Posts Tagged ‘other’
As a student teacher, I’ve heard a lot about ambition, and changing the world. I’ve heard a lot of my fellow student teachers talk about wanting to make a difference. I’ve heard a lot of full-time teachers relate glowingly their stories of having made a difference, and being engaged.
As I finished up my grading after school, my master teacher and another teacher talked shop talk. I paid attention only intermittently, more intent on the 10s, the 7s and the many, many 0s throughout the PowerSchool grading program.
The other teacher is just as committed as my master teacher, and she would do anything for her students within reason — any action or strategy that teaches them to fish rather than just giving them a fish right off the bat, that is. Upbeat, positive, model teacher.
Eventually, she said something about wanting to shut down and just give up, in a moment of end-of-the-year exasperation.
I joked: Whatever happened to changing the world? Giving up already?
I gave up changing the world a long time ago. That’s the first thing I learned as a teacher, that changing the world can’t be my goal.
Laughing, my master teacher asked:
Why do we think that? Why do you think we try to change the world? What’s up with that?
In mock frustration, she offered her hypothesis.
It’s those movies, those stupid movies, where the teacher changes the world and is awesome.
But if you actually watch the movies, the Jamie Escalantes don’t change the world. They don’t even change the school. They just change their class of 20 students.
Twenty students per class? Now that’s something out of Hollywood.
Part Four of Four in my series on my two master teachers.
My master teacher consoled a fellow student teacher, and I overheard him:
Never live too close to where you teach, especially when you start out. You sometimes need that drive back home to decompress.
I need the drive home, too. Teaching his classes is regularly frustrating. It’s an uphill battle against some students who never show up. Against some who do, rarely. Against those who are there every day, and immediately enter their 55-minute coma. Against those who are awake, but insist on avoiding work at any cost.
Against some of the rest, who know I’m nothing like my beloved master teacher.
He writes his lessons on the fly, and without much preparation. He knows which copies to make for which week, and he doesn’t usually put together handouts. He believes: Keep It Simple, Stupid; work smarter, not harder.
Students might do a textbook inventory, looking for people, events or vocabluary in the book and placing it in the appropriate spot on a timeline. Students might read from his copies of the TCI curriculum, and do the TCI activities. Students, given their parents’ permission, might watch Schindler’s List as half of the Holocaust unit.
These plans are easy to write, and they’re effective.
I don’t know if his compliments have any perspective: He hasn’t had a student teacher before. He did tell me me that I’m ahead of where he was as a student teacher, at least in terms of knowledge of the material.
Hanging out with the kids was the easy part for me. It was the subject that gave me trouble.
My skills are inverted from him, and so I have a long way to go.
Part Two of Four in my series on my two master teachers.
One master teacher is laid back. The kids love him. He quit last year.
One of our high school’s administrators lives near his house, and was, over time, able to con him into joining this year’s staff. He signed a new contract, in this new district, at the last minute.
Why did he sign? He loves kids. By itself, loving kids couldn’t and wouldn’t sustain him through a year of teaching. It made the difference when he had teetered between signing and not signing the contract offered him.
Back during his first marriage, there was a student. This student had a bad boyfriend, a bad father, a bad uncle. Read between the lines. He offered this student his couch; she took him up on it for months. Even after she moved into a stable apartment, he helped her get back on her feet, get her GED.
My theory: That’s why he signed.
This is his first year teaching at our high school. He had been frustrated from his ten years at his previous school, as a basketball coach, and in his fewer years as an athletic director. He does not coach basketball here, and he isn’t an athletic director.
In the classroom, he is still a basketball coach.
Raw charisma fills his classroom. When he’s there, students won’t notice the bare walls or broken desks or unkempt whiteboards. They notice him.
I knew he would be that sort of teacher as soon as I met him. It was the first week of December. I introduced myself. Firm, confident handshake. Bellowing baritone. His pastiche of adolescent humor.
When I teach fifth period sophomores, I don’t teach my class. I teach his. If he ever removes himself completely from his classroom, I supposed I’ll float around the vacuum he leaves in his place.
He told me once:
Two years ago, I decided that I was done teaching.
He came back.
