My body has been rebelling against teaching this year. It's only November and already I've called in SEVEN sick days this year, made a trip to urgent care, the minute clinic, two visits to my own doctor, and one trip to a fancy opthamologist in a skyscraping building downtown. Not exactly a personal best. But I want to put aside my rebellious immune system issues, the possibility that my body is telling me to quit teaching, and the pain I am feeling from a golfball sized pus-filled lymph node that is irritating the left side of my throat and making me squinch both shoulders up in a painful wince each time I swallow.
I want to put aside the physical for a moment and think about teaching.
I have to create an assignment for composition students for a course I am taking on composition and pedagogy. Conveniently, I teach composition and so this assignment will be pulling double duty for me- once when I turn it in for my grad class and then again when I use it on my unsuspecting students in a couple weeks.
I felt a little reluctant taking a grad school class on teaching composition while working on my MFA in writing, because, having already earned an M.Ed, I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about teaching already. But it has turned out to be surprisingly helpful, and, even more surprising, I am starting to feel as though I am exiting the shiny, new toy stage of teaching and entering into the shabby, worn skin horse part of the profession. I don't profess to be "real" yet, as the Velveteen rabbit wanted to be in the story, the one in which he sought wisdom from the skin horse who explained about the passing of flashy, new toys. But I do think nine years in the profession has changed my thinking about what I do.
I began teaching as a shiny, new toy right out of grad school, one year after under-grad. I was a ferris wheel of activities and lesson plans and games and exciting things to DO in class. But I think now that I DO a lot less and my students are learning a lot more. Or at least I hope so. I'm learning more, anyhow.
So here are some thoughts and lessons I've been considering in my evolution to skin horse composition teacher:
1. It is better to not do everything but to do certain things really well. It's better to scrap the day's activity in favor of going over the one you gave yesterday. Students want to do assignments that have meaning and they will put more effort into it if they see the meaning in what you do. By going over the materials, you illustrate the importance of the assignment for them.
2. The less I am involved in the assignment, the more they learn. My view of myself as a teacher has changed--I am not the expert telling them what to do, but I am a scholar, asking what we can learn from what is in front of us. I see my students learning the most when I introduce materials and ask them questions, when I say "what can we learn from this piece?" and "how does the writer make her point?" rather than "This is what we learn," and "This is how the writer makes her point." I ask my students to come up with grading criteria for their assignments. I ask them to tell me what a good narrative essay should do. They have to engage more critically with the work and, hopefully, start to think like scholars, rather than as students waiting for instruction from the teacher.
3. Learn from them. I used to be so nervous to pass out class evaluations, and not without reason. Handing a volatile 17 year-old an evaluation form can be seriously devastating for a 23 year-old newbie teacher. Now I learn from my students by asking them to reflect on their own process as writers, or by asking which assignments were most helpful. I am more willing to change and less fearful about their reaction to me. My thinking has gone from "do they like me?" to "are they learning?"
4. Page requirements are for suckers. One lesson learned from the self-reflections I had my students do is that for many, the thing they were most pleased with was the length of their essay. The requirement had been to write a 2-5 page essay and one student wrote "I am pleased with the length of the paper. Usually I am at the minimum but this time I was right in the middle." As a teacher, I found I could actually care less about the length of the paper. And that, in fact, when the students tried to stretch their stories to make them longer, usually the writing became worse. The papers lost their focus, became too wordy, and contained so many details that there was no climax to the story. In the narrative essay, I found the papers that were about a page and a half long tended to be the strongest. And, furthermore, I decided that I didn't want my students to worry about the length of the essay for a second. I wanted them to think about content, voice, and organization. I scrapped the length requirement for future narrative essays.
5. Not everyone likes to write. As a writer, I found this shocking. Having never struggled for topic and being the sort who could ramble on and on for five pages just introducing my topic, it never occurred to me that some people might simply not enjoy writing or might struggle to think of what to say and how to say it. I grew up in a family where my dad was an English teacher and my mom, a businesswoman, loved writing limericks and poems and lengthy, comical Christmas letters. We discussed grammar at the dinner table. We wrote skits to perform at Christmas parties. I had no idea there was a whole culture of people who didn't enjoy reading and writing.
Having made friends with people more mathematically or business-world inclined, I have learned a new perspective. Some people feel frustrated by the subjectivity of English courses, by the hazy guidelines and criteria; there are no answer keys to say you are right or wrong: there is only the teacher with her red pen. Suddenly I could understand why students take the comments and grades on their papers so personally; they are personal. Of course, not to the instructor, but, if you are student who doesn't understand the concepts being explained, you aren't going to receive the comments written on your essay as anything but a message that you are inadequate in this world where other people belong and you don't.
6. Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a great battle. Plato said this, first of all, not me, but it is a lesson that has been the most painful for me to learn. As a new teacher, I took students' failures personally. Why wouldn't they learn? Why wouldn't they try? Why did they insist on failing? But there's always a reason and it usually has little to do with me.
For instance, there was the student I scolded in front of others for skipping class who stormed away from me in a huff. Months later I learned her two year-old nephew had just been beaten to death by her sister's boyfriend. Of course I had no clue, but I will never forget that I shamed her (and not too harshly, to be fair to myself) in front of other people while she was dealing with that. Or there was Tyler, the student who pierced his own eyebrow with a giant safety pin and promptly lost every assignment I gave him. Or Alan, a student who NEVER brought a pencil to class and would chew the ones I let him use for the period... and lose them before class the next day. Or Mary, a student who always dressed impeccably said to me when I asked about her failing grade "I don't know, I just can't concentrate. My dad and step-mom always fight, so I just want to hang out with my friends." Or Jereme, who said, when I asked him about his failing grades that his grandma, his only caretaker since his mom died the month before, had been hospitalized for a stroke and so he had to take over her dog-walking business while she was in the hospital.
No wonder he wasn't turning in his assignments.
7. Or else they are on drugs. Seriously. I've caught at least three kids using in my classroom over the years and I know that's just the kids dumb enough to get caught. Deals are going down in high school halls all over the place. But if students are choosing to be high in school, imagine how pointless they must see school in their lives. Some students will learn later on, some will go on to become addicts, some will have no long term consequences for their choices, but either way ultimately this is the student's choice.
I'm not really sure how this revelation fits into my personal pedagogy for teaching, other than to remember it is an element in the classroom that is never in the textbooks. When you are learning how to write a lesson plan there is never any guidance for what to do if your students are tripping, or stoned, or high out of their minds. And sometimes, when I am beating myself up for a being a failure of a teacher, for letting one or two of the children get left behind, it is slightly helpful to remember that one or two of them might be stubbornly planting their feet in the ground and refusing to move ahead with the plan. That it might not have anything to do with me at all.
8. Everyone wants to do well. Everyone. A peer in my composition class once told me that to get an F on an assignment, even one he didn't care about doing when he turned it in, was like "watching a video of being kicked in the face in slow motion." All students want to do well. All students want approval. All students care about the end results even if they show it by getting mad at the teacher, being hostile, challenging, demanding, apathetic, disinterested, or flippant.
This revelation has shaped the way I meet with students. I try to remember that their efforts on an assignment are their best efforts based on what they understood of the assignment. Even those students who waited until the last minute and rushed through it-- why did they wait? Why didn't they put more into it? Why did they sabotage their own efforts? What were they fearful of? What didn't they understand?
I have decided I don't want to be a teacher who crushes writers. I don't hand out A's but I try to simply remember to honor my students for their efforts and meet them where they are. I try not to shame or belittle my students.
9. You never know what they take with them. It's true. And especially with high school students. There are fewer pictures and cards made for high school teachers. Which is fine. Mostly it will seem like no one appreciates you. That is just the nature of being a high school teacher, especially if you have high expectations for your students and a reputation for being a little tough.
But sometimes a student will surprise you, and the student you thought cared less about school, will thank you for your efforts. Once in a while they will even buy you a shot, as a student of mine from my first year of teaching did when I was with friends at a bar downtown. He was a bartender and, in addition to giving me a drink, he turned to my friend and told her that I was the one of the few teacher at the high school who actually cared about what I was doing, the few that made a difference to him, a student notoriously late to class, usually inclined to goof off, and rarely inclined to finish homework. I would never have thought he would remember me any more than another student, Deshaun, one I worked with twice in an after school program and saw frequently in the halls.
Deshaun was frequently in trouble, mostly failing his classes, and often getting into confrontations with his teachers. I complimented his creative writing in the after school program and would ask him about the rhymes he was making up. Now he works at the Walgreen's by my apartment and is going to a community college in January. He greets me reverently as "Ms. Fuller" when he sees me and keeps me updated on his life, that he's working full time, planning to go to school, and getting his diploma on Monday at our high school because he finally finished his credits. I'm pleased he is succeeding now and surprised he remembers me; I never even had him as a student.
I'm telling these stories not to boost my ego for being an amazing teacher. (Well, maybe a little for ego-boosting. This is a pretty thankless job, so maybe I am just a little bit patting myself on the back for once instead of beating myself up for my many failures.) Mostly I am telling these stories to illustrate that teachers will hear the complaints instantly from the students they have pissed off, but that they rarely will hear the positive feedback. So it's a profession that requires a certain quality of faith, a certain skin horse toughness.
And finally...
10. There is nothing more satisfying than playing tricks on your students. It's so fun. On Friday I promised a taste test for an analysis unit we've been working on and I told my students we would be taste-testing broccoli, liver, and pig's hooves. For some dumb reason they believed me. Another classic joke is to write QUIZ! on the board on April 1st. They never catch on. Seven periods in a row- the joke works!
I say this because teaching can be fun, too. These are not mean-spirited jokes; they are harmless pranks and bring levity and life to the classroom. And, in a classroom where I will be largely unappreciated and teaching crabby students on drugs, I might as well amuse myself.
There are 800,000 variables I cannot control in the classroom (golf ball sized, pus-filled lymph nodes being one of them), but I can control my attitude. And I can find ways to amuse myself. To bring levity to the classroom. So I make bad jokes (for instance I asked my students which character in To Kill a Mockingbird said very little, which character said boo. Ha ha.) and I do not mock students, but I play tricks when I can. I tell my students embarrassing and amusing anecdotes about my family's obsession with jello. They don't laugh, but I don't care. It's not cool to laugh at your teacher's jokes when you are 15. Luckily, I am not 15. I can laugh at myself all I want.
So, an hour later into my sick day, I guess my conclusions are this: Am I an amazing teacher? Probably not. Am I a good teacher? Maybe. Am I doing my best? Yes. Have I learned anything in my nine years at this? Definitely. Is the journey from new toy to skin horse over?
Chances are, it's just beginning.
