matching tracksuits

Over the summer, a former student tracked me down on Facebook and sent me a note. I'd had an interesting relationship with the young man: at times, I felt he was very frustrated with the class. Indeed, he said as much. And he also said that very often, when he'd asked for help, I didn't really help him. I thought about this for a moment, then realized that he wasn't yet recognizing what I was trying to do. It's something along the lines of the saying about giving people fish versus teaching them to fish.

The young man's note included one of those compliments that feels a little like a backhanded insult. He wrote, "I want to thank you for being such a great teacher and making the class not extremely boring." Apparently I was boring, just not extremely so. Yet the next few sentences simply set me to smiling:

You would help me sometimes and most of the time you didn't, and I am glad you did that. I realized that I can't be helped all the time and that I need to learn to do things on my own more often.

He closed by saying that I "made the class and literature enjoyable" for him, but that's really of little significance compared to helping him develop self-reliance.

One of the things I love most about teaching eighth grade is the simple fact that I teach more than my subject content. I came to realize this fully the other day, when I received the third letter.

To be continued, again...

Teachers have a dream letter. It’s the letter that says simply, “Thanks. You helped me.” Sure, it’s an ego boost, but more than that, it’s confirmation that a teacher is doing his job effectively from the only source that matters: the student.

I received one such letter after my student teaching. A young lady in the honors course I was teaching was frustrated with the amount of reading I’d assigned. She came to me after class and explained that she has great difficulty comprehending what she’s read. “I have to have my mother help me. She reads it and explains it,” she said quietly, wiping her tears and glancing about to see if any other students were in the room.

The next day, I gave her a list of techniques I’d created the night before while pouring over all my notes and books from college. I explained how each technique worked, modeling a couple. She used them at home and said they were helpful.

When my cooperating teacher had the students write letter to me before I completed the assignment (one thing you liked, one thing you didn’t, and advice for the future), she wrote a sentence that, though I have long since lost the letter, I remember clearly: “You’ve helped me more than you realize.”

Fifteen years later, I receive another letter.

To be continued

Returning to school as a student was always something of a mix. There was a little relief because, let's face it: free time can get a little boring when you're a teen. At the same time, there was the return to dreaded classes and dreaded teachers. There were classes we didn't feel were worth our time (sometimes rightly, often not), but this was not the real problem.

The true problem was in the personnel: the teachers.

Though they were few, there were teachers gifted at turning interesting subject matter into drudgery because of their inability to share their enthusiasm or (probably more likely) their complete lack of enthusiasm. Such teachers often complained about the end of break, relied heavily on sarcasm in their interactions with students, and generally made no effort to hide the fact that they really didn't want to be there, that they really didn't enjoy working with us, and that, given any other options, they would choose just about any job over being a teacher. (This is certainly not to say that any teacher who complains about the end of a break or uses sarcasm is such a teacher.)

Those were the classes we endured when going back to school after a break. Was it best to have such a teacher first period, fourth period, or seventh? That was the only question. First period meant getting the dreaded class over with from the beginning. Seventh period meant capping a potentially great day with a sure disaster. Fourth was always good for me: not early enough to put me in a sour mood for the rest of the day and not late enough to leave a bad taste in my mouth before heading home.

I know there are still teachers like that. I suspect that if I snooped around a bit, I'd find one or two in my own school. Most teachers would say the same of their schools, I'm sure.

For such teachers, being in class is just as much drudgery as it is for the students. Neither wants to be there; all are counting the minutes to the end of the class. Such teachers drag themselves out of bed every morning and breathe a sigh of relief when the day is done. And so the first day back for them is sheer torture. It's a return to work.

Along the lines of the old adage, I've never worked a day in my life as long as I've been employed in education. Going back to school today was a pleasure. Indeed, I couldn't get to sleep for the excitement last night of trying some new lessons in old units. I walked down the hall this morning with an enormous smile on my face, and I greeted everyone -- students, teachers, administrators -- with a genuinely goofy cheerfulness. I told students that I'd missed them, that I'd been looking forward to returning, that I was a little bored without working with them.

Perhaps this helps explain why I have no behavior issues in my classroom beyond the talkative nature of thirteen-year-olds.

Bonnie Davis writes in How to Teach Students Who Don't Look Like You,

In searching for the causes of the achievement gap, [Haycock] and her research colleagues ask adults why there is a gap. They hear comments from educators that the children are too poor, the parents don't care, and they come to school hungry. The reasons, she adds, are always about the children and their families. Yet, when she talks to the students, she hears different reasons. Students talk about teachers who do not know their subject matter, counselors who underestimate their potential and misplace them, administrators who dismiss their concerns, and a curriculum and expectations that are so low level that students are bored.

I'm curious about the methods of this study. Were teachers simply asked to share their assumptions, with researchers later collating and categorizing them? Or was there a questionnaire? Either way, there is an element of interpretation necessitated by such research that might make it far from objective.

I'm particularly curious about the claim that students find the curriculum so low-level that they're bored. I don't doubt their claim to be bored, but I'm skeptical about the cause of that boredom.

In my own classroom experience, I've found the state-mandated curriculum to be too challenging for many of the students placed in on-level classes (students who, generally, actually read two to three grade levels lower than their actual grade). I often feel my expectations are too high.

But is this why children are bored in the classroom? Is there a societal element? I believe there is. Contemporary entertainment media -- games, television, the Internet -- have taught students to expect short, entertaining bites of information.

The question is obvious: are we competing with the new media?

We might be in competition for students' attention, but to that I'm tempted to say, "Well, that's at least equally the students', parents' and teachers' fault." I agree that teachers should be interesting and engaging, but the point of the classroom is not entertainment, and the defining criterion of an effective twenty-first century teacher should not be their ability to entertain students.