Persistence

In order to teach and teach well you have to have a kind of cockeyed optimism or force of will. As Walt Whitman exhorted in Leaves of Grass, “By god man, you will not go down! Hang your whole weight on me.” Sometimes you just have to believe in your students and yourself against all odds and empirical evidence.

You have to be the optimistic one. Some days in class, you may be the only one. Especially when the kids are tired or if you have a tough class with kids who aren’t successful in school. Sleep deprived kids in a morning class may just want to endure it. Sometimes, it’s simply all on you to provide that spirit.

I don’t think many of us are used to being that person. Some of us have to reach down and find that optimism. It may feel like you’re putting it out there and no one is reciprocating, making you feel ridiculous. We’ve all seen the cliche of the extremely excited teacher (see Hamlet 2 if you haven't yet) who is not connecting to the students and looking clownish.

As a teacher, you have to risk becoming the clown and act in relentlessly spirited, optimistic and good natured way on the side of your kids. You can't simply protect yourself. Not only in the classroom but outside, when you see kids on the street or in the hallways, stop, talk to them. Some of the best teaching happens in these situations, when you have a moment with a kid alone and you can give a word of encouragement or a compliment. You must show that you care and that what happens in the classroom IS important, you notice, you think about them, worry about them and you ultimately believe in them. They will respond.

I’ve heard a lot of kids talk about teachers who they think are fake or going through the motions. When they catch them “offstage,” they’re just empty, or don't have time. That reaffirms the idea that everything kids do in class is arbitrary, fake and false, so everyone continues to go through the motions.

While you have to be that strong person, that leader, you don’t want to dominate the classroom. You have to be humble as well. You can’t just be Mr. or Mrs. Onstage Superstar all the time. You have to be that spark, then let the kids go and create the opportunities for them to shine. They can't do that if you're the only one doing the thinking and performing all the time.

Sometimes that’s hard when you get a really difficult class. Day after day it seems like you are the one dragging the class along like Sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill. However, if you stick with it day after day after day, the kids will respond. Maybe not all of them, but even the ones that don’t will respect you for it and at least have an example in their mind of someone who doesn’t give up.

You never know what seed you’re planting. A kid could change a month after your class, a year, a couple years and perhaps a piece of what you did helped them. Just keep plowing.

Teacher man: a memoir - Google Books

Teacher man: a memoir - Google Books

I can't put this book down by the late Frank McCourt. A line struck me as I'm preparing for the first day of school on Tuesday. He writes of teaching, "If you don't learn to love it, you'll wriggle in a corner of hell." Love it folks!

By Sarah Fine -- Why I Left Teaching Behind - washingtonpost.com

Thanks to great teacher Christopher Greenslate for finding this piece:

By Sarah Fine -- Why I Left Teaching Behind - washingtonpost.com

Ms. Fine reports feeling "undervalued" as a teacher by the administration in her inner city school, friends, and American society. It seems the charter school she worked for sought to improve education without much input from the teachers. This hierarchical style of educational reform seems destined to fail.

More and more research seems to imply that children with less educated parents need more physical time in school to close the achievement gap. Some charter schools have figured this out and shown powerful results. The problem arises when schools, like Sarah Fine's, try to extend the school day and school year without increasing teacher compensation, reducing teacher pay to around 10$ an hour. No wonder charter schools have such a high rate of turnover.

The Obama administration has embraced (see the New Yorker abstract) the charter school model as practiced by the KIPP and Green Dot schools. I only hope they don't try to make these changes on the cheap, forcing more good teachers out of the profession. In this sense, perhaps Ms. Fine shows insight in her feelings about the value American society puts on education, learning, and teaching.

Day to Day Success in Teaching

Remember that as a teacher you’re in it for the long run whether it’s the class, the school year or your career. This is a dangerous profession in that you can set yourself up for burn-out or simply hating what you do. Depression or feelings of impotence can insinuate their way into your spirit if you don't guard against them.

Let’s say you have a class where you start off okay, then things start to drift. Students may seem to lose motivation, you have some discipline problems or just a sense that strong progress has halted in your classroom. You begin to feel like you just want to get through that class every day and you’re not happy to see them.

To deal with these situations you must reinvigorate yourself every morning and not think of the big picture. Just think about TODAY. How am I going to make today a great day? Given everything else that’s gone on, my failures, their failures, what can I do today to make this class work? How do I have to change? If you go into class each morning and work with the focus on that one class or student immediately in front of you, rather than get overwhelmed by the work load, the apathy, the long term goals, or the long term trajectory of a student, you will see you can turn the tide in a class.

There will always be students who come in with negative attitudes who don’t want to learn. As a teacher, you have to win them over. Convince them not only with your arguments and reason, but with your pure exuberance and belief in yourself, subject and life. The cockeyed optimist is the successful teacher at any level. You have to believe in the face of cynicism, class after class, year after year, student after student and day by day.

If you can’t generate that enthusiasm within yourself and students perhaps it is a sign this profession isn’t for you. It’s simply tough being a cynical person, and then going in to confront the cynicism of your students. You have to be an optimist to teach well (See The Passionate Teacher on the bookshelf at the bottom of the page).

Another piece of thriving day to day is avoiding burn-out. There’s an enormous amount of work to do outside of the classroom just to stay afloat, even if you do control what you’re grading. You have bureaucratic work, collaboration, meetings with students and parents, e-mails, etc. Set schedules so you can create a rhythm for yourself.

For example, Mondays and Tuesdays might be days where you grade and organize student work. Wednesdays and Thursdays you have a set time for some exercise after school or doing something that recharges you. I would recommend that you do these recharging activities before you go home to avoid collapsing into exhaustion when you get there.

Stick to your schedule. People will ask you to meet about this or that, but you can’t let your physical and mental health consistently rank second if you are going to survive for the long term. These are not luxury goods. They are essential. We have a responsibility to model physical and emotional health to our students.

You could be the most intelligent, intellectual person in the world, but if you’re unhealthy, you are sending the wrong message to your students about what it means to be an adult. They will sense your lack of health and want to check-out of the world and model of adult life you are offering, which makes them much less likely to learn from you. Take care of yourself!

Do you have to like your students? Yes!

Above everything else, you have to like the kids you work with. Whether they’re teenagers, middle-school kids or elementary kids. It seems like an overly obvious point, but we've all worked with many teachers who don’t seem to understand, love their kids or even like them. All students will soon be adults like you and me and we should treat them as such, not as “evil” or broken creatures that we must "fix." We have to build our classes and lessons with some leeway for kids to be kids.

If you get into teaching and you find you are upset all the time and kids aren’t behaving like you think they should or reacting like you think they should, perhaps you should adjust what you think kids are. It’s not a matter of lowering expectations. There has been some research showing that teachers who account for this bit of spontaneity in the classroom, letting kids be who they actually are, are more effective than teachers who clamp down on every “out of line” response or action. These overly controlling teachers will actually miss teaching opportunities because of this inflexibility. When teachers control too much, kids shut down (See Malcolm Gladwell's "Most Likely to Succeed") .

The roots of this rely on rhetorical theory which says you must know your audience first and foremost. If you are speaking to an audience you are not seeing, your message will never get across. The kids will sense your dislike and constant disappointment.

Kids that may seem hopeless and immature early on in life actually will have a psychological shift in their early 20’s and figure a lot out. I think we have to treat them all respectfully as if they all have that potential to make that change at all points in their K-12 existence. Once you make that perceptual change, to where you’re actually seeing kids for what they are, and adjust your lessons, your personality and your rhetoric to your audience then you will be much more successful and happier too.

When you love your kids and don’t see them as the enemy, you are more likely to listen to them and hear them. They will sense this respect and be more honest with you. This is one way to get over this insane adversarial relationship that has developed in so many American schools. Look at our films and our archetypal characters like Ferris Buehler or Bart Simpson. How can we have a culture in which we rebel against education?

Even more crucial than everything else: If you don’t love your kids, you will not have the energy to sustain your effort day after day, month after month, class after class, essay after essay. When you’ve lost your passion for kids and their learning and opening up the world, everything becomes a drudgery. Without that spark you probably won't do that one extra thing that was going to make a difference for that kid.

In teaching, you are overworked. You will be given much more of a caseload and a task than you can accomplish reasonably. Without that magic infused into everything that you do, you will fall short sooner or later. So yes, you have to like your kids!

Thriving as a Teacher

The focus of this blog is to explore and write about how to think about, conceptualize and feel about teaching, not how to teach. This will be something teachers can use to support themselves rather than something that says, “Everyone teach this way.” So many teaching programs and workshops focus on methodologies, but miss the point of what the purpose of teaching and learning is.

Do you have a reason for teaching? Do your students have a reason for learning?

In addition to reasons, how do we organize our lives as teachers? We deal with so much ambiguity in evaluating ourselves and our students honestly, it creates a psychological challenge.
How can we be sure we are succeeding and we haven't simply created an echo chamber of our own misconceptions about what our students have achieved?

There is always more that can be done to help a student. How and where do we draw the line?

Some future topics I'll look into in more depth:

Loving your kids

Loving your subject

Guilt

Assessment

Day to Day

Your Family/Your Life Outside of Work

The Obligation to be Passionate

How do you deal with some of the above questions? Please suggest some future topics as well.