Posing, Pretending, Waiting for the Bell: Life in High School Classrooms

Abstract

Taken from a larger study about life in high school classrooms from students' perspectives, this paper discusses how study participants pinpointed individual classrooms as the nerve centers in students' high school experiences. Once inside individual classrooms, students work hard to follow tacit codes for appropriate behavior among assembled peers. Although this unspoken but de facto student culture can differ period to period, it nevertheless dominates students' experience of school. Because this finding reveals so much about students' social compromise and so little about their engaged learning, it seems that classroom teachers hold the surest, most immediate power to reclaim and reform classrooms from sites of student accommodation to sites of active and even enjoyable accomplishment.