Compose a letter to your former teacher-self. Think of moments in your life story as a teacher that you would have liked to have known before they happened. If you had the chance to sit down and have a conversation with your former teacher-self, what would be the most pivotal information you would tell yourself about your current classroom practice, instruction, method, etc.?
Please write, at least, 500 words.
Remember…the students…they are JUST KIDS. They are kids who make mistakes. They are kids who are trying to find their way in the world. They are just kids who are learning and doing the best that they can, and some of them are smarter than you are. They are, above all else, children who want to learn everything they can from you. But they are…JUST KIDS. Do not take anything personally. If a student is yelling at you or taking something out on you, remember that as soon as they walk out the door, they are back to the real problem and that is not you. This is what I would tell the teacher I was in the first five years of teaching.
ReplyDeleteDo not hold grudges. So a student cheated on a vocabulary test. That is not something to take personally, unless you want it to be said that the student did not want you to see him or her as a failure. That student was so worried about what you would think that they decided that cheating was the answer for not studying and not preparing for the test. But do not hold it against the student forever. Again, these students are JUST KIDS. Holding a grudge only prevents the student from learning and you from teaching that student properly. In the words of a recently popular Disney song, “Let it go.” This is what I would tell the teacher I was from years five to ten.
Remember that the students enjoy the joking and laughter. It helps them to remember not only you, but also what you are teaching them. Remember that the students are there to be engaged, if not entertained. Remember that the students are capable of jumping to the bar you set, and you set that bar high. Do not lower your standards simply because they complain about the work load. They are capable, and if they want that A in the class, they will work to get it. And you let them. And yes, they will fail. Of course they will. They are not perfect. They need to fail to appreciate their success and to appreciate the hard work that they put into their achievements. Failing now helps them to think critically about what they are doing and sets them up to succeed later on. It helps them to problem solve, to work through it, and to succeed later on. This is what I would tell the teacher I was from years ten to fifteen.
Remember, they are human. So, too, are you human. It is okay to let them see you as a human being. Life can be a struggle. When they see a teacher power through issues in a way that shows them life goes on and some “major issues” really aren’t, they learn how to better cope with the struggles they have in their lives. They need to know that no one is perfect, that everyone makes mistakes, and that how we deal with mistakes is a life lesson as well. Life is always 10% of what happens to a person and 90% how he or she deals with it. Sometimes we want to be so strict and unmoving in deadlines and assignments; sometimes we have to give students the benefit of the doubt and treat them the way we would want to be treated if the roles were reversed. Be firm, but be fair. These are the thoughts I have as I continue to figure out this profession on a day-to-day basis.
Dear Younger Me,
ReplyDeleteRemember those cartwheels you did after the first day of school? You were so excited, so energetic. Eventually you will do those more to celebrate the end of the year. That is okay. You earned them both. Don’t try to re-catch the high of that honeymoon period; it is unattainable.
Go visit your friends on spring break. Let your assistant coach take the team to state. It will be fine. It turns out your friends had tickets for one of your favorite bands. But even more poignant, you never see them again. The loss of friends because of your job is something you will regret. Stay up late, go out with friends, and be tired at work. You need friends who are not teachers. You need to talk about things besides your school or you will be a big bore. You will bore yourself. Do not put all of your eggs in one basket, either. You will have dear friends at school, but when work gets hard, you to connect and let loose outside. Forget about the conflicts and stop being a teacher.
Get organized! Keep your calendars clear—what went longer, what didn’t work, suggestions for the next time. That way next year—next semester you don’t have to reinvent everything you did. And you won’t make the same mistakes over and over again. This will save you so much time.
Time is invaluable. Make time to be friendly. You need those people. You need to laugh. You will get burnt out if you don’t stay friendly. There are no prizes for having the most graded in the quickest amount of time. Learn to budget your time gracefully. You do have a lot to do, but most of it can wait. Better yet, stop assigning work that needs graded by YOU. Grade in class more. Students will ask questions, you will explain it and that will benefit everyone.
Classroom management will be a pain always. You will have good days and bad days. Don’t beat yourself up. But it is important. Try to do it with love, but kids need your strength. Have simple rules: do not talk while the teacher is talking, work when it is time to work, be in your seat, etc. Then give a warning, then a consequence. Do this consistently and your life will be simpler. It is not easy, but it works. Take opportunities to go observe other teachers in their classrooms. You will get ideas and also feel better about your own work. But don’t spend too much time comparing yourself to other teachers. Everyone is different and kids need variety. They will run into many different kinds of bosses and fellow employees that they will need to get along with.
So I sit here writing this on Christmas break, with not one thing planned for the next semester. We have new textbooks and new tests, and new standards. You are overwhelmed and procrastinating. This keeps happening. I just read that happy people do not try to control the world around them, but sometimes you should manage this better. Some years you are a pro and this transition to the next semester is cake. Some years things get away from you. Don’t let it get you down. This is what you do. You still have time to read, watch a movie, go for a run.
I am proud of you for doing a hard job. You do it the hard way. You do not take the easy way out. You are in it for the long haul. Don’t plan your escape; plan how to make it worthwhile.
Your Future Self,
Marla
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ReplyDeleteHey there,
ReplyDeleteRummaging through a box of old journals, I found the one you kept in the spring of 1968, your second full year of teaching 7th and 8th grade English in Wisconsin.
On the first read, I squirmed—so many rookie mistakes and such profound naïveté. No wonder the two years before this had been so rough. Between the lines, I could read your angst and sensed the strain. You recorded your gripes and a whole slug of criticisms, but mainly what you said was this: “School is so hard—it demands so much.”
On the second read, the humor—generated mostly by student remarks you recorded and behaviors you described—stood out. You loved those kids. You wanted them all to succeed, but things weren’t going well.
By the third read, I was past the embarrassment over own my clumsiness. I could see myself in your narrative. Teaching style, values, impulses as an educator—the seeds of what you (I) became are all there.
It was spring and the kids were bored. They wanted to do “fun” stuff and you had a curriculum to follow. You didn’t agree with it all, but felt an obligation to teach it: “If I don’t,” you wrote, “it will be they and not I who will suffer for it”—meaning, they’d be ill-prepared for high school. Know what? I still feel that way. But the methods individual teachers employ to communicate that content? The projects they undertake to develop those skills? Ha! That’s altogether different.
So, on Monday through Thursday that spring in 1968, you dutifully did as you were expected to do. But on Fridays, influenced by the educational reformers of the day—Jonathan Kozol, Herbert Kohl, John Holt—and Summerhill, that idyllic private school in England (that maybe never was “as advertised”), where students followed their own agendas for learning—you launched an experiment in self-directed study that today would be called “project-based learning.” Pretty ironic that the last major initiative of my/your classroom career was pure PBL: the Unsung Heroes project that dominated my last three years in the classroom.
That 1968 experiment yielded mediocre results—some good, some bad, nothing awful but nothing sterling. Girl! You could have used a coach! Someone to kick start what you eventually learned, painstakingly, by trial and error. You didn’t know how to blend what you needed to teach with the creative projects you and your students envisioned. You didn’t understand that content and skills don’t need to be taught in isolation. A coach could have helped you see that and helped you unpack the curriculum, sequence it, and create a schedule that was flexible but that held the kids accountable. A coach could have suggested strategies to keep those kids on task.
Continued...
ReplyDeleteThe boys in the class were squirrelly and pubescent; you looked like you were fourteen yourself. Discipline wasn’t your strength. Blame it on youthful looks, a crummy student teaching experience, poor leadership in the school, even the backdrop of all that was going on nationally and in your own backyard on the University of Wisconsin campus: the slide into violence of the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the nascent women’s movement. A lot of social unrest.
Whatever, there was a lot of “social unrest” in your classroom, too. So in addition to the experiment in learning, you and the class together drew up rules for an experiment in self-governing. I cringe reading about this now—but actually, judging by the journal, it worked pretty well. The kids developed some self-control. You learned that reward works better than punishment. That experience and some strong support from a principal in another school ten years later probably spawned your ultimate and only classroom dictum on discipline: “Do your best. Respect others.”
But that spring must have been a turning point in your development as a teacher. I know the experience built your confidence. By the time you left Madison for a new community in Connecticut, you had begun to believe in yourself, to believe you could be a teacher.
Fast-forward to your years in Indiana. Not that two years of teaching in Connecticut weren’t important or that the ten (plus or minus) years of hiatus while you raised your children weren’t full of experiences that informed your eventual practice, but you weren’t in a regular classroom on a daily basis.
Even your first year in Indiana you were out of the classroom. You worked at TRIAD, a federally-funded teacher center that provided professional development for inservice teachers. You used to say you were like a Farm Bureau agent—you packaged workshops that were held at the Center and presented them again yourself at schools in Benton and Carroll counties. You were in every school in those counties and in Tippecanoe County, too, by the time TRIAD closed. (It was a promising federal initiative, lost to a shift in national political leadership.)
By then, you’d learned a lot about school leadership, so when you had a chance to teach in the TSC for John Christopher at Southwestern, you had no qualms about a crumbling building and a room with seventeen buckets to catch the rain. With Mr.Christopher in the background, you grew into your authority as a teacher and were free to focus on instruction. You went back to school for your M.S. You coached the speech team.
The district reorganized, and you moved to McCutcheon. You welcomed the challenge of high school—and that it was. Older kids were different. You had to reestablish yourself. The pace of instruction was different. The content was murky in your mind. You spent long nights rereading Hawthorne and Emerson, Whitman and Dickinson, and learning about their lives. It had been fifteen years since college.
Continued...
ReplyDeleteDays went by, months, years. The time you spent never seem to diminish. Just as you thought you were reaching the end of something, you’d discover something more there was to know. But you kept on.
And you loved it.
The intensity of the work suited you. New classes, new content. A G/T endorsement. Speech team. SuperBowl. Beyond the Pages. The Russian Exchanges. International Club. Unsung Heroes. Papers and presentations. Responsibility beyond your own classroom.
You just kept working, never even looked up.
And the kids. A flood of kids. You put their pictures on the bulletin board and quipped that you’d retire when the board filled. It did, but you just moved to a room with a bigger board.
Then, recognition beyond expectation. Who’d have imagined it? Or expected it? Or worked with that in mind? But it happened.
If you had known all this, would it have made you less anxious twenty-five years earlier about your ability? Would it have made you more confident? You probably wouldn’t have believed it.
And you might even have been discouraged if you’d known that learning to be a teacher never ends. Teaching is complicated—and I was learning how to do it right up to the very last day.
But you persevered—and I am so glad you did.
I’ve had a long and gratifying life in the classroom. I’ve worked hard and risked a lot, but my life has been enriched in ways I could never have imagined back when I was you. It has called for persistence and, some would say, sacrifice, but the rewards—the kids, the challenge, the satisfaction of getting things right, purposefulness—have been worth all the stress, the investment of time, the risks, and the dangers. Yes, the dangers:
Cultural ignorance, for example. I have never watched Friends or The Office on TV, have seen only one or two Seinfelds in my life, have no idea who Justin Bieber is or where Kim Kardashian came from. I had no time. Instead, I kept company with Twain and Faulkner and Homer and Harper Lee and George Orwell and other literary luminaries. I reread their work every single year—and considered myself lucky to admire anew a turn of phrase, to marvel once more at an apt comparison, to suck in my breath at the sheer beauty of their prose. It was nothing short of privilege to open To Kill a Mockingbird for the thirty-first and last time and read aloud to my class, “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.” Every November, I went to London with Pip, and in February, I followed Odysseus around the world. Come spring, it was time to visit Manor Farm again and watch the pigs turn into Mr. Jones. I’m spoiled now for bestseller fiction. I can’t stand TV. That makes me a poor conversationalist and puts me out of touch with popular culture.
Conclusion.
ReplyDeleteHere’s another danger I have faced: Falling flat on my face. No one told me how to structure those fifty minutes between the bells. No one told me how to teach or how to manage my classroom. I decided from a range of choices what we would read and when we would read it. I decided how I would make the stories come alive or what I would to do to help the students improve their writing. I set the goals and I crafted the lessons. I made the connections from book to book, and I designed the projects, the writing assignments, the presentations. I made up the tests. My creativity as a teacher was limited only by my imagination and my stamina. Even when resources were in short supply, I usually could find ways to finance what I wanted to do. Granted, there were standards and a local curriculum that I was obliged to follow, but how could I quibble with those? The standards provided guidance, and I helped to write the curriculum. Such independence was exhilarating—but it also posed a risk. Since I decided just about everything that happened in my room, what would happen if I failed?
I have been in constant danger, too, of my heart being broken. It’s love, of course, that does that, and love is the only way to describe my feelings for the students I was with each year, sometimes for longer than a year. These are kids I celebrated with when they were happy, encouraged when they were down, sometimes let up on when they were taxed to their limit, and rejoiced for when they succeeded. We developed a relationship, each one of them and I, based on shared experiences and my knowledge of what they often revealed when we read those books together. I was privy to their ideas when they raised their hands to speak. I read their thoughts in the essays they wrote for me. It was a lopsided relationship, of course. More like parent-child than friend-to-friend. I nagged them, cajoled them, and told them what to do. Sometimes they made poor decisions, let me down, acted badly. Sometimes I wanted to throttle them. Sometimes terrible things happened in their lives, and then my heart broke. My attachment to the kids sounds odd to people who haven’t taught. But all these years later, seeing my grown-up students in a store or at a theater or meeting them on the street, I discover that they feel attached to me, too. Sometimes, even years later, they come back to say thank you: for pushing them, for demanding they do their best, for putting up with their resistance, for teaching them something—in short, for caring about them.
Intoxicating stuff, teaching: Privilege. Independence. Joy. But they all come with risk attached: Isolation. Failure. Hurt.
But I’ve never been sorry we followed this path.
I am a teacher.
I always will be.
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ReplyDeleteDear Harry,
ReplyDeleteRecently I have been reflecting on my career as a teacher and how that professional work has affected who I am as a person (a non-teacher) and how my non-teaching life has influenced my teaching and my teacher-self. Let me share with you some insights based on my experience that hopefully will help you as you grow and mature as a teacher and as a man.
I have observed that teaching is a lot like other professions in one very unfortunate way—it tempts or threatens to devour a teacher’s whole life in the process of simply doing a job. Teachers often work 60- or 70-hour weeks during the school year, and the only reason they continue to do so despite their low pay is that they love their work or believe strongly in the importance of their work. Well, loving your work is a great thing, no doubt. However, nobody’s work should take over their lives. I am a teacher, you are teacher. But that is not all we are. There is something subtly pernicious about being so closely identified with your profession. I have seen that many people take a pride in that identification that crosses over from being healthy to being destructive. So, I would caution you to avoid falling into the trap of thinking you are something greater that you are. Learn the secret of contentment.
Another thing I would caution you about, based on my experience, is that trap of perfectionism, which shows up in two ways. First, I think perfectionism is especially troublesome for English teachers, because so often we see ourselves as grand protectors of the language, the last bulwark against the forces of impending barbarism against pure English. While it’s true that you do have a better grasp of grammar than 99% of the people in the country, and better than 99% of the other people in the school building—so what? Just as we take slight offense when a person who’s really good at math, say, makes fun of us for our seemingly minor arithmetic errors, we have to understand and accept that our abilities with the language are very unusual, that other people who don’t share our “gift” are nevertheless intelligent people, and that outside of the classroom our insistence on pure English is unfruitful, futile, and even comical. It’s true that people can communicate perfectly well without using perfect grammar. So I would advise you to develop a more tolerant and gracious attitude toward other users of the language than most of our colleagues have.
I guess the bottom line on what I’ve said so far is that you shouldn’t take yourself too seriously. You should learn to do your job well without coming to believe that it’s the be-all and end-all of human civilization, or even of your own life. It’s not.
Continued...
ReplyDeleteAnother thing I wish I understood earlier in my career is the actual relationship between me as a teacher and my “superiors.” I think it’s important to have this clear in your mind; it will save a lot of worry at some point in your career. Technically, legally, you as a teacher work for the school corporation that hires you. But it’s not really that simple. The school corporation can be thought of as an arm of the state government, so a teacher can rightfully think of himself or herself as a civil servant, a state employee. Even though we are not elected by the people, we are hired by people who are elected by voters. So a teacher ought to have this in mind all the time. When creating units or individual lessons, for instance, we ought to be thinking in an overarching way about whether or not we are trying to teach students truths that will help them be better citizens in a free society. I’m talking in a very general way, of course. I don’t mean that your own political values should color what you teach. But we should be trying to help students learn to think critically, to weigh issues in a way that’s consistent with the best historical thought in our nation. You may think of yourself as liberal or conservative, but in the classroom you should be supporting the idea of free inquiry, open debate, etc. And that approach comes from consciously remembering that we are working in a democratic system of a free country. Nobody ever encouraged me to think about teaching in this way—I wish they had, but I had to develop it on my own.
Thinking about the chain of authority, you shouldn’t ignore the role of parents and a teacher’s obligation to parents. The voters are also parents, and whether they consciously think about it or not, they want the school system to have their kids’ best interests at heart. That means they expect the decisions we make day to day in the classroom should reflect love and care for young people who for eight hours a day become our children. Say what you want about the wisdom of the idea of in loco parentis—it’s a fact of life in our country today. I wish people teaching me to teach had clarified this idea for me. Obviously, no two parents agree on how a child should be taught, or what that child should be taught. And there’s no way an individual teacher can navigate the waters; you can’t keep every parent happy. Nevertheless, I wish someone had warned me ahead of time about this important aspect of teaching. It’s important to keep lines of communication open with parents and to have a strategy with other teachers and with the building administrators that acknowledges the proper responsibility we all bear to parents.
Conclusion.
ReplyDeleteFinally, you should think about how your role as an employee and a servant of community parents fits in with your conscience—that is, you need to think ahead of time about how you will react when your principal or the school board or a parent calls on you to teach something or in a certain way that goes against your better judgment as the person on the front line in relationships with teen-agers. This is going to happen. It’s a question of when, not if. And it probably will happen on the sidelines, on issues having to do with kids’ day-to-day living rather than academic issues. Teen-agers often talk about their lives more openly with a trusted teacher than with their own parents. When they share some secret, what should we do with it? What if you know in your heart that as a parent—or as a friend of the parent—you ought to respond in a certain way, yet as a teacher if you do so you might ruin the relationship with the student (and by extension other students) which in turn will hinder your effectiveness as a teacher, and so on. In such cases there are no right answers. You’ll be living life in so far as life means relationships with other people, and people are going to get hurt because that’s what happens in life. What I have learned over the years is that a teaching career entails lots of such situations that force you to come to grips with your own priorities and values. The more you can think about what’s most important to you ahead of time, the better equipped you will be to handle these bumps in the road as they arise.
Looking back over what I’ve written, I see that I’ve said very little about classroom management, how to develop plans and units, tips for areas of teaching like grammar, vocabulary, etc. What I’ve learned about those is that different teachers discover different approaches that they are most comfortable with or that “work” best. Each young teacher needs to experiment and determine what works best for him or her. Having lots of interaction with fellow teachers helps, of course, even if you wind up testing and rejecting a lot of their ideas. There is no one-size-fits-all method or strategy. I have learned that the best teachers keep an open mind about new ways and don’t insist that their own ways are the best practice for everyone.
Well, I wish someone had actually sent me a letter like this from my future! It might have saved me some trouble along the way. Maybe as you proceed along the timeline of your career, you can communicate some of what you’re learning to younger colleagues. That’s about the best any of us can do!
Dear Marilyn,
ReplyDeleteHold on, dear. You’re heading for one hell of a rollercoaster ride. You started this thrilling adventure for the fun of it, and you ended up staying on the ride longer than planned. There are some things, though, you should have known before you attempted such a noble task of shaping the minds of young people:
***English teachers have to work harder than other teachers to stay on the coaster ride successfully. Your essays and writing assignments can’t be graded by T.A.s. You have to do it by yourself, and you will give up hours and hours of your weekends; you will take sick days to grade essays; you will pull your hair out when you finally input the grades from the last essay just the day before the next essay is due. It takes time to read everything students write, sometimes more than 30 minutes an essay if the student struggles with the assignment. After you painstakingly grade the assignment and pass the paper back with all of your comments, suggestions and encouraging words, you will see students drop the essay in the recycle bin without even looking at it. Some days you would like to be a FACS teacher because then you could eat your students’ homework.
***Your co-workers don’t like rollercoaster rides and don’t have the enthusiasm for them that you have. The old adage, “Life ain’t fair” can be applied here. Starting this profession, you were an idealist who believed that you could change the education world and make it better. You can’t. Now you are a pessimist and are not sure if the ride is worth saving. The school system is broken, and legislators are attacking the teachers as the reason for the breakdown. Some need to be attacked. You will be disillusioned by their lack of effort, lack of professionalism, lack of caring, lack of intelligence, and lack of integrity, and yet they get paid the same as you do, sometimes more.
***Just when you feel as if you are cresting the ride, the bottom will fall out, and you’ll pass through a dark tunnel. For example: Early on when you are eager to see students succeed, you ask for permission from the guidance counselor and the TSC assistant superintendent of instruction to copy the new and improved ISTEP exam to help your students study for next year. Permission granted. You will pass out the exam to all TSC teachers to use with their students in preparation for next year’s exam. Exam day will arrive, and the students will be administered the exact same exam as last year—the one you copied and passed out to all teachers to use as a study tool. The students will think the test is a ride in the park, and it will be, of course. Results: State will nullify all scores for TSC that year, and you will be under investigation for cheating because the guidance counselor had no recollection of giving you permission to copy the exam.
Conclusion.
ReplyDelete***Most students think the rollercoaster ride is all about personal relationships with their friends and boy/girlfriends. Many are not in school to learn. They will not engage in class discussions as your fellow college classmates do. Most of the time they will not care what the symbolism is in the short story or who the speaker of the poem is. You’ll have to be an actress in front of the classroom to engage them and get them to pay attention to anything you have to say. Even if you tell them, “This is ON the exam,” they will not write it down or remember it, but they’ll be able to tell you exactly what Suzie Q had on yesterday, and how many points Billy scored in the football game last Friday.
***Kids lie to get on the ride. On the day the essay is due, 20 of your 75 students will have a printer that is broken, or a computer that deleted their entire essay, or jump drive that went bad, or a corrupted disk, etc.
***Kids are brutally honest. Just when you think you’ve heard every twist and turn about ride, they will tell you about the fight their parents had. They will tell you about not having any money. They will tell you about not having any food at home. They will tell you that they visit their dad in prison. They will tell you that they cheated on a test. They will tell you they hate the outfit you have on. They will tell you that your assignments are stupid. ETC.
***You will forget the names of some of your favorite students. Even though they give you a senior photo, and you displayed it in all of the classrooms you were in, one day their names will disappear from your memory, as will “why” they were your favorite. You should always make them write their name on the back of the photo before the leave the ride.
***You will question your teaching skills and methods continually. One year you will be “spot-on”---the most fun coaster ride in the park. Kids will interact with you in the classroom, understand the subject matter, choose you as “teacher of the year,” perform well on tests, etc. The next year you are a dud even though you are teaching the same material in the same way. Even though you have been on this coaster over and over for more than 20 years, you will NEVER feel confident in your profession.
***You will love your job, and hate it at the same time. Enough said.
These are just a few of the instructions you should have known before you decided to take this crazy ride. Had you known all of the above, you might have decided not to get on, and then you would have missed the best 25 years of your life.
"Had you known all of the above, you might have decided not to get on, and then you would have missed the best 25 years of your life."
ReplyDeleteAmen.