Reflections on Teaching, 2012 Edition

I am going to knowingly generalize for a few minutes in order to prove a point.

It's probably not uncommon for many classroom teachers, especially at the secondary level, to admit they went to school in order to teach because they enjoyed learning. They enjoyed the school setting, the classroom, and the process of engaging with material and finding inspiration. Largely, they enjoyed some form of success, whether tangible or intangible, and aspired to share that experience with teens not unlike their former selves one day.

The trickle down effect of learning worked. If one sat long enough, listened well enough, and tried hard enough, time brought about the desired effect.

There's a deep-rooted attachment to this method of educating, one that keeps teachers--myself included--married to a dogma that strikes chords for the few, but fails to rise above the din for other listeners. It's these other listeners who need teachers like myself to speak up, sometimes in their language, and begin a process of communicative teaching that transcends our comfortable attachment to antiquated modes of teaching.

The hardest part about this realization for me, unfortunately, is an awareness of how difficult this kind of teaching really is. Moreover, the difficulty is not periodic. I can't say, "This week is going to be a bear! Look at all this intensive instruction I have to plan," because this kind of teaching must happen every single class. And if this sudden awareness of the rigors shocks teachers into facing the proverbial music, imagine the paradigm shift that must occur in how they must now approach the work they do--the work they always imagined they could do with sophistication, ease, and (gulp) comfort.

Though this dynamic evolution is exactly what some energetic teachers are looking for, there are many of us who will readily admit that we didn't sign up for the profession to be blindsided by a paradigm shift. No one, I would wager, knowingly chooses a line of work that will dramatically alter his or her worldview.

And yet, here we are. Here I am, really. I'm staring at mass of expectant youth who know all too well the old, antiquated models of teaching and learning. They know that sometimes what I say will affect them and sometimes what I say will not, and that's just how things go. On and on, in an unfolding line of grades and rooms and campuses.

That's what school is. They expect me to drone on, in fact, because that's what school was, is, and will always be. Changing my practice changes their practice, and despite the fact that these new methods of instruction seems mostly effective, they still bear the scent of manipulation.

Students, like many teachers, remain perceptively aware of the failures of the current educational model. But it worked for them, so...