Having completed three courses of graduate school, I find myself reflecting not on the roller coaster of being a student again but more on the general changes I've undergone in my 20 years as a teacher. I've heard others in the field talk about "reinventing" themselves variously throughout their career and I think I'm just beginning to understand what that really means.
To explain where I am currently, as an educator, I need to backload you with where I was, mentally, when I started. When I run through a list of names of teachers that influenced me - Patty Worsham, James Koger, Sid Homan, Jim Locke, Pete Peterson, Peggy Myers - I am struck at how unusual my motivation was. Assignments tended to turn me off; syllabii made courses way too clinical. I wanted to show up each day or class period and be blown off my feet. I didn't want to know three weeks down the road that I'd have a research paper due. That just caused me anxiety. As a result, I worked harder for teachers who made assignments sound like suggestions, or even better, challenges. "I think it would be worth reading Swift's Battle of the Books but don't expect to understand everything on the first try. It's hard." I was thinking CHALLENGE ACCEPTED decades before it became a meme. The same was true, oddly enough, of homework and breaks. "Try reading Othello over winter break and we'll see what makes sense when you return." I'd consume that thing in an afternoon and then read every critical reaction to it I could find. Again though, if it was an "assignment" and if there was some long-range plan connected to it, I felt less interested. I felt like a Model T on Henry Ford's line. Do this... now this... and now this... good..."
So I began teaching in the late 1990s and early 2000s with that mindset. Put some nuggets out there, just make some suggestions. Let the students bite, let them see the grandeur and BOOM they'll be hooked. Except... the pond seemed empty. Suggestions became, well, exactly that. Encouragement became students who "took that under advisement." And worse still: my superiors came looking for evidence of progress, of students who had grown as readers and writers and my dinky portfolios did not prove that. Not even close.
A rational, thoughtful human adult would evaluate that kind of failure and adjust. This method didn't work so let's try... But me? Yeah, I double-downed on my dumb. My friend and colleague Andrew Clark likes to say he cringes when he thinks of how he screwed up his students in the first five years of his teaching. Ditto. What did I do? I pulled back. I made the kids struggle MORE with the text. I assigned MORE reading. Reading that they, honestly, didn't do for the most part. Because who's going to work for the asshole English teacher who acts so superior?
I remember clearly a professional development I went to at a previous school system where I worked. The instructor kept talking about "making learning fun." If it's not fun, he claimed, then the students are only doing it for the grade. I fought with that guy every step of the way. Learning is hard, I argued. Sugar-coating that puts students at a disadvantage when they graduate or go on to college. Back and forth. I knew enough to stop after awhile; I wasn't going to change his mind and I wasn't looking to make the class painful for my colleagues.
Then I transferred to LCS and back to my alma mater. I started undergoing a gradual but clear transition. Some of that I think required me get beyond the general age of the students themselves. A 24 year old teacher needs to establish credibility in a way that a 41 year old teacher does not. These changes have some specific examples: I stopped assigning reading over breaks (Thanksgiving, winter, spring) and I editing my reading quizzes to allow for creativity and choice that once upon a time I didn't. Some changes are more theoretical: I became a skills teacher instead of a content one. Being able to recite the events of The Odyssey wasn't as important as being able to read it. That was a sea change, for me. For my students too because a skills test doesn't allow for material to study. "What's my test on?" "A passage of American prose." "Um ok... mom wants to know what to study?" I began building examples of prose readings that would challenge my students intellectually and prepare them for the kinds of things I needed them to read to be successful. That's a work in progress. Total truth: I know I have kids who end my class with the exact same set of reading skills that they started with. They literally make no progress. And I have to own that, I have to figure out a way to fix that.
My friend Derek would remind me that students have free will and if they choose not to grow then there isn't much anyone can do to change that. (Sidenote: I miss talking to him more than I let on most days. He kept me honest and challenged my assumptions. Also, he lives at the beach. Bastard.) But I am charged with this work. I cannot shrink from it.
So am I coach or evaluator? Cheerleader or judge? Some of my colleagues would say both but that's a chasm I don't think is cross-able. Am I building my own wall to keep students out of an arbitrary land that I have named success?
I am heartened when my students come to me after school and we can talk about their writing and in talking about that we're really talking about them - their hopes and fears and work ethic and family and struggles. I wish there were more hours in the day to do this. I also realize there are probably current and former students reading this who disagree with the person I see myself as. I am the problem, the obstacles, the issue in their lives and if I could just stop that would be great.
I find myself reevaluating my mindset constantly. Is this perception I have of education one that makes sense with students where they are today? Am I just the current form of the curmudgeon teacher that has existed since the time of Plato? Am I nothing more than one of the two old guys on The Muppet Show making fun of things from the box beside the stage?
One thing is sure: being a student again grounds me in the frustrations with which my own students constantly struggle. I hope that is enough to make a difference.
