My mentor teacher at Dana Middle School counseled me early on: Teachers only give off an illusion of control. When it all comes down to it, no one really has to listen to you. Then why should students give me or any other teacher the time of day, let along follow along with a lesson in a subject which they do not care about?
Control is an issue for many teachers. They want to control the curriculum, they want to control the management of the classroom, they even want to control the outcome of student learning. Yet with all of that control, even if I snapped my fingers, and everything proceeded the way that I wanted; when I yelled “Jump!”, and the students meekly responded “How High?”, I always felt a fundamental lack within myself.
When students discovered things of interest or import to themselves, when they learned things that I did not know, I got excited. It seemed that teaching was the most interesting when I did as little as possible. Of course, how can students learn if they do not have the proper skills to begin with? How can students learn if they are expected to be entertained and babysat instead of thinking for themselves, making conclusions after looking over the evidence which they have received?
This lack of curiosity is an acquired passivity, one based on standardized testing instead of stellar communication. One in which student tastes are dictating an instructor’s style of teaching instead of the other way around.
Respect is the most important element in the classroom. Respect for the teacher, for one another, and for the community learning at the site. Unfortunately, and undue and unhealthy emphasis has been placed on the student’s respect, not the teacher’s. Whether because the teacher is a temporary employee, or the because the district fails to support staff adequately, or whether because of a culture of danger and dysfunction which defines the daily lives of many students, teachers are very much under attack, and the demand for teacher accountability continues to rise, even while accommodation for troubled or frustrated students increases.
It's not about earning respect or gaining students' favor. Everyone of us has to find our respect, our place in this world. It's about trust, yes, including the trust that no matter how difficult a student may be, that he or she knows that you care enough that you are not going to cave in on them. If necessary, a good teacher will push a student to the wall, go the extra distance to hold the student accountable, to ensure that the student knows that the teacher cares.
But a teacher cannot care if he does not know what it means to be cared for. This I was sorely lacking during much of my life! I endured having to “make it on my one” many times In many schools, where new teachers, whether to the profession or to the specific school site, are expected to figure everything out on their own. Such sudden transition from student teaching to full-time employment is damaging to the human psyche. My first assistant principal regaled me with the harrowed account of crying every day for a month during her first year of teaching. Although I did not cry so profusely, I definitely could not sleep for the first year, so pressed was I to do everything perfectly. Even the principal’s calm assurance that “It’s OK to make mistakes” hardly calmed me.
For a long time, and I did not realize it, but I felt very alone in the world, and teaching made me feel even more isolated. I felt that, good or bad, it was all up to me. Such rugged individualism may inspire a walk in the forest or a solitary cabin-like existence in the New England Wood à la David Thoreau, but when it comes to making it in the real world, such dim and lonely prospects of me, myself, and I against the world are simply daunting. A sense of acceptance had eluded me for so long, and with teachers enduring so many evaluation, plus the stressors of completing one’s credential, facing the daunting political issues of craven administrators and cringing or clinging parents, no wonder many teacher quit after two or three years.
The sense of alone, burdened, exclusive responsibility: I believe that many adolescents feel this way. Like their younger counterparts, many adults are still struggling with questions of identity and security that plague us throughout our lives. "The Terror of Adolescence" playwright David Mamet termed this phenomenon: the overwhelming awareness that absolute freedom of "make your own wan in the world" is actually the cruelest of prison sentences, the condemnation of Freedom that existential atheist philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre used to pine over.
One in which the world is a prison of relative choices and individual will alone, even though the creeping suspicion within you demands some sort of accountability, but to whom? I can go by the state standards as closely as possible, but if everything ultimately depends on me, then what is the point? What are we all doing here? Why come to school?
With such questions roaring through my mind, no wonder I struggled for so many years to be a stable instructor. Now I have learned, however, that identity does not depend so much on who you are, but Whose you are. Not where you come from, but who you come from, and I am not writing about family or friends, either.
No comments:
Post a Comment