AUTOBIOGRAPHY, IN PARTS
Part I: Nouns
In my first academic iteration (read: first English teaching gig), I was convinced on Day One that what I knew mattered. Content was key. I had convinced myself that having a working and accessible knowledge of William Wordsworth’s life, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s eccentricities, and Pablo Neruda’s theories of poetic devices were all critical to the success of my students. I think I envisioned teaching as a kind of firing squad. Kids would pepper me with questions throughout the year (“What does Homer mean when he writes…?” “Is Chillingsworth meant to reflect a certain person that Hawthorne knew?” “Did Walt Whitman have lots of sex with men?”) and I would need to defend, respond, answer those questions or perish. My content knowledge was my shield. The things I knew, the facts I could produce about history and literature, mattered more than literally everything else.
This absolute faith in what I call the nouns of teaching was reinforced during those early years in so many ways. I was tasked with teaching a lot of Poe in those days. So as I introduced The Cask of Amontillado (still my favorite Poe story) or Mask of the Red Death (my least favorite) or Fall of the House of Usher (the most oversold Poe story, in my opinion) I spent whole class periods reviewing Poe as a person: his drinking and gambling addictions, his year at UVa, his marriage to his cousin, his mysterious death. I had come up through a public schooling that involved a lot of note-taking. Teachers would fire up those old white-hot bulb overhead machines with the transparent sheets to write on. Usually these devices contained pages and pages of notes, information that was vital for us to record, memorize, and then use later on a test or exam. I don’t really bemoan this process (much as it is considered anathema in education circles today) because it did instill in me a desire to know and master this information. Introductions to units, be they in English or history or physics, typically involved copying this massive amount of information and listening as the teacher commented on the information. Some of what the teacher said was considered additional notes that we had to copy down also. All of this informed my approach during these early years of teaching. I too would fire up that overhead machine. I considered myself ahead of the game, too, because I had written out those background notes (Poe’s life, for example) legibly and thoughtfully. I considered what additional information I wanted to say while I presented the notes. Lots of time went into this preparation. But, I would add, the time was definitely focused on what *I* would do or say and not what the students would do or say. In retrospect, their presence was almost secondary to my lesson planning, a very “teacher-centered” way of approaching education.
I had some early reality checks to this style of teaching as I encountered students who fell asleep during class or who zoned out. Even worse: kids who just refused to take the notes. They would look out the window, pass notes to others in class, or even whisper during my lesson. (Honestly it wasn’t a lesson; it was a lecture… and a poor one at that.) Again, my formative years in school taught me that this kind of behavior was indicative of students who needed to be corrected, who didn’t understand the value of what they were doing or hearing, this amazing “gift” I was bestowing on them. I would stop, often, and draw them out asking them to explain their behavior. This often led to confrontations and belligerence and rarely solved the actual problem.
During this time I think I envisioned the problem as student motivation. Why didn’t these kids want to learn? I had craved knowledge and learning and school throughout my entire educational career. It was alien to me that anyone would not feel the same way. This was stuff that you didn’t already know. Didn’t you want to know it!? I was incredulous. What was the world coming to?
The nouns of teaching manifested themselves in other ways too. When I interacted with other faculty members, particularly members of my own department, I often measured myself against them in relation to what we knew about English. I would randomly quote parts of The Canterbury Tales (yup, I was THAT guy) and when another English teacher looked at me in confusion I chalked it up to a win. This morality tale played out in many ways. It was reinforced by senior members of my department. At lunches or on planning periods, they would bemoan the state of content knowledge of new teachers entering the profession. “These kids,” they would say, “just haven’t read enough.” Comments like these fed my esteem and ego. I could confidently stand in front of my class and make connections from Poe to Macbeth that would impress scholars the world over. Forget whether my students had read Macbeth and got the reference; that was immaterial.
My only other indication that something was wrong, that maybe this wasn’t the paragon of all great teaching methods, came at the end of various class periods. Once again, as a student I had always found the last five or ten minutes of a class the best time to draw more information out of my teachers. As we packed up our notes and bags we were encouraged to ask questions. Often our questions were content related. Do you have other funny Hemingway stories? What else about Jefferson and Franklin’s relationship did we not know? So as I modeled my early classes on what I knew from my own high school experience I was surprised when those final minutes of class were dead silent. Kids would pack up and glance at each other but no one spoke. “Any questions” I would ask. “Thoughts? Comments?” Nothing. Zip. For awhile I thought they were just overwhelmed with it all. Just needs to soak in, I told myself. Give it a few months of this and they’ll come around. Except they never did. I suspect at this point a more self-aware teacher would have taken time to reflect. They would have evaluated what the root cause of all this was. For me, though, it was the dimmest glimmer of a concern. Again, my position was enabled by some around me who assured me that “students these days just don’t care like they used to.”
Part II: Verbs
In my second academic iteration, I began to realize with the help of those veteran teachers around me that while content knowledge is important and one can’t truly be an effective teacher of any subject without a solid foundation of knowledge none of that matters if the students in the room don’t learn anything. This became especially clear to me as I began teaching my AP Lang & Comp course. As a writing course this thing required me to focus on the skills my students were developing. If they started the year being unable to write sentences with clear subject-verb agreements and they ended the year writing sentences about Walt Whitman’s fluid view of sexuality still with subject-verb agreement issues then what they had “learned” was fairly robotic and of little importance, for their writing had not improved.
It took teaching AP Lang one whole year before I started really clearly seeing that “moving the needle” for my students, affecting their writing in a meaningful way was way harder that imparting random facts about authors and history. In some cases they were downright resistant to that change. Stop telling me what to fix, they would (silently) say, and just give me the “A” that I’ve always gotten in English class. There were moments that first year and early the second year that I really and truly confronted my first crisis of faith: was I any good at this thing? Was I nothing more than a kind of automaton, spitting out facts that kids really didn’t care about anyway? Technology was catching up too. Notes on the board were quickly becoming a thing of a bygone era. As cell phones became more and more ubiquitous in the classroom, copying notes from an overhead project was a matter of clicking the picture button on the phone. This allowed students to zone out for 20-30 minutes at a time, click a picture at the end, and have (on paper) the same understanding that their classmates had. Factual regurgitation tests, once the gold standard for a rigorous class, were also challenged. A good cell phone with internet access allowed a student to get all the answers he or she needed.
By the end of that first year and as I struggled to redesign for that next year I kept coming back to the notion that my most important job had less to do with what students got out of a course and more to do with how they performed. Moving the needle. Students who started the year only able to write simple sentences (subj-verb-compl) needed by year’s end to get more comfortable and demonstrate some control over more complex structures. Those nouns that had always been so very important suddenly weren’t. I couldn’t quite articulate where this change was leading until one day early in the second year of teaching this course. It was likely the third or fourth day. We had reviewed the syllabus, deconstructed the 9 point rubric, read some exemplars and a student asked a very simple question: how hard was the grading. Simple yet not. In contrast to prior years, I was more sensitive to the fear that underlaid that question. The student was asking, in a fairly public way, whether she was going to fail this course. I remember reassuring her that grading was fair, with opportunities to improve throughout the year, and that the rubric from the College Board was specific about things. What things, she asked. And then I said: “Your verbs matter. Not whether you say the thing you kinda mean but whether they say exactly what you mean.” And there it was. Verbs matter. Actions matter. They matter way more than the nouns. Information can and was being hurled at these young adults at an incredible rate. Everyday they were being bombarded with information and facts about chemistry and european history and geometry and the Spanish language. At every turn, in every classroom where they sat down there were things to know. And remember. And later prove to the teacher that they could remember them. But here, in this composition course, it didn’t really matter if they could recite Nixon’s “Checkers” speech or list the reasons Aristotle saw poetry as a superior art form. What mattered was their ability to explain, articulate, defend, analyze, and write. Verbs, verbs, everywhere. I needed to do more; my students needed to do more. They needed to write (not take tests) and they needed to reflect and they needed to talk about what they wrote.
So finally there was this: I was gifted a workbook when I took over the AP Lang & Comp class at my school called “Voice Lessons,” by Nancy Dean. I hadn’t really employed it during those first years. It was a go-to for days when I was absent. But I had used it wrong; I was having students read it and write long responses and then I was reading those writings. And grading them. Worksheets! The memory disgusts me. But then it started dawning on me that these activities, which are small snippets of clever, thought-provoking language, were really more geared for for students to talk about. I started using these as “bell ringers” (although I hate that term too) and ways to make the first 5-8 minutes of class meaningful. So instead of work these prompts, these singular creative examples of phrasing, became catalysts for kids talking about not just the words in front of them but their own writing. The best part - and other teachers will smile at this - was after a couple weeks of modeling how this warm-up activity worked the kids arrived at class eager - like pushing each other through the door eager - to see what the example was today. This most recent year I found the most success thus far. New desks at our school allowed for more organic grouping, so kids could look at the example, comment about it a bit, and then transition to their own use. Kids shared - sometimes willingly - with the class when they had used this very construction. Or when they planned to use it in the future. In some of my classes, students visited other groups to ask them about their perception of the example. It sparked so much conversation. I’m not ashamed to say these 5 minute blips sometimes became 20 minutes teachable moments about carefully selecting adjectives and turning a weak verb into an interesting gerund. It was dynamic and different and sometimes - just occasionally - fun.
Perhaps most importantly my kids were doing something, changing something about their writing instead of learning more facts, more nouns.
