are Rules Useful?

It seems that a lot of people in education think that the way to improve our schools is through more emphasis on adult control and student compliance. That is certainly the theory at a lot of charters, where students are told how to sit in class, how to walk down the hall, among other things.

The district where I teach moved to school "uniforms" this year, despite many, many protests on the part of parents, students, and some teachers.

The message students hear: You are not responsible enough to dress yourself. We will tell you how to dress. Don't think: Obey.

But even without uniforms, schools tend to place a great emphasis on rules and compliance. Many, if not most, teachers start the year with them, from day one. Students tell me all they hear for the first week of school is an endless litany of rules in nearly every class.

The message students hear: We can't trust you know how to behave; we are so sure you are all here to be disruptive, we must begin with the rules right away, so you know who's the boss.

I used to start with the litany of rules myself, because it was what I was told to do.

The message teachers hear: Don't smile until after Winter Break. You must be in control. It is your job to get unquestioning obedience from your students. Control your class through bribes and punishments. Don't think about running your classroom differently. Don't think: Obey.

My sense that something didn't seem right about all of this compliance kept nagging at me throughout the years. I guess it is teaching students how to write that made me really begin to think about how we teach students to behave. I had a few too many students tell me I was teaching them wrong, because their other teacher in their last grade or at their last school told them what the rules of writing were, and you had to follow them.

Here are some of the rules my students have told me they follow, because a teacher told them it was a rule:

You do not ever use any contractions when you are writing for school.
You must never use the personal pronoun "I" in any form in any school writing - including personal essays.
Every essay must have five paragraphs.
Every paragraph must have at least five sentences.
Every sentence must have exactly five words.
Every word must have exactly five letters.

Okay, I made the last two up. But the rest are actually no less absurd.

Many people complain that students don't follow instructions and don't follow rules. In my experience, students who follow misguided rules too faithfully are actually more of a problem. Writing is less about following a set of set-in-stone rules and more about knowing some general principles of good writing, being familiar with the kinds of choices and tools writers have to work with, and then making choices appropriate to your current writing project and audience. What if, by making writing about following rules (some of them fake) to hoop-jump for the teacher, we are actually teaching them how not to write? What if teaching students to write entirely to please their teacher means they don't really know now to write at all? Instead, they know how to follow instructions whether they make sense or not.

What if behavior in class and school- and society - should be less about obeying a set of rules and more about following a guiding sense of principles? What if, by making school about following rules to hoop jump for the adults for the building, we give students the impression that school is a performance for someone else rather than something they are doing for themselves? What if being forced to be a student means they don't really know how to be students at all?

Since my own thinking has shifted, and since I always want my students to be thinking, I have begun starting the school year differently. Instead of having rules posted in my class, I begin by having my students write about the best class they've ever been in, and the most unpleasant class. I ask them to write about, in both cases, the behavior of the teacher and the students. (I ask them to not use real names for the "unpleasant class" teachers.)

The results are remarkably consistent. A great class has a focused, attentive, enthusiastic teacher who likes students and explains things well, and students who are there to learn, are willing to work, and have manners and respect. An unpleasant class has students who are unmotivated and rude, and a teacher who exhibits any of the following traits in some combination: assigning and assessing instead of actually teaching, yelling a lot, not caring, making lots of threats, and testing students on things they never taught.

So my students and I talk about what kind of class that we want to have. It's pretty simple. There are some rules, but our class isn't built on rules. It's built on purpose. A great class exists to learn.

This year I took the activity a step further. I asked students to do the following activity in small groups:

When are rules useful?

Some situations are clearly rule-based: without rules they simply won’t work, or in some cases, even exist. Some situations require no specific rules, but instead a set of principles, values, or shared vision. In some situations, rules may actually be destructive. Some situations are ambiguous: rules may or may not be useful. In some situations, the necessity of rules may depend on a number of factors (social structure, the purpose of the activity, the amount of flexibility required, etc.). In some places rules are unspoken, but breaking them may still cause you trouble.

Look at the list of activities below. Categorize them into groups of whether rules are

Essential (E) to the activity (without the rules, the activity wouldn’t exist), Important (I)

Optional (O), Unspoken, Depends (D) on the situation Non-existent/Not Needed (N).

The results were interesting. We discovered that activities where rules were absolutely essential were things like being in the military or driving, but also things we do for fun - sports and games. We discovered that a lot of rules are unspoken in many, many situations. And we discovered that in many situations, rules are not needed - or may even get in the way.

This activity got students (and their teacher) thinking. Rules are paradoxical. Sometimes essential, especially for "fun" activities. Sometimes rules should step aside when they obscure the purpose of the activity rather than create or reveal it.

I followed up this activity with a simple journal for my ninth graders. What have you learned about writing and reading? I am at a new school, teaching ninth grade for the first time in over 20 years, and my students are coming from many different places: public, private, charter, and home schooling. Many students focused on writing rules they'd been taught, and those rules were nearly all "surface features" of writing. Use periods and commas. Capitalize. Indent. Spell correctly.

One type of rule many students brought up was the "X sentences per paragraph" rule. We debated it. Answers from the various schools and teachers rang out. Ten sentences! Eight to twelve sentences! Five sentences!

Finally one person in each class usually said something like this: "You stop adding sentences to a paragraph when you've said what needed saying." And I gave that person an Amen. In writing, thinking about what you are doing is more important than following rules. There are rules, but following them blindly doesn't lead to good writing. Thinking does. Making writing about rules obscures its purpose.

The same goes for school itself. Making school all about rules obscures its purpose. It should be about thinking. It should be about being there to learn. My Big Inquiry Question for this year is one that I hope will get students thinking. It's one I think more adults should think about. What is the purpose of education?

To introduce this topic, after our discussions of about rules, I have students do the following activity:

Power of Education Pre-Unit Survey

Name ______________________________________________Date __________ Period _______

It is the first day of high school, and you are hearing “opening day” speeches from your teachers. Each speech reveals something about the philosophy of education held by that teacher. First, label each speech for what model of education it represents. For instance, there might be a “Bribery Model” or a “Testing Model.” Rank these speeches from Most Agree With (1) to Least Agree With (8).

_____ Mr. Gradgrind – “Welcome class. As soon as humanly possible, we will be getting our textbooks from the book room. In this class, we are all about the textbook and the facts it contains. My job is to expose you to facts and your job is to get those facts into your heads. In today’s world of internet memes and free-floating opinions based on personal bias, facts are all that matter. We won’t be discussing your ideas, your opinions, your questions. Most of all we will not be discussing your feelings. Feelings and emotions have no place in education. We will be learning about solid, set-in-stone facts. Your brains are essentially big flash drives, and we are going to download a lot of data on them.”