This is Our Classroom

While I want to be realistic about how frustrating and tiresome my students can be at times, I am desperately going to miss them once I’m done with student teaching this semester.  It’s not that I expected my experience to be any different, but it’s overwhelming at the beginning of the semester to even consider what the end is going to be like.  I learned so much, I am currently learning a lot, and I’m looking forward to getting a job and continuing this learning process.

“This is not your classroom!” This is a sentiment I just heard screamed from the classroom next door this morning at 9 am on a Monday.  I think this is indicative of the opposite of my experience this semester, and perhaps it’s also the underlying reason behind the chaos outside our classroom door (especially from that classroom next door).  I’ve seen my CT constantly strive to make all of his students feel welcome in his classroom—and he wouldn’t actually call it “his” classroom.  It’s our students’ room.  Students are always dropping by during lunch just to hang out and chat with us.  One of my students gets out of his last period class every day (it’s “football class”—so, now that football season is over, it’s basically just “sit around” class) so that he can help do different tasks and even engage in classroom discussions.  I think that the environment that has been supported in my classroom this semester has definitely affected my view of what a classroom community looks like.  I’m not going to pretend that every class is always on task and accomplishes everything we have for them all the time, but I do think that they feel supported and want to come to class, even if they don’t necessarily have the desire to get all their work accomplished at the moment.  I think it’s been a successful experience for me and for my students, and I’m so excited to check in on them next semester while subbing.  (I’m also working on writing letters to each of my students, responding to their daily journals and making sure they’re aware of their status as amazing people.)

As far as Burke’s question-driven book goes, I’ve actually started to incorporate his ideas in my current unit for 11^th grade.  We’re going deeper into writing analyses of short fiction, so I gave out a worksheet with his levels of questions (factual, inductive, and analytical) that we are using with a few different texts.  While I’m not always a fan of such structured work surrounding texts, I think it’s really helped a lot of my students dig deeper in the texts.  I think that’s really the advantage—making sure that most of the students are getting into the texts rather than a select few who will end up dominating conversations.  We tried out “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, and Halfie” by Junot Diaz, and then we read “Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin on Thursday.  I was a little concerned about the Chopin story keeping their interest, but after we had a brief conversation about women’s rights (and they knew a lot about women’s suffrage—thanks, American history!), they really dug in deep.  The questions led to some classroom discussions, and I think we could use the questions they came up with to lead us to really great thesis statements.  I know it sounds a little boring, but I think that the classroom conversations before the thesis statement formulations save the lessons from being painfully boring.  The tough part about this unit is that I’m only teaching a couple of weeks anyway, so I just wanted to use this time to kind of experiment with where I can push them.  J 

This is all to say that while I’m resistant to some of Burke’s units that are driven by whole-class texts, I do like the basic framework that he uses to support reading texts.  He also uses a kind of worksheet at the end of his book to guide teacher planning for units, which seems somewhat helpful and a little overkill.  Still, I think the reasoning behind the text comes from a good place—“America must now, if we are to maintain our place in the world, become ‘a society of creators and emphasizers, of pattern recognizers and meaning makers.’”  And where else can we support the inception of this kind of society than in the ELA classroom?  Well, in our classroom.

Bittersweet Anticipation

With two real weeks of teaching left this semester, I’m both relieved and sad at the same time.  I mean, I (mostly) love all of my students, and I definitely want to see where they’re going and how they’re doing in the future, but the business of student teaching is definitely a difficult endeavor.  I’m not going to pretend like I’ve had it that bad, since my CT is definitely one of the best teachers I’ve worked with and he’s given me a lot of free reign to try out different things and be myself in the classroom.  (Also, I got a really sweet thank you note from one of my seniors since I helped her with several college essays...it doesn't seem like a lot, but it's the little things that make me feel appreciated.)  Still, I think it’s always tough to balance out with another teacher on a daily basis as well as trying to assert your teacher-ness.  That sounds silly, but my name isn’t over the door.  (Technically, neither is my CT’s, since it was his wife’s old room and he doesn’t want to change it.  But at least his name is on their schedule.) 

And I’m also planning for a future that I’m not going to be a part of.  If you’re planning with the end in mind, it kind of throws your game off when you know you won’t be there for the end.  Also, we just have different styles.  I think that we’re very similar when it comes to temperament with students and our level of care and involvement, but we ultimately have different goals and conversations in mind that we want our students to get at.  Maybe it’s the perfect situation, since they’re getting to experience a variety of approaches to English Language Arts.  This is all to say that while it’s been a blast, I will really enjoy some down time to reflect on my semester at the end of the month. 

As for reading material for this week, I’m in a book club with Christine, and we’re reading What’s the Big Idea? by Jim Burke.  Christine did the dirty work of finding the book, but I’m really into what he has to say about question-driven units and teaching.  In the introductory chapter, he goes into a lot of background for why these critical units are more necessary than ever, and I was really getting pumped up for the rest of the book.  Now, I haven’t finished it yet, but I was a little disappointed in the actual “unit suggestions” chapters.  Basically, Burke will discuss a specific kind of unit that he’s taught around different types of inquiry projects.  However, he mostly focuses on work that he’s accomplished with AP English IV students.  While this is definitely a valid class to focus on for some teachers, I think it’s highly unlikely that we will teach very many of these classes until much later in our careers.  (And that’s obviously a personal issue because many other teachers may need examples for these kinds of classes.)  Also, he does an entire chapter on teaching Crime and Punishment.  Really??  I know he wants them to read it because it’s a difficult text, but geeze.  I can think of so many other texts that are difficult but seem a lot less like slogging through muck just to get to the other side. 

Still, there are some helpful tools that Burke presents, such as his list of types of questions to begin good dialogue, and I’m looking forward to the chapter on meaningful conversations.  I do think it’s difficult for students to know what kinds of questions to ask about a text, and I’ve found myself (especially in my poetry unit) doing some really heavy-handed steering.  I’m also excited to use Burke’s tools in guiding some discussions of short stories that my juniors will be doing in the next couple of weeks.  I’m hoping to get them to this “big idea” realm before I leave so that they remember that the point of ELA is not just annotating texts but having authentic conversations about them.

To Teach (Or Not To Teach)

Ayers’s To Teach is definitely a refreshing read, in light of some other more theory-heavy material we’ve dealt with lately.  He provides a lot of practical advice (though he can be a little too repetitive), and it seems that the book would come in handy during summers where you may be dreading the return to the necessary chaos that is the school year.  Ayers explains that the work of teaching is important because every student is sacred (I feel like a lot of the writing about education we’ve been reading lately is couched in very religious terms).  Most of the book focuses on students as individuals, with which I find no fault and I wholeheartedly agree.  However, I’m a little nervous about this idea in practice.  As a student teacher, I’ve had the opportunity to get to know several classes of students, but I’m only completely engaged with two classes of them since I’m the full teacher.  I know the other students fairly well, since I’m there during their classes to support and cajole them into writing and working, but it’s definitely not the same kind of relationship because the authority aspect/main teacher part isn’t there.  I think it’s already difficult to keep up with the two classes of students that I have, so thinking forward to having six classes seems mind boggling, especially considering the overcrowding of classrooms that already exists.  I think that these relationships develop over time, and you don’t have to (and can’t) fully know each student in your classroom from the very beginning.  Still, that beginning time is really important for establishing the kind of classroom environment that you want and for gaining trust. 

I think the only solution would be for administration to limit the numbers of students in the classrooms, which probably wouldn’t happen unless some kind of grant was involved.  And that leads me to another issue that Ayers doesn’t really address: what about the administrators at your school?  What if they don’t agree with or don’t want to deal with your methods of teaching?  He talks about the people developing curriculum in a vague sense, but he doesn’t really address the people in the same building who can definitely affect (for better or worse) your effectiveness in the classroom.  They can “review” your work as being less than stellar, or they can insist that you accomplish teaching in a certain way.  If you disagree, they have ways of pushing you out.  So it’s not just an issue of dealing with restrictions put into place from on high.  There are restrictions looming from the next hallway over.

On a more cheerful note, I especially like Ayers’s method of dispelling the myths of teaching.  Though I don’t completely agree with all of his opinions, I do like that he constantly comes back to the fact that we’re not teaching these awful human beings who are so different than any who have gone before.  And we don’t have to be consummate performers and fun-makers!  I think that this is just a personality default for me, in that I want to be perceived as someone who is fun and likes to engage in exciting activities, but it also causes me to feel burned out way more quickly.  When I’m racking my brain to figure out something super exciting for my students to do, I’m sometimes missing out on them and where they want to go and be in the classroom. 

One last point that Ayers mentioned in the beginning of his book is a professor who told his student that she was too bright and able to be a teacher.  This actually happened to me as well.  When I applied to the program, I asked an undergraduate professor if he’d write me a letter of recommendation.  I’d asked him to do the same on a couple of other occasions, once for my application to my first graduate program in literature and then a year later when I thought I wanted to pursue a PhD in literature.  The response I received for this new venture was disappointing and made me question my decisions: "Don't sell yourself short. I'm not saying that is what you are doing...I can't emphasize enough that I'm not saying that. But I'd like to hear from you that this is what you want right now."

I have been inculcated in this myth that teachers aren’t as able as others in their subject matter.  If they were, they would be pursuing higher degrees and teaching in college.  But I wholeheartedly do not believe in this myth anymore.  I have seen that teaching at a high school level can be one of the hardest yet one of the most rewarding jobs that a person can have.  And I am ready to go on that journey.

Playing at Understanding Vygotsky

We actually read a decent amount about Vygotsky in our Psychology of Learning class, though interestingly enough, I don’t think that we actually read any material written by him.  During that time, I also began reading a book about approaching Vygotsky’s theories in tutoring situations, but I quickly lost interest.  The stuff people write about Vygotsky seems to be fairly confusing, but I didn’t find Vygotsky himself to be too far out there.  The way that he set up each chapter seemed fairly straightforward, and I definitely found myself agreeing with a lot of his points (even though my experiences are mostly confined to older children).  I really enjoyed the chapter on play.  I’m sure that a lot of elementary ed students get training about play theory and the purpose of play, but it’s never been an area that I’ve heard much about.  Vygotsky points out that play seems to be invented due to children’s unrealized/unrealizable desires or tendencies, and it is wrong to think that play is acting without purpose.  As a child, I liked to play school a lot, and I hated being the student.  I really wanted to be in charge, to have power, and that was a space where I could act this out.  Also, this make-believe activity was obviously not without purpose; even without the power struggle issue, I wanted to teach my little brother in the same way that my teacher helped me.  (I also wanted to dole out punishments on a whim.) 

Although Vygotsky states that play structures change as children grow older, I wonder how much of that change is due to school and societal restrictions rather than the developmental level of a child.  When I observed in middle school in the spring, I was surprised that the students didn’t have much time to just hang out on the playground.  Most of their time was structured, down to the second, presumably because the school administrators wanted to make sure that the students weren’t “up to” anything.  Not only does this confinement (and surveillance) make them feel constantly controlled, it also seems to take away their ability to “play” at being adults.  At age 11, all of their time is spoken for by academics.  Now, I’m sure they were required to take P.E., but that’s still a class that has rules, requirements, and grades.  Are we taking away their ability to play, causing them to act as adults far too early?

And speaking of restrictions, I think that ol’ Lev (I can call him that, right?) would have had some choice words about standardized testing.  He argues that writing should be relevant to life, even in a preschool setting, or it would become mechanized!   Obviously, the American educational system did not take his advice; my mother-in-law is a kindergarten teacher who must submit her students to a variety of standardized testing assaults.  Play is once again removed from the equation when these kinds of inorganic restrictions are imposed on writing because creativity does not fit within a small box.  Vygotsky believed that development occurs at some point after learning, so if we are teaching our students a very narrowed conception of what writing is, aren’t we essentially stunting their development?  I wouldn’t say that we are preventing development, but we are not providing a large enough zone for them to realize their full potential as writers and as citizens of the world.

A drive towards reconciliation

“I am more and more convinced that true revolutionaries must perceive the revolution, because of its creative and liberating nature, as an act of love.”  (Freire’s footnote on p. 89)

I know that we’ve read a chapter out of Pedagogy of the Oppressed before, but I think that we should have already read the entire book—I feel like Freire’s work should be the bible of urban teaching/culturally relevant pedagogy.  I mean, I’m sure that it kind of is already, but I feel like it should be given out at the beginning of our coursework.  Its philosophy provides the foundation of so much of why we teach the way that we want to teach.  Honestly, I want to make time to return to it every year to kind of ground myself in what I’m doing.  As Freire points out, unless you’re constantly reflecting on what you’re doing, you could fall prey to going back to a position of the oppressed, wherein you “talk about the people, but [the teacher] does not trust them.”  In the Texas public educational system, I think that you constantly have to be at that work of praxis, of action and reflection, because so much of what you have to deal with in order to remain hired as a teacher is the enforced pedagogy of the oppressor.  It’s funny to think that the American public education system wants students to become critical thinkers, but the restrictions that are imposed upon the classroom create the opposite environment for that work to be done. 

At the heart of Pedagogy, Freire emphasizes that teachers/revolutionaries (I kind of just want to call myself a revolutionary from now on) have to be thinkers and doers—he likens praxis to the word, in that there must be both action and reflection.  It’s almost like Freire is talking about that educational term “best practice”; in order for the best practice to occur (and by “best practice,” he means transformation of the world order), teachers have to act and reflect on those actions.  In addition, they must charge their students to be involved in the same praxis through dialogue.  When Freire expounds on what he means by dialogue, I was pretty much swooning.  The language gets pretty New Testament biblical, I think, since he says that dialogue can only exist through love, humility, faith, and hope.  That’s some real talk.  Honestly, I think that we tend to think of those who love and have faith in others and have true hope for change as weaklings, in that they’re not strong enough to face the bleakness of reality.  No.  Freire points out that “love is an act of courage” (89), an act of bravery, and an act of freedom.  Control and manipulation in the classroom, and on an administrational level, is not an act of tough love.  That is no love at all, and when this kind of love becomes acceptable in urban schools, it is no wonder that the schools fail.  The students are still oppressed.

One issue that Freire brings up about the oppressed is the oppressor’s consciousness that they have internalized.  Because the oppressor views the world and those operating in the world as things to be possessed, the oppressed also begins to think of “being” as “having.”  My ELA IV students defined success in a warm-up at the beginning of the year, and most of them explained that success involved monetary comfort.  They may not have said that they wanted to be outrageously rich, but they all mentioned having things as being a measure of whether or not they’ve “made it.”  It’s difficult to work beyond this conception of success because, to some degree, they do need things, and I understand why they want more.  Who am I, a person from a mostly middle-class family, to be the person to tell them that success doesn’t have to be defined through accumulation of wealth?  I’d really want to have a year-long discussion on this idea, and return to it at the end of the year.  (Although, according to Freire, I’d need to make sure that they want to talk about this issue.)  Still, to get there, I need to make sure that I’m being a model of praxis and true dialogue, working with my students side by side.  Sometimes I find it difficult to cede control to others, but my resistance to working with would only mean that I, too, have played into the oppressor’s game where I am more concerned with a love of death rather than a love of life.

Dewey, the Prophet

It’s crazy to realize (or reflectively think about) that John Dewey published How We Think over a century ago, because a lot of his cautions about the way that school can harm rather than help students are still very real issues in public education.  I feel like this quote could be taken from an editorial on teaching on this very day: “The large number of pupils to be dealt with, and the tendency of parents and school authorities to demand speedy and tangible evidence of progress conspire to give it [giving the correct answers rather than reflective thought] currency.”  If anything, this sentiment is heightened, since we have added the correct way to think to the correct answers problem.

Dewey’s points are some that we continue to emphasize as methods of good teaching—prior knowledge is very important, students who don’t answer a question immediately aren’t dumb, and there are many different kinds of intelligence.  He recognizes that all children are naturally curious, and our job isn’t to create that thirst for knowledge; instead, our role as teachers is to (and this is one of my favorite quotes) “protect the spirit of inquiry, to keep it from becoming blasé from overexcitement, wooden from routine, fossilized through dogmatic instruction, or dissipated by random exercise upon trivial things.”  As high school teachers, I think that we definitely get the short end of this stick on this ability to protect the spirit of inquiry because so many of our students have been forced into a school environment where their natural curiosities have been forcibly shoved into the recesses of their minds.  Standardized testing and harmful accountability measures have guided their previous teachers to focus on following formulas with a sprinkling of incontestable facts. 

Instead of the true reflective thought that Dewey explains, our students come to high school, ready to escape because the work of school has become drudgery.  Personally, I think that the students sometimes think that all of life is drudgery, especially since we present a college education as a means to getting a job where they can make more money than their parents.  We (and I don’t necessarily mean only teachers) have taught students to define success as monetarily outdoing the generation who has gone before.  There is no spark of excitement in this definition; there is only the drive to finish.  And what happens when students get to the point where they think that they can’t properly mimic what is wanted by a test?  They drop out, trying to get a head start on the money-making necessary for the rest of their lives.  Students tell me all the time that they could make it if they drop out of school, citing the example of Bill Gates.  I have to explain that Gates dropped out of college, not high school.  Also, their example is telling, too; they don’t mention scientists or artists or others who have dropped out.  They talk about a man who has made lots of money.  Now, I know this is a function of the economic situation that they have experienced, and I don’t think anything is wrong with wanting to succeed in an economic sense.  However, I do think that by playing into this function of education, we are reinforcing the dominant powers of the society and ultimately supporting drudgery for all.  I think Dewey would be very disappointed in this brutishness.

Also, on Dewey’s statements about Columbus:  http://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day

Just food for thought!  (I’m mostly posting this in reference to Dewey’s statements about Columbus’s brave thoughts on the world being round.)