Professional Documents
Culture Documents
“You teach high schoolers? Oh, I could never do that.” I get this comment a
lot.
I’ve heard many replies: They’re jaded—too cool for school. They’re cynical,
world-weary—or at least school-weary. They’re smart-mouthed, sarcastic,
flippant, mean-spirited, dishonest, angry, low-energy…the list goes on and on.
What’s a teacher to do?
I won’t lie and say that high-schoolers aren’t some of these things from time to
time, but almost all these behaviors boil down to this: Many students are
bored with school. Can we blame them? They spend eight hours a day
completely disengaged, fighting tedium and sleep at the same time—and
they’ve been doing so for ten plus years. Let’s put it another way: They’ve
been in professional development meetings all day, every day for over a
decade. So how do we deal with this? How do we break this cycle of teacher-
student negativity?
After using script-stories for nearly twenty years, I’ve analyzed exactly what
makes them a hit with older kids. Here are my findings:
Maybe you are high-school teacher looking for a new way to connect with
your students. Maybe you are looking for a way to make your content fresh. I
encourage you to give script-stories a try. You may find that students who
seem “too cool for school” are anything but.