Genius Freak

You may teach English 11 for 25 years.  You may have read The Great Gatsby 20 times.  You may have written or read 1000 papers on Death of a Salesman .  But those kids in front of you, (at least the vast majority of them), they only have 180 days of English 11 with you.  It's the first time, the last time, and not a moment to spare.

For about 15 of 25 years I have been a teacher I also coached a few different sports -field hockey, basketball, and soccer - in the after school hours. A coach's "success" is generally measured by the record of winds and losses racked up on game days.  But teams and coaches put much more time into practicing than they do in the games that "count."  At its most basic, the role of the coach is to teach your student/players the set of skills that they will need to take the field on game day and win.  In many senses, not all that different from the role of the teacher in the classroom. Like the coach, in theory, we have lots of days of practice and then a game day that "counts." But in school practice, it often doesn't seem to work that way.

It’s teacher appreciation week. And in the spirit of teacher appreciation week, I’d like to lay down some appreciation where it is due. I have been alive for 17,066 days, and I am pretty sure that I have spent more of them in school than not in school.  In 17,066 days I have had a lot of teachers, and in some way each of them has had an impact on who I am as the teacher and the person (inseparable, from each other) sitting here on this stool, in this room, in the Vortex.   I usually divide teachers into two categories.  There are the ones who teach me something about the teacher I do not want to be.  And there are the ones who teach me something about the teacher I aspire to be. I do not want to be the worksheet teacher, or the packet teacher, or the scantron teacher. I don’t want to be the teacher who just writes a question mark next to a whole paragraph on a paper and thinks that’s helpful feedback.   I do not want to be the teacher who stands in front o...

Every teacher has probably had to do it as a requirement for at least one teacher preparation class in college.  But I think it's a valuable thing for teachers to do  pretty regularly, not just as an academic exercise, but as a way to really think through where you are as a teacher, how you got here, where you are going, and why. The assignment:  Write a brief statement of your teaching philosophy.   Here's my most recent stab at it.

This is a picture of a page in my teaching journal. Scrawled in the corner of the page it says "What I teach or plan with __ in mind I do as a better teacher."  A snapshot of a small epiphany with big consequences.  I am a better teacher when I plan and teach with students in mind.  That seems obvious. What teacher doesn't plan and teach with students in mind, right? Unfortunately, obvious at it is, it hasn't always been the case.

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a majority of high school students to be able to read and write and do math at an 11th grade level before they graduate from 12th grade. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect students entering college to be ready to do college-level work when they graduate from 12th grade. But when we [teachers, schools, districts] focus the bulk of our educational efforts on "preparing" students to achieve the minimal passing score on a single test that measures 11th grade proficiency as if that were preparing them for anything other than that single test, it is unreasonable to expect that they will be prepared for much of anything beyond high school, least of all that college-level work we think we are getting them ready for.

It was late. I was on the couch, pretending to be comfortable between the piles of graded, and to be graded. Wanting to move one last paper from the latter pile (by far the larger) to the other before calling it a night, I read through one senior's exploration of the concept of "American exceptionalism." Noting good arguments and places where more information would strengthen the writer's position, in the margin I wrote, "This would be a good place to add some statistics." Or I meant to write that. I was about halfway through the word statistics when I realized it was looking more like a child's drawing of some choppy ocean waves than anything resembling a word in any language. I looked at it through tired eyes and thought, "Oh, he'll figure out what that says," even as I knew that was hopeless.