I arrived early Monday morning at Northfield High School nervous and excited. Biking from my house to campus along the quiet streets of Northfield with the autumn leaves falling felt like a perfect stereotype for going back to school. However the the most striking thing about my first day was realizing that the stereotype didn’t fit my high school experience at all. The dimly lit low ceilinged hallways were packed with students all focused on getting from one destination to another. I walked into the front office, checked in, and walked out with a yellow visitors tag. As I walked down the hallway I realized that I was staring at all the students and that if it hadn’t been for the bright yellow tag they probably would have assumed I was one of them. My nice clothes, while nice, didn’t exactly scream “adult human.” This really blew my mind because while I wasn’t much older than the students, my high school was drastically different. Being from California my high school had a very open, outdoor oriented design with little to no “indoor hallways.”

As I squeezed my way around the corner I entered into Mr. DuBe’s 9th and 10th grade English classroom. The room had 5 rows of chairs facing the front of the room. The bulletin board on the walls were lined with fairy lights that offered up a warm glow to the room. After greeting Mr. DuBe I headed for the back of the class as the students filed in. Mr. DuBe began greeting them asking about their weekends, work, sports, and other extra curriculars. Mr. DuBe began the lesson only to be interrupted by the PA system leading the pledge of allegiance. For some reason this moment took me by surprise as I realized that I hadn’t participated in this ritual in years and that it felt completely foreign to me. Then Mr. DuBe outlined the lesson plan for class starting with a short grammar lesson followed by a short practice quiz on the material. He then had the class complete a worksheet on the short story “The Necklace.”

Many of the students completed their worksheet on their school tablets. While I believe that these tablets were issued pre-pandemic, I wouldn’t be surprised if their integration in the classroom had been heightened since the pandemic. Sitting from the back of the classroom I noticed many students playing games on their tablets or using their tablets to block Mr. DuBe’s view of their phones. When I worked one on one with a student, I noticed that he was very skilled at navigating all the tools and functions of the tablet. However he seemed easily distracted, often spending a lot of time using the different writing and formatting tools as opposed to just having a pencil with an eraser.

According to Piaget the 9th grade students I observed and worked with should have been in the final stage of development, formal operational. While some of the questions on the worksheet on “The Necklace” required that they think abstractly about the moral implications of telling the truth, there was very little discussion beyond basic responses. When I worked with individual students it was challenging to navigate whether to focus on answering the questions or to have a more open ended conversation loosely based on the questions. Just answering the questions didn’t seem to really engage them, but asking a more open ended question often left them silent. I wasn’t sure if they were fully processing what I was asking or whether they just didn’t feel connected or engaged by the story. While the short story and worksheet asked questions that required hypothetical and propositional thinking, the students didn’t seem particularly engaged by the material. Part of the reason the students didn’t feel engaged might have to do with the fact that the setting of the story didn’t feel relevant to them. Their lack of engagement may be because they didn’t understand the theme of the story, all they could focus on was the plot and the characters. This leads me to think that they may not have been thinking abstractly and therefore may not be fully formally operational.