Three Professors and a Lesson in Curiosity

This past week, I met one of my graduate students in my old college neighborhood. We met at the café where my creative writing professor used to bring us for weekly poetry sessions. As I walked up the street, I noticed what was still the same and what had changed. The last time I was on that block, I was moving out of the dorm and stepping into my new life as a New York City public high school teacher. Now I was returning to support a student stepping into her own role as a New York City public school teacher.

I felt proud. I had only a few moments to look back on that journey before we began our work, but the feeling stayed with me.

When she arrived, we got right to it. She was planning a unit on climate change for her entering and emerging English language learners. We worked through her brainstorm, refining ideas with each new question, each AI prompt, and each book or text we considered as a possible mentor text. We built a curiosity stack, a text set grounded in Dr. Lupo’s work on quad text sets. We explored sentence-level strategies from the Hochman Method and student routines from Keys to Literacy. We built, talked, refined, and rebuilt.

In those two hours, we both grew. She grew as a teacher, thinking carefully about her students and what they might do with this unit. I grew as a coach, working alongside her as she made decisions and changed her mind.

The session reminded me how much teachers need this kind of time together, whether they are new to the work or have been doing it for decades. I could draw on my experience, model a strategy, or help her see a connection she hadn’t seen yet. She could bring me back to her students and what she knew about them. Together, we looked for ways to combine strategies within lessons that would build on what students had already learned and prepare them for what came next. Reading, writing, and speaking would live together. Her students would have real work to do, with modeling, guidance, and time to practice along the way.

At a nearby table, three professors from my old college were talking about their students. They were frustrated by what they saw as a lack of effort. I’m fairly sure I heard “students these days” and “back when we were young.”

I wasn’t shocked. Every generation seems to have this conversation. But I was saddened by it. Being a full-time college professor carries an awesome responsibility. It is also a gift: the chance to work with young people as they figure out who they are becoming and how they want to show up in a rapidly changing world. I would love the opportunity to do that work full-time in a school of education. Sitting there, listening to people who had that opportunity bemoan their students, was hard.

Of course, I don’t know what was happening in their classrooms. They may have had every reason to be frustrated. I heard only a small piece of their conversation. But it made me wonder what questions they were asking about the students behind the behavior they were seeing.

My student heard them, too. As we worked, we talked about what else might be going on. Maybe their students didn’t see meaning or purpose in the work. Maybe they weren’t sure they could grow their skills, or why they needed to in an age of AI. Maybe some didn’t believe they could succeed at hard things.

We didn’t know. But then the question came back to us. Were we thinking about those things as we planned her unit? And was I thinking about them as I planned my Theoretical Foundations of Education and residency courses?

That last question stayed with me. I ask my graduate students to read, question, and wrestle with ideas that can be difficult. Do I always make clear why that work matters to the teachers they are becoming? When someone has not done the reading, do I get curious about what is in the way, or do I sometimes fall into my own version of “students these days”? I would like to think I always get curious. I’m not sure I do.

Eventually, I had to leave for volleyball, and she had to get to the market. But we kept working that night, each in our own document. I went back to the essential questions for the next few lessons. She kept building the lessons, taking the ideas we had explored and making them her own. It was coming together beautifully.

Then I got an email from her:

“I love the podcast idea as the unit—but that is not the unit. The unit is on curiosity.”

She went on to explain that climate change would be the first module. Her students would build a podcast as they learned. In the next module, they would choose a topic they were curious about, investigate it, and share what they learned with their school community through another podcast.

I read her email and thought, Yes. We both understand the assignment.

I had been planting seeds as we worked, but I wasn’t ready to push her toward that larger idea. There was already so much to think through, and I didn’t want to overwhelm her. I hoped she would get there in her own time. Then her email arrived, and there it was, in her words: the unit was about curiosity. The podcast was one way her students could follow it and share where it led them.

The timing stayed with me, too. That Wednesday, the readings, podcasts, and videos for our next class would bring us to Paulo Freire and Noam Chomsky, asking what school is for and what education might do when it reaches into students and draws out their curiosity. She had arrived at that question through the work we were doing together, and through our conversation about what might be happening in those professors’ classrooms.

I wish the professors at the next table could have met my student. I wish they could have seen the care and wonder she brought to this work. And I want to hold on to the question their conversation left me with: When a student seems disengaged, will I be curious enough to ask why?