Classroots.org

In response to this post by Shelly Terell (@shellterrell), Philly Teacher Mary Beth Hertz (@mbteach) shared her own reflections on lessons learned from great educators and then  tagged me to do the same.  Here goes (with all due apologies to Alan Moore, who, along with Anne Carson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Haruki Murakami, and Vladimir Nabokov, taught me what I love about memory – its paradoxical flexibility to seem absolute according to whatever we need in our lives as they go).

Hershey's Store by elisart

The checklist is in my hand. It’s the assessment menu for a unit on Greek mythology. Mrs. Labonte is explaining how we’ll be graded. I don’t remember anything but the dozens of choices on the handout. Draw a picture of a god. Write a letter to a god. Make a business using a god’s name or symbol as its logo. Dozens of choices. I don’t remember being offered this much freedom at any other time in my education. It’s the 6th grade.

The phaser is in my hand. It’s The Taming of the Shrew as performed by Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Kate. I remember saving the most bawdy, sci-fi-Shakespearian jokes we could imagine and write in sloppy iambic pentameter for the parent-night performance, and that Mr. O’Neil didn’t bother to hide his smile while he shook his head. Where does the Enterprise wear its photon torpedos? It’s the 7th grade.

The mid-term is in my hand. It’s the first I remember taking, and it’s the first time I read “Ozymandias.” Mrs. Goldstein is expecting me to say something. I don’t remember what it was, but I remember she trusted me to figure it out. It’s the 8th grade.

The novel is in my hand. It’s As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. Ms Fotino is drawing a wheel on the board. Addie is in the middle. Her husband and children are the spokes. The rim is plot of the story rolling on as each character moves further and further away from the central event of Addie’s death. It’s the Wheel of Fotino. It’s the first graphic organizer I remember valuing. Ms Fotino is also the first teacher I remember talking with me about books as a fellow reader instead of a as teacher. After The Sound and the Fury,  she points me towards Truman Capote and Tennesse Williams. She’s also the first teacher I remember setting up safe and effective peer-review for our writing. It’s the 10th grade.

The F paper is in my hand. It’s about The Good Soldier or The Return of the Soldier or maybe Pride or Prejudice (without zombies). It’s the first F I’ve ever gotten in English. I’m in the English department office talking with Mr. Grant, who is not the teacher who gave me the F, asking him for help. He doesn’t even talk about the paper. He talks about how I write when I have a story to tell and how I write when I want to be finished with something. He’s asking me how I would tell someone my ideas instead of writing them as quickly as I think them. He’s telling me to write the telling. He’s the first teacher to succeed in getting me to realize that while I can tell a good story, sometimes I make the choice to ignore my audience. It’s the 11th grade.

“A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” is in my hand. It’s Spanish class, and we’re reading García Márquez in English. Dr. Joba is asking us questions and making us write about an author outside the English department canon, an author outside American and British lit. I realize I didn’t know anyone could write this way. I start learning about what’s going on in Colombia. It’s the 12th grade.

The coffee is in my hand. It’s burnt, like all the coffee in Athens, Ohio, in 1998. Professor Bartlett is somehow sitting there with me, this unknowable Welshman who has spent six months pointing out everything I still don’t know about the Restoration. He’s telling me that I’ll understand; he’s telling me that he’s always been the outsider. I understand, but I didn’t expect him to find me like that with some ingrained outcast echo-locator. Later he offers me my pick of the art in his office; he’s retiring. He was a coal miner in Wales before becoming a professor in America. I wonder if he feels like we didn’t learn enough about him when he tells us we don’t know enough about the Restoration. It’s the second year of college.

The poem is in my hand. It’s mine and it’s terrible. It’s about communists and Dan Rather and a coffee shop and completely inferior to the one in which I re-imagine the Monolith from 2001 as a giant Hershey Bar. Mary Ruefle is at the end of the table, looking at my watch, trying to find some words. “Mary,” she says, “there is no beginning, and there is no end.” It’s not really about my work, but it’s the only teacher comment near it that I can quote verbatim. It’s the third year of college.

The transcripts are in my hand. I’ve made them from pages of an American woman’s diary written after the death of her husband as she tries to maintain her hold over a hacienda in revolutionary Mexico. Pepo is listening as I read them. He seems really interested. He’s asking questions about what I’ll do with them and how I’ll edit them. I have no idea, but I know he’ll help. After a while we stop talking about work and talk about his son, his health, his plans in Ohio. I think he’s so cool and such a good father and I hope he will be okay. It’s still the third year of college, but since there is no beginning and there is no end….

The chalk is in my hand. I’m student teaching with Pat.  It’s all I can do to keep up with her pace of thinking, her interrogation and reinvention of what’s not working, and her ceaseless devotion to every student.  It’s absolutelty apparent that she’s never taught the same year twice and that her enthusiasm for teaching and learning grow exponentionally from year to year.  It’s the second year of grad school.

The data is in my hand. Lori is leading us to a common understanding and championing of what we have to do: Eliminate the Achievement Gap.  I’m finally figuring out that teaching is not about me being good at it; it’s about learning for all.  It’s the fourth year of my career.

These teachers and their dedicated, gifted colleagues shared with me many gifts that I try, fail, and try again to pass along in my teaching: freedom, humor, expectation, equality, generosity, awareness, empathy, idiosyncrasy, humanity, care, passion, and determination.

However, when I look back at the design of my education, what’s missing are two pieces that we still struggle with today: standardization and authenticity. The teachers who taught me the most about myself and the power of communication to share feeling, meaning, and memory either allowed me the most freedom or pushed me the most to do something more than settle.  They did not standardize me.  The teachers whom I let hurt me were the ones who tried to do that.  While it’s absolutely right, necessary, and human that we create circumstances to lift up one another through all kinds of teaching and learning, standardized testing cannot be the endpoint of public education.  We have to find a more fitting destination for the variety of human existence than standardized testing.

We also need to build more authentic schools. We need schools that are not schools.  I fell in love with reading and writing at an early age, and my schools were geared toward students like me.  While many teachers reached me me, I have no idea if or how they reached students with different gifts and needs. My education was authentic to me because reading and writing were personally meaningful to me, but that was not the case for many others.  Many students had profound gifts, but few outlets.  School was not an authentic or personally meaningful experience for them.   Who knows what else I might have been good at or learned to do from a teacher or classmate if I hadn’t been tracked in my own way? I spent my youth in books.  I’m certain now that there were other things going on outside.  Schools need to connect with all students’ lives, not only to engage kids with authentic work, but also to enable students to learn from one another.  We need to push learning into students lives by pushing it past classrooms’ physical boundaries.  We need to committ to choice in the classroom.  We need to provide choice within school systems.  The choices we offer need to be shaped by the needs and wants of our learners.

While I loved reading and writing, it’s my responsibility to help my students find what they love.

Tag, @msstewart, @englishcomp, @stevejmoore, @engltchrleo, @tweenteacher, @mctownsley: if you have the time and inclination, you’re it.  Be sure to link back to Shelly and Mary Beth’s posts.