Applause a great teacher

Friday, December 16, 2011

Let us all credit John Boucher with being not only a great teacher, but one with a certain amount of courage.

Boucher is the Hollis/Brookline High physics teacher who lets, indeed encourages, his students to hit him with water balloons using a trebuchet, or what we laymen would call a catapult, although they aren’t precise the same thing.

Each year, Boucher, who began this endeavor 11 years ago with a now-retired colleague, Brian Maynard, let’s students earn a grade based upon construction and performance of the trebuchet. Ah, but that’s not all, according to a story last week by our Hattie Bernstein, the other half of the grade depends upon the quality of entries in a journal that details how the device was developed and constructed.

Yikes. So as a Boucher student, you not only have to be handy and somewhat mechanical, you have to be literate, at least to the extent of keeping a journal.

What we think Boucher is indicating here is the need for schools to be about more than just classroom rote learning, something all good teachers know but something that, in a time when cutting the budget is what education seems to be about most, gets lost. We either forget, or don’t care, that the creativity of students – remember, friends, what are students but the workers, the creators, the inventors, the entrepreneurs of the future – needs to be nurtured in the institutions we have developed to help them, at least theoretically, get to the point where they can be all of those things.

And who are the best role models for that? Well, parents, of course, but how many parents are out in the backyard helping Johnny build a trebuchet or, in too many cases, helping Johnny do anything? The second primary role of creativity nurturing is the teacher. If Jenny’s teacher believes in her, if Jenny’s teacher encourages here to try many different things, she will be more likely to take sensible risks as she grows.

So, applause applause to Boucher and applause to Hollis/Brookline High for encouraging him to encourage his students.