Category: Teaching

During the days of yesteryear (the historical period immediately following ‘yore’) it is said that students would sometimes leave an apple on the desk of a favorite teacher.

Now I’m sure these weren’t organic braeburn or fuji apples fresh from Whole Foods, and were occasionally rotten ones found on the way to school, left only as a means to curry favor, but still it seems a nice tradition.

And so it came to pass in the days of, well not yesteryear, but close to yesterday, that I arrived at school to find that someone had left a lemon on my desk. It’s a nice looking lemon and it’ll probably find its way to the bottom of a martini, but what is it supposed to mean?

While watching summer vacation fade to black and digging out all my classroom stuff to get ready to head back to the salt mines this week, I stumbled upon this little gem. I wrote it back in 2000 at the end of my first year of teaching as the closer to the portfolio I had to submit as part of my alternative certification process.

The Ten Phases of the First Year Teacher 

Phase 1: I’m going to change the world.
This stage is filled with excitement and anticipation for the school year to come.

Phase 2: No I’m not.
This stage is characterized by frustration, anger at self and children. Kids know you are a first year teacher and they take advantage of the fact. At this stage, the first year teacher feels more like a cop, circus ringleader, babysitter, animal tamer and judge. One does not feel like a teacher, whatever that is supposed to mean. At this point, the first year teacher eats less, drinks more and watches too much TV on the weekends.

Phase 3: What the hell is a predicate?
The first year teacher now realizes he has forgotten much of the esoteric details of what he is supposed to teach. Many basics have gone beyond memory and entered unconscious awareness. The first year teacher must dredge this back up, relearn it and find ways to make it interesting.

Phase 4: Who do I think I am?
Self-doubt. I don’t even have a degree in English. I am the author of an unpublished book and several unproduced screenplays. Is this just a dodge? Am I qualified? What if I ruin English for 120 people who will never ever learn to write and will fail miserably in life before being flushed out the bottom of the fast food industry.

Phase 5: You were listening?
One day, around late October one student will write or say something that shows insight and awareness of herself and her abilities as a young writer. It takes one’s breath away. Maybe it will be a call from the parents, or a note from a student, but the first year teacher realizes he has touched someone. This is a profound and humbling experience.

Phase 6: The third or fourth paper.
Late one night, the first year teacher finds himself grading papers. He notices that some of them are good. Fewer run-on sentences and misplaced modifiers pollute the landscape of the page. Maybe a simile pokes out of the dense undergrowth of words like a nervous rabbit on an autumn morning. The first year teacher realizes that the writing of most students has improved.

Phase 7: I can do this.
As the giddy rush of the holiday season approaches and all the VACATION time looms like the Seven Cities of Cibola on the horizon, the first year teacher smiles. All is not lost. It is already late November and he has survived. There are fewer problems in the classroom. Most students are learning. Things are going well.

Phase 8: This is fun.
During the December holidays, while having a beer for breakfast and watching his wife go off to work, the first year teacher experiences a strange feeling. He realizes he loves his job. It is not just a job. It is a calling. He realizes he does not love it for the vacation time or any of that (which is a major plus, especially when one has literary ambitions), but for the fact that teaching kids how to use words is fun. In a perverse sort of way, he cannot wait for January.

Phase 9: I am a teacher.
The first year teacher returns to the classroom confidant. He knows what he is doing. He is eager to continue and excited by the prospect of pushing the kids to continue to strive for their best work.

Phase 10: I am going to change the world.
Maybe not this year or even next year, but someday. It will occur 120 kids at a time. 120 x 1 lifetime of teaching (call it 30 years)= 3600 lives. Wow. What an awesome responsibility. How many live will those 3600 children touch?

When I arrived to work yesterday, I learned that two of my coworkers had been killed in a car accident on Monday night. It was on the front page of the Austin American Statesman today. One was the campus secretary who made the whole place run and who did so much to help me get settled in when I started there. The other was an English teacher, a favorite among the kids and a woman who made everyone feel welcome. There is so much pain in that building, such a palpable feeling of loss.

Both women were people who truly made the new guy (me) feel welcome. They helped me get settled into the routine there which is so different from a normal school. It’s hard to fathom how you can just say ‘see-ya tomorrow’ on the way out the door only to find that that’s it. It’s a terrible thing to lose one person in such a small tight knit faculty, but two at once is just… well, there aren’t words. Everyone is so rattled at work, just hanging on. I can’t imagine what the two families are going through.

Until yesterday I had been teaching mostly GED prep courses, but because my certification is in English, my GED classes were given to other teachers and I’ve taken over the English teacher’s classes. I had no idea what the kids would be like, but they all wanted to carry on what they were doing in her classes so I will now need to read and get caught up on My Side of the Mountain, The Count of Monte Cristo, and To Kill a Mockingbird. I just told them I couldn’t be who she was and that I wouldn’t try, but that we’d muddle through together. Then I taught them a bit of poetry writing. Most of them liked that and things went as well as could be expected.

Note: Dr. Hodges at the excellent Gypsy Scholar blog posted about education and training in the Korean education system last week. His post reminded me that I had this post lingering in the drafts folder, which started as a tangent that developed while writing this other post a few months back…

Most of us who are teachers want to educate, which in my mind means teaching our students to ask question and have the capacity to answer those questions, thereby learning on their own.

The goal is, as the popular catchphrase goes, “to create lifelong learners.”

No Child Left Behind and its insistence on standardized testing, however, is creating an atmosphere that rewards training more than educating.

The difference is that education opens doors and creates possibilities. Training tends to have the opposite effect. I don’t intend to disparage training because it is a critical part of education (doctors, lawyers, teachers, mechanics, engineers, architects are all highly trained) but for kids in a state-imposed secondary curriculum, education should take precedence over training.

An educated learner responds to training better than one who has only known training. This is why education progressively focuses rather than broadens, providing the necessary foundation for training be it medical, automotive or anything else (example track: high school diploma to biology degree to medical degree to specialization in thoracic surgery as the good doctor moves from broad education to specialized training.)

So what, then, is the purpose of secondary public education? This is a question that is often hotly debated by academic and vocational teachers in school staff rooms on campuses everywhere.

The fact is that both education and training are important. The world is full of kids who aren’t going to college and probably don’t need to. With that in mind, though, does that mean that secondary education should be the place to emphasize training?

I once had a discussion with an agriculture teacher (I was in a school where a substantial portion of the students came from farming families) who held fast to a belief that we (misguided English teachers) should not be wasting our students’ time with poetry when we could be training them to fill out purchase orders and write resumes.

That’s training; it isn’t education. Of course, I have taught many kids who might – in the short term – be well served with a purely practical training over a more liberal education, kids who maybe wouldn’t have dropped out of school, but that doesn’t sit well with me.

First, there is something intrinsically valuable in developing a general awareness and appreciation for the arts, science, math, history, philosophy, and language even if these things will never directly contribute to putting food on the table or a third car in the garage. Second, many kids will grow into adults who do wish to pursue these things beyond the level necessary to fill out a purchase order or write a resume. If they don’t have the option of realistically continuing their studies should they choose to do so, we’ve failed them.

An educated student can learn to fill out a PO. A trained student will know one method for filling out one kind of PO.

An educated student can do anything, go anywhere, learn anything. An educated student has the possibilities that are opened through critical thinking, broad knowledge and an awareness of how to use those tools.

A student trained to regurgitate correct answers on a multiple choice state assessment may become a master test-taker, but what else will that student who sees the world only in right-wrong multiple choice formulations be able to do?

Just before he retired in frustration, my old principal confided in me, “They only want us to create technocrats.” That’s where training at the expense of education will lead us.

The Texas Legislature is soon to embark upon what will most likely later be known as “Failed Special Session on School Finance, Number Four.” When politicians begin to discuss public schools in the coming months, I hope the goal of Texas public schools will still be to educate young Texans and not merely to train tomorrow’s workforce.

Spring Break! WOOOO HOOOOO!
(The painting – Los Borrachos by Diego Velazquez – is one of my favorites, by the way.)

The other day we had an awards ceremony for the students. Several of them were recognized for academic excellence, which here means no incident reports for thirty days and a concerted effort to take charge of their own education, showing constant improvement. The kids didn’t know about it. They just lined up, surely expecting another inspection.

The principal explained the award and called the names. The kids came to the front and stood at attention while we teachers pinned the awards on their uniforms and shook their hands. The thing that amazed me was the look of sheer pride on the faces of the kids who earned the award. I’ve seen many kids practically melt with shame at getting recognized for academics in regular public schools. But not these kids, some of whom had never had anyone – ever – think of them as being good students or even smart. These are the kids who got pigeon-holed and began to believe that they really were bad students, that school wasn’t for them. The sad thing is most of them really want to learn.

I had three kids who earned the award and they came back to class just glowing, filled with a kind of pride that most of them had never felt. It didn’t matter that they were locked up, that they couldn’t go see their families or get high, or run with their buddies because they couldn’t believe that their teachers thought they were good at school.

I know all my kids made some very bad choices and did some incredibly stupid things to wind up where they are, but I hope that this awareness that there is a place for them and that they can succeed where they thought they couldn’t will stick with them. I hope that those who return to regular public schools won’t forget the pride they felt when they realized that they could be good students, and that that was cool.