Why Our Students Have to Know Us

For my professional reading, I’ve been going through Mike Rose’s book Lives on the Boundary, which is about the author’s experiences working with at-risk and underprepared students of all ages.  Rose’s approach to education is fully aware of content, but not without first considering the student who has to master it.  This is critical when the students have had academic struggles because they already perceive themselves as incapable of doing whatever they’re supposed to learn.  For that situation, Rose offers this lesson:

Teaching, I was coming to understand, was a kind of romance.  You didn’t just work with words or a chronicle of dates or facts about the suspension of protein in milk.  You wooed kids with these things, invited a relationship of sorts, the terms of connection being the narrative, the historical event, the balance of casein and water.  Maybe nothing was “intrinsically interesting.”  Knowledge gained its meaning, at lest initially, through a touch on the shoulder, through a conversation…My first enthusiasm about writing came because I wanted a teacher to like me (102).

I suppose this ties in with my earlier reflection comparing teaching and cooking.  Students need to know more than just how to do something.  They also need to know that it matters, and the teacher’s concern for them is the first sign that it does.   It’s easier for teachers to be concerned and win students over if they’re passionate about both their subject matter and their students.  Rose had a few dynamic teachers who introduced him to the Beat writers, Albert Camus, Abraham Maslow, and tons of other thinkers, all of whom were challenging to read.  Rose’s teachers, though, had a contagious passion for ideas that was easy for Rose and his friends to catch.  I hope I can fill my career with that kind of outbreak.

What If the Glass Is Half-Full?

Today’s discussion of Teacher Research for Better Schools dovetails nicely with this Washington Post blog post by an Ohio principal, who touts all the great things his (non-charter) school is doing in an age when it is all too easy to criticize the public school system as a whole.  Check out what they didn’t do:

We did not fire the staff, eliminate tenure, or pay teachers based on student test scores. We did not become a charter school. We did not take away control from a locally elected school board and give it to a mayor. We did not bring in a bunch of two-year short-term teachers.

And somehow, this school is still successful!  So much of the talk of school reform these days is about gutting the system of bad apples.  Believe me, I know there are bad apples out there; I’ve seen them firsthand.  But of this group, a certain percentage are well-intentioned people who could use some professional development, and a slim minority are the true slackers who collect paychecks while they wait for retirement.  I’ll concede that it takes only one awful teacher to light a fire under a “reformer”; there’s one at my alma mater who has been there for at least twenty years.  He was incompetent then, and he’s incompetent now, but for some reason, nobody bothers him.  It angers me to think about my friends who had him as an English teacher, many of whom were stuck in remedial English when they went to college.  Nevertheless, this is one lousy teacher at a high-performing school.  Should we bring about sweeping reform just to get rid of one guy (or a few people)?  Should we euthanize someone with cancer, or should we just get rid of the cancer?

I would be willing to bet money that the vast majority of public schools in this country are good schools, and that the vast majority of teachers in those schools are good teachers.  It’s easier, however, to point out problems than celebrate successes, or to take something that works in one area and expect everyone to implement it, even if things are fine everywhere else.  There are places where schools are failing, but there is rarely a single source for that failure.  I do not want to risk complacency, and the proposed solutions might work.  However, I have yet to see a workable systemic model for what is so far working just in miniature, with specific populations.

Organic Teaching

My ideal classroom is simple.  The class, like all classes at the school, is limited to twelve students.  The room is simple and practical.  Decorations are limited to selected maxims, quotations, and snippets from our readings, all meant to reflect the inner lives of the students.  There are the necessary technological implements: a few computers, a projector, and so on.  Sometimes we use them; sometimes we don’t.

We meet around a conference table.  The facilitator sits at the head of the table.  Sometimes that’s me; sometimes that’s a student.  Then we talk.  Generally, there has been a reading or writing assignment.  We usually talk about that.  If we’ve read, then we discuss our impressions and interpretations.  If we’ve written, then we share our writing with each other.  Ideally, the students aren’t the only ones who’ve written–I have, too.

So what do we read?  That depends.  Our texts fall into a few categories: stuff I pick, stuff they pick, and stuff we pick together.  My fiction, poetry, and drama selections will be a mix of the contemporary and the canonical.  My nonfiction selections will be current and varied in subject matter, with a few older, more classic works thrown in.  Every student will also have a subscription to The New Yorker, and we’ll be talking about it once a week.  When they pick their own texts, they get to pick whatever they want.  They might start out with simple readings, but hopefully, what they choose will get more sophisticated as the year progresses.  Sometimes we will vote on something to read together.  I might steer them towards something I want them to experience, but I might not.

So what do we write?  Lots of things.  The greatest emphasis will be on creative nonfiction, which is both practical and, well, creative.  Occasionally, the students will write fiction or poetry.  There will be one new draft every week, with lots of workshopping, revising, and portfolio compiling in between.  When we share pieces, we read them aloud, with the rest of the class giving feedback afterward.  Everyone is gracious, constructive, and fair, but also thick-skinned–we have to be willing to dish out criticism and willing to take it, but with the goal of ensuring that everyone is better at year’s end.  At certain times during the school year, there will be opportunities for the students to share their work with larger groups of people.  The students will practice their presentations with the class, implementing whatever multimedia tools will support their speaking.

That’s all we do.   I like bells and whistles, but I also like stripping things down to their essentials.  I believe conversation–especially between people who don’t necessarily share the same viewpoints–is a lost art.  And I believe people, in and of themselves, with all their interests and experiences, are interesting.  We all need to hear that we’re worth hearing; that is foundational in my classroom.  Our hyperactive pop culture can mislead us into assuming otherwise.  So we focus like this in order to recognize that the whole of our identities is not defined by the external.

I’m not sure if my generation (myself included) thinks hard enough.  The next one will need to think harder, and may need to do so surrounded by distractions we cannot yet comprehend.  The next generation can get better at this by improving their reading, writing, and speaking.  All three take lots of practice.  If, by the end of the year, my class is not better at these things, then I have not done my job.