As a teacher, imagine that you could wave a magic wand and do one of five things in your classroom:
1) Turn your failing students into D students.
2) Turn your D students into C students.
3) Turn your C students into B students.
4) Turn your B students into A students.
5) Inspire your A students to become life long learners.
Just to be clear, for the purposes of this thought experiment, we are going to assume that these letter grades represent real standards and not the sort of grade inflation that dominates modern education.
At a gut level, my choice is to try to inspire the A students. It is not that I believe that the other choices are unimportant or that I ignore most of the class. That being said, what puts a smile on my face in the morning when I walk into my empty classroom is the possibility that something I present is going to get into a kids head so that they find themselves thinking about it at home.
When I prepare a lesson, my first question is why is this topic interesting. If I can figure out how to make the material interesting to me, there is a chance that I might make it interesting to someone else. When I teach, I am loud and passionate. In this sense, I am very much the product of the Haredi yeshiva system. You can think of me as a somewhat secularized rebbe.
This attitude has its downsides. Consider the problem of skills training. Under the surface of every topic lie certain discreet skills. For example, reading requires phonics decoding and vocabulary. A good student can usually learn how to decode words and develop an advanced vocabulary passively by being exposed to books. That being said, most students need to be explicitly taught phonics and vocabulary even though they are not the interesting part of reading. Part of the appeal of Whole Language methods of teaching is that this approach allows teachers to actually sit down with students and read with them. The hard truth is that this approach does not meet the needs of most students who need to be explicitly drilled in the individual skills that make up affective reading.
When I teach literature, what I want to do is present a book that fascinates me and make the case that they should share my fascination. The book does not have to be complicated. I have been blessed with a childlike mind and remain interested in children's things. For example, this past year, I taught A Wrinkle in Time. I loved having students bounce a ball in class and recite the multiplication table. Then, playing the role of It, the villain in the novel, I announced to the students that there is only one right answer to multiplication problems and we need to make sure that everyone answers in the right way. There is only one right way to bounce a ball and we need to torture kids to make sure that they bounce the ball properly. My way is the only way to live. I know what is best because I am a giant brain who is totally rational. As long as everyone is not like me, society will not be perfect and people will not be truly happy. We better get rid of all the people who are selfishly ruining society and making everyone else miserable by not simply complying.
The reality was that, even though A Wrinkle in Time is listed as being for fifth graders, most of my students struggled with the vocabulary. I recognized that my students needed explicit instruction in vocabulary and was willing to do so, but my heart was never in it. This was always merely a chore that, like a kid going to school, I had to get through in order to be allowed to get back to the teaching I wanted to do. My antics in the classroom were certainly memorable and helped some students. That being said, I was not always what most of my students needed.
The year has passed and hopefully my students and I both learned something. It is summer now and I have the opportunity to think of how I can do a better job next year.
