Might the Fear of Teaching be the Beginning of (Teacherly) Wisdom?

Okay, so I've been thinking a lot about everything I've talked about and thought about so far, and what I've identified as my (perhaps trite and simplistic) understanding of my obstacles to becoming a worthwhile educator is fear.

I had a student this week say some things that made me afraid--not afraid for me, really, but for him, and for the other students in the class who interact with him. And this really drove home for me some of the real challenges I'm going to face as a teacher. But this isn't the extent of it.

Let me go over some of the fears I have, going into teaching:

1.) The fear of inadequacy. I'm sure we all feel this from time to time, whether we're student-teachers or veteran educators. But it's a paralyzing fear, nonetheless. Sometimes, when I'm planning a lesson I'll be presenting in my placement, I'm almost paralyzed with fear. Concerns run through my mind: Is this topic going to be relevant to students? Will it help them meet their educational goals, whatever those might be? Will it help them to become more critical consumers of the world around them? Is it pedagogically sound? Is it internally consistent? Will it be accessible to students--not over their heads, but not too simple for them, either? Will I be able to implement it well? Am I expert enough in the content to be able to field any questions students might have? Can I give directions clearly? Are my estimates of the instructional time for each activity close approximations? Am I going to be running out of time, especially if I have to take time to manage behavior issues? Will I even be effectively prepared to handle behavior issues at all?

2.) The fear of unethical or ideologically questionable motives. I often, for my own sake, try to articulate why I want to be a teacher, what kind of teacher I want to be, and why. And I come up with extensive lists--Because I love reading and writing and, as an adolescent, found them to empower me in a way that, probably, nothing else could have, and I want to share the power and connectedness of the written word with students; Because I'm concerned about social inequities that exist in our society and I want to make our nation's youth aware of them, in an effort to create a critical and responsible generation of citizens; Because I believe that an English classroom should be so much more than what it too often seems to be--a place to learn formulaic rules about language and composition that are often archaic and usually function as tools to keep some people in power and most people marginalized...I want to be the kind of teacher who pushes students, and demands a great deal from them, but who also appreciates their contexts and perspectives; the kind of teacher who wants to work with the "challenging" students, because they're too often marginalized and deserve to have their perspectives heard and understood; the kind of teacher who is passionate about every single skill set or text she teaches, and who wants to share that passion with students.

Of course, whether or not I'm the caliber of person necessary to become this type of educator, and whether or not my preservice year is preparing me for this goes back to the fear of inadequacy. But my fear here is that these motives, these goals, are just the ones I tell myself I have, and, in reality, I fell into teaching some other way and have simply justified it to myself. Perhaps I felt there was little else I was qualified to do with a B. A. in English, since the challenging life of the professional writer is fairly intimidating. Perhaps the idea of having summers off to pursue further education in English was a factor, too. It's so hard for me to tell what considerations came first. And is my desire to work with marginalized students, particularly those in low-SES urban settings a misplaced sense of superiority, like I'm some savior figure that can come in and save these unfortunate students? I struggle with this consideration, in particular, because of another fear.

3. The fear of too-high aspirations--though I don't know if that's really a good way of putting it. Is it right for me to (believe that I) want to teach to marginalized, struggling students? Or does my desire to do this type of work come from a belief that they need extra help, my help? For what? To become upwardly socially mobile? I don't think this is the goal of education, but is it not my students' (present and future) goal? If it is, shouldn't it be my goal? Or would saying something like "you need to learn to read and write well so you can go to college and get good jobs" (which is not what I believe, I don't think, but is perhaps what many students and parents, and certainly several educators and policy-makers might say) just de-value where the students come from? And can I even say that students "come from" a place, or does that generalize in a harmful way, and blind me to students' individual situations? In any case, what it comes down to is, am I aiming to work with "at risk" youth because I think they need my help? If so, isn't that a horrible, condescending thing to think? And won't that attitude, even on a subconscious level, make me a bad teacher? But what's the alternative? Teach students whose social status is more "like mine?" As if that's an option, ethically or just realistically? And how do I uncover prejudices I might have, combat them, and still function as a good educator? Can I even do this (see #1, the fear of inadequacy)

4. The fear of saying the wrong thing(s). This fear is closely related to #3. How do you show that you genuinely care about students, respect them as individuals--many of them as adults, care about their contexts and their perspectives, but still manage their behavior, ask them to do things that they don't necessarily care about or want to do, or that might be useless or even harmful to them? Should I be asking them to do things they don't see the value in? Is it my job to make them see the value in a task? What if they don't buy into my explanation of its importance? How do I create rigorous expectations for my students while still validating their literacies, experiences, and interests? How do I push back on students thoughts and statements without seeming confrontational or authoritative? And maybe the biggest challenge of all: how do I make my students successful students and citizens whilst simultaneously making them totally critical consumers of the world around them? How do I prepare them for PSSA's while still allowing them the space to challenge the test makers and the school administrators and the policy makers? How do I prepare them to enter the work force and negotiate job seeking skills while teaching them to interrogate the validity of corporate rhetoric or media images? If I do only one and neglect the other, I'll be doing my students and society a disservice. That's a lot of pressure, and those stakes seem pretty high to me.

This is just a beginning. I'm also afraid of living in an urban area, of dealing with the low pay and the tons of work that go with being a teacher. If I get a job in an urban school, I'm going, I know, to be terribly afraid every time I walk from the train station to the school, because of the neighborhood it's in. Right or wrong, I know I'll be afraid. And, supposing I get a job teaching high school english in Newark, for instance, and I walk in to a classroom of 25-35 on-level 10th or 11th grade students. I'm going to be afraid. No matter how much I tell myself to be confident, I know I'm going to start out being afraid. How can I manage a classroom like that? Will the students respect me? Will I come across as uppity, or worse? AM I uppity or worse? Can I teach those students effectively? Without being overwhelmed by the difference between their lives and mine--a difference that would be shocking based on the different setting alone? Will I make unfair assumptions? Will I say something really horrible and offensive to a student without realizing it? Will I get mugged on my way to the train station?

These are fears that I wish I didn't have, that I know might be based on a whole slew of factors, ranging from my own ignorance to seriously valid concerns. The hard part is drawing the lines to determine which fears are founded and which are unfounded. But regardless of all that, I think that I sort of came to a conclusion today: what's important isn't whether or not I have these fears--I can't control that. What's important is how I deal with them. Like I said, this might come across as trite and oversimplified, but as long as I acknowledge the fears I have, which I tried to do here, and press on, trying to do what I think it the best I can do in spite of my fears, I think I'm on ethical and responsible ground. And I know I'm going to mess up. Professor X has assured me that all research suggests I'll mess up over and over and over again my first year in particular. And that's REALLY hard to acknowledge, because students don't deserve to be impeded by their novice teachers' mess-ups. But there's no way around it. It's going to happen. All I can do is try to be real with myself and my peers about that, and learn as much as I can, and try as hard as I can. And I have to figure out how to balance different priorities, which will take time.

But anyways, I feel like now that I've named my fears (some of them) I have a little more power over the trajectory of my life and career. And I don't think being afraid makes me a bad teacher (at this point, teacher candidate). On the other hand, I think, to be paralyzed by fear, or to try to avoid certain settings, discussions, or experiences because I'm frightened, would kill me in the proverbial crib. Being an English teacher is risky business, and I'm realizing that, and hopefully learning to deal with that realization.

Write Beside Them

Penny Kittle told me to "write beside them"--my students, that is. And that's something I haven't done, or that I've had a hard time doing, since my life was swallowed up in pedagogy and theory and sales pitches and an empty apartment. But I've been stealing moments and pages, here and there, trying to document my present madness in order to retain my sanity. So I'm not sure if this is what my program director had in mind when she suggested, what seems like an eternity ago but must really have been only 10 weeks, that we might want to keep a blog, a teaching blog, that we could show employers-to-be and peers and could make us a part of a community of professionals. As i said, I don't know if this is what she had in mind, but this is my blog, and I suppose I should lay myself bare if I'm asking my students to do anything of the sort. So here goes.

Today, I was struck by a realization. I've been struggling, really struggling, this semester. It's hard to be bad at something, to be able to talk about what a good teacher is, but not to be one. It might be harder for me than it is for most, because no matter how hard I try to be good at it because I know I should, I'm really bad at handling "constructive criticism." Of course I want to improve, but I don't want anyone but me to figure out how I can. And to hear someone tell me that I need to write better handouts, or communicate more simply and clearly, or to think like an eighth-grader, stings. Really, really hard.

So I've been struggling, trying to make myself wake up in the morning and feel good about what I'm going to do that day, even though I know that between the readings and the reflections and the presentations, I'm spread so thin that, as a novice, I'm just getting ready for a long series of failures that I can analyze with my peers all day and talk about how, some day, we'll be good teachers. That is, one or two of us will, because we've all read, by this point, about the high turn over for beginning teachers. So I wake up every morning in my apartment with no one beside me except for my poor, neglected cat, and I prepare to go out and fail. Over and over and over again. And then to hear people tell me all about my little failures. And it's really, really hard.

But today I realized something that made it a little easier. I was, like any 20th-century-roughly-middle-class-american-girl/woman-in-her-20's, scrolling down my facebook feed for the zillionth time today, and I came across this video, posted under a friend's status--some short poem-- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0snNB1yS3IE . The friend who posted it is a student at Susquehana university, and I think at this moment she's living in London. I don't know her all that well--she's a mutual friend of my fiancé's who I've met a hand full of times--but she loves this spoken-word poet that I love, and she follows TED, a group I've recently started following. And I realized that, even though right now, I'm isolated from the world by this wall of university-education-training, I'm still a part of a community.

Yep. I'm a part of (a) communit(y/ies).

A community of (strong) women (who try to be strong). Women who are (as) self-made (as anyone can be), women who work for a living and care about being (as) strong(er) (as/than) any m(a/e)n in their lives, or any (wo)m(a/e)n in their ways, who (want to) build their lives instead of having them built for them. Women who hear the well-intended but frustratingly anachronistic things their brothers and fathers say--about walking down dark alleys at night, living at home [in their fathers' houses], and letting someone take care of them once in a while--and let it roll off their backs like rainwater.

If Luce Irigaray taught me anything, it was what to call the tool gynecologists use to open things--and that anyone worth writing for won't mind working to read what you wrote. If you're still reading so far, than you must be worth writing for, because I mean so many things when I can say only one. Ol' Luce calls this woman-talk (only she says it in French), but I call it me-talk, because I don't think like (a) (wo)m(a/e)n, I think like myself, like only I can, because only I have taken the steps to get me to where I am so I can see (the things/the way) I see.

(We aren't/I'm not) always strong, though I/we always want to be, and often try to be. In fact, I feel weaker than most a lot of the time. When I go to bed early because I've gotta sleep to silence the thoughts in my head, they usually go something like this: I-have-too-few-friends,-too-few-dollars,-too-few-accomplishments,-and-too-many-pounds-of-fat-on-me,-I'm-so-bad-at-communicating/empathizing-to/with-teenagers-maybe-I'm-not-meant-to-teach-(not-that-I'm-"meant"-to-do-anything-because-who-plans-it-but-me--but-then-what-made-me-"mean"-for-myself-to-become-a-teacher?-In-fact,-how-did-I-end-up-here,-anyways?-Is-my-whole-life/identity-the-result-of-coincidence(s)/convenience(s)?-and-if-so-then-why-does-it-feel-like-(such-a-struggle/a-hole-I-keep-trying-to-climb-out-of-only-to-discover-that-no-matter-how-high/hard-I-climb,-there's-still-more-climbing,-and-harder-climbing,-left-to-do)-But-if-i-don't-teach-English,-what-on-earth-should-i-do?-Being-a-stayathomemom-seems-so-much-easier-why-do-i-insist-on-winning-my-share-of-bread--not-that-i'll-do-that-as-a-teacher-anyways-with-the-job-market/world-economy-what-it/they-is/are-so-if-i-can't-do-it,-and-even-if-i-could-i-couldn't-make-a-living,-anyways,-then-why-am-i-bothering?-Do-i-want-to-be-a-teacher?-i'm-so-lost-in-the-cloud-of-rigor/failure-i'm-in-i-can't-remember-anymore-what-i-want-to-do-vs.-what-i-feel-i-must-do.-Am-i-doing-this-for-(all)-the-wrong-reason(s)?-what-even-is/are-the-right-reason(s)?-Does-it-matter-why-i'm-trying-to-do-it-if-i-can't/won't-do-it,-anyways?-maybe-i'm-just-not-trying-hard-enough!-i-should-work-less-hours-so-i-can-be-fully-devoted-to-my-coursework/placement--i-should-work-more-hours(to-make-up-for-my-inability-to-write-the-number-of-sales-i-need-to-earn-the-commission-i-need-to-support-myself)-so-i-don't-have-to-take-out-more-student-loans,-since-i-probably-won't-be-able-to-get-a-job-that-allows-me-to-pay-them-back,-anyways--i-should-make-more-of-an-effort-to-(make-new-friends/stay-connected-with-old-friends)-because-i'm-a-hypocrite-for-talking-about-a-"communityoflearners"-if-i'm-so-socially-withdrawn/isolated/rejected.--what-am-i-even-contributing-to-society/America/my-students/the-World/the-Universe,-anyways?... And it/they go(es) on.

These thoughts are overwhelming, like clouds of locusts eating up all my energy/motivation/life-force. And some days, I'm totally absent from life, my mind running over these doubts over and over and over again, my body occupying a seat in a classroom, my mouth offering lessons to students, but my mind absent, and my heart being eaten away.

But I'm a part of communit(y/ies) and I know that I can battle these doubts. I've got my strong girls behind me, those that I know and love and those who just inhabit the same space(s)/world that I do. I've also got my fellow academics (readers/writers), with their/our thirst for knowledge and wisdom, a thirst that I/they/we can't ever possibly quench, seeking out more and more, greedily, eating up words and ideas, books and letters and websites and conference talks, historical figures and periods and philosophers and writers and authors/poets, slurping down cup after cup of theory and philosophy and discipline-specific/interdisciplinary thoughts. Always, always, always, thinking, puzzling, analyzing, re-thinking.

And educators, who want to give give give students the words, the knowledge, the wisdom that I/we/they love(d) so much, that help(s/ed) us/them/me so much. I/we want students to read/love Shakespeare--or hate him, as long as they've read him, and can have a well-informed, well-argued hatred. Our/my mouth(s) and mind(s) are full of things we want these kids to notice, think about, interrogate, analyze. And we're/I'm disappointed in (our/my)sel(f/ves), not our/my students, when they fail to notice/think about/interrogate/analyze those things (fully).

Black can mean many things, I think, but it can't mean me. And poor can mean many things, but it (probably/usually) doesn't mean me. Man/male can mean a lot, but not me.

Weak and strong and determined and dejected/defeated and hungry and satisfied and beautiful and ugly and thoughtful and diligent and lazy and stupid and cold and damp and short and stubby and meek-and-mild and severe and hypocritical and (full-of/lacking)-integrity and social and reclusive and gentle and bitchy and frightened and cowardly and brave and uncertain and many other things mean me right now.

I'm trying to take things one step at a time. Poetry and novels and music have been great helps to me in this struggle--which makes me think I'm in the right field, because when I was feeling lowest, I asked my friend to feed me poetry, or I listened to a song that moved me, or I read a couple of pages of a novel I'm (trying to) work(ing) my way through. My peers and professors and students all help and hurt me right now, as good peers/professors/students almost certainly should. But, for now, I feel good, I feel like I'm a part of something good, and that I really belong in it, even if I've still got a ways to go...

It was good to get this all off my chest. In one of my classes, on teaching writing, we do quickwrite assignments from time to time, and one of them was a free write. I wrote about the Salem witch trials, and about death-by-crushing, a method of execution for witches at the trials in which more and more weight is put onto someone's body until they are crushed to death. I wrote about how I felt like, every day, more and more weight was being piled on my chest, like so many stones, and that I was sure any minute my rip cage would splinter and I'd be a goner. That hasn't happened. I'm still here. I'm still (roughly) pretty sane. I'm still moving forward. And I feel like writing is helping me take some of the stones off my chest, and better bear the ones that are stuck there. I know that when all this is done, even if I still have a ways to go before I can call myself a good teacher, I know I'll at least be a strong(er) person for the effort.

Obstacles: Self-Doubt, Discouragement, the Whole Bit

(Note: I posted 3 entries today, in backward chronological order. I wrote one, but it was far too long to be one post, so I broke it into 3 parts--this is part 1, the entry about the purpose of (English) teachers and literacy education is part 2, and the entry about my struggles with unit/lesson planning is part 3. Just FYI. But each entry, obviously, stands alone, too)

Well, I've avoided the blog successfully for altogether too long now. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is that last week was very discouraging--between a workload from my classes that I thought I'd never be able to manage and co-teaching (which really ended up meaning my mentor teacher teaching while I pretty much stood there) a lesson on complex and compound sentences, I started to lose heart.

Another reason is that this week has been insanely busy and phenomenal. I did a lot of work with a special ed teacher at my placement, which was really useful and enlightening. I planned a lesson on writing in which I got to write to the prompt students are using, model my writing and revision process, and do a peer revision workshop all four periods out of the day. And I got a lot of work out of the way for my Pitt classes, which was a relief. In short, this week, I felt like superwoman, and last week, I guess I felt a little bit more like...oh, I don't know, Eeore, or some other negative-Nancy with a bad self image and a lack of motivation.

I'm saying this to offer explanation for my long break in writing--boy, would Penny Kittle be cross with me! What a far cry from writing every day!--and to give a sense of how pre-student-teaching feels to me, right now, just after finishing week 8 of classes. I mean, I've gone through it all so far--feeling like I'm the best possible teacher candidate in the universe, feeling like I'm not qualified to work with the public at all, much less teach high school students, feeling like the workload I'm presented with through my program is physically impossible to manage, feeling like I can complete all of my work for Pitt, go to work on the weekend, and still have free time to do whatever I want--In short, I've contradicted myself more in the past two weeks than I have probably at any other time in my life. For the first time in my life, I feel like I might really be struggling to learn something. I'm not supposed to be bad at things! At least not things that have to do with school! But, here I am, questioning my ability to become a real, true, quality educator.

And I don't know, really, why that is. No one's telling me that I'm not teacher material. Actually, many of my professors, my Mentor teacher, my University supervisor--she's a retired English teacher who acts as something of a liaison between the University and my placement and makes sure I'm meeting the requirements of both institutions to the greatest possible extent--all are telling me that I'm doing well, that there's a good teacher in the making buried somewhere inside of me for sure. But why don't I feel it?

One of my professors--we'll call her Professor X, just because I think it's fun to use code names--told me that many studies have found that the pedagogy and the strategies and techniques, all the wisdom and knowledge we're accumulating from the zillion-and-a-half researchers and professors and vet teachers that we're reading, whose names I can hardly keep strait, all the feedback we're getting from the phenomenal educators at the University of Pittsburgh, all this training won't really make a difference until our second year of teaching. I don't mean to put words in her mouth, or in the mouths of the researchers who did the study. She wasn't talking about us specifically. She just said that the studies showed that to be the case for the majority of the novice teachers they studied. Still, it's a hard thing to hear. Part of me wants to declare, "No way! Not me! I'm the exception! I'll use understanding-by-design Smagorinsky-modeled inquiry-based units from the beginning of my first day! I'll be building literacy communities from the get-go! There's no way I'll let my students go a whole year without the quality instruction they deserve!" But the truth of the matter is, I know that would be a total lie. I can't even guarantee I'm using best practices in my mentor teacher's classroom, with what feels like (usually) the entire University of Pittsburgh to support me. But it's such a disheartening thing to think I'm going to make a ton of mistakes this semester and next, and not give students the quality of education they deserve. And to think that I might get a job in a real school, with my own classroom and my own students and even--dream upon dreams!--my own curriculum, and I might still spend a whole year floundering around, trying to get my teacher legs, trying to figure out how to do what I'm getting paid to do, what my students are COUNTING on me, DEPENDING on me to do, is totally terrifying and depressing. And what about me that year? It's stressful enough to think I'm not a good teacher after doing it part-time for 8 weeks. If I have to look in the mirror after being a full-time teacher-of-record in a classroom for 6 months, and say, "you know, I still don't really understand this whole teaching thing," I don't know if I'll be able to look at myself at all!

Professor X, if you're reading this, please don't despair! I bear you no ill will for telling me this information--in fact, I'm glad to know it! In my view, knowledge gives you power, and having knowledge, even when it's depressing, discouraging, not-what-I-want-to-hear knowledge, at least I have an idea of what I may have to deal with.

But, in thinking about myself as a teacher, pre-service teacher, future teacher, or whatever, there were a few questions that came to my mind as far as what matters to me, to making me a good teacher, etc.

The Role of the English Teacher and Literac(y/ies) Education

What is an English Teacher? What should (s)he be?

As far as my question about the role of a teacher, I had a couple of conversations with professors, peers, and my mentor teacher in which the idea of student "need" came up. Professor X told us about some of the things that make life unpredictable from year to year--one year, you might have students who work independently and stay on task, for the most part. "Easy" students, generally speaking, to teach. And the following year, you might have a group of students that need a little bit more guidance, scaffolding, or support. This got me thinking about the odd phenomena of student need, and the role of a teacher. Later in the week, my MT (I'm just going to start abbreviating Mentor Teacher as MT because it makes my life much easier. Sorry, this abbreviation probably makes no sense to those of you who aren't pre-service teachers or involved in teacher ed), trying, I think, to be supportive when I perhaps sounded to her like I was doubting myself (who'd ever get the impression that I'd ever do that), said to me of her AP students, "Don't worry, they're good kids. You can't really mess them up." This made me think a minute. I mean, is there a distinction between "bad" kids and "good" kids, "smart" kids and "dumb" kids, students who struggle and those to whom learning comes with a fair degree of ease?

Certainly, all students, of all levels of academic and cognitive ability, all areas of interest, confidence, parental involvement, etc., need good teachers. But I think there's a reason that so few of my peers in my special education class have students in their classes with IEP's. I may be wrong about this--I've done no fact checking whatsoever, and no asking of professors or others in my program--but I suspect that student teachers/interns generally get placed in fairly high-level classes--honors and AP classes. I suspect there are two reasons for this--one is that teachers of AP students perhaps feel more confident that we can't "mess their students up," but I think the main reason is that most student-teachers are placed in classes with teachers who are generally considered to be expert teachers, teachers with a fair amount of experience and who demonstrate competence.

But, wait a minute, if you're reading carefully, you'll notice that there's something a little funny about what I just wrote. The AP kids are the one who student teachers are qualified to teach, because regardless of how much we might stumble, we won't mess up their learning, because they're independent learners. (This is not me making truth statements, but just restating the hypothetical logic that I suspect, perhaps wrongly so, goes into our placement decisions) We also end up in these placements because the teachers are experts who we can sort of apprentice, who have a lot of desirable skills. Have you caught the drift of what I'm suggesting yet

If not, let me be explicit. In my experience, in my placement now and in the high school I attended as a student, the vet teachers, the real "expert" teachers, taught the AP, honors, and academic sections. The new teachers taught the on-level students, or the "vocational" track students. Again, I don't have the studies/research to back me up here, but it seems to me that the best teachers in the biz might be teaching to the students who, supposedly, need them the least. Of course, I'm not suggesting that AP students don't need good teachers. Certainly, I think they do, which is why I worry so much about failing them, not being the teacher they deserve me to be. But don't struggling students, students with IEP's, students with low levels of parental involvement, students from low-SES homes, single-parent homes, working-parent homes--don't they need strong teachers even more? Perhaps they don't. But I do know one thing for nearly certain. Most of the "lower-level" classes at my placement tend to be a lot larger. And the same was true in high school. And, as far as I know, that's a pretty typical pattern to see in urban low-SES schools (again, no research to back that up, so don't take it for truth--I'm basing this on my experience and what I remember hearing, not always the most reliable sources, and they certainly wouldn't stand up to peer review). At the very least, planning for large classes is a big struggle that, in itself, requires expert maneuvering. My point in all of this--and I know I'm slow at getting to it; I told you, I had a LOT of time to think while I was brooding last week and cheering this week and blogging neither week--is that I'm trying to decide where I belong once I finish my program at Pitt. I was thinking, really, truly thinking about teaching at an urban school in NYC for the first couple of years, at least, of my career. My reasoning was that I suspected there was a higher need for talented, committed educators in those schools (and at that time, I still saw myself as potentially talented. Now, I may be revising that idea. I still think I can do it--teach well, that is--but it may take a lot more work than I anticipated) and I had a duty to go to the schools where the need was highest. This, perhaps, is an incredibly, incredibly arrogant thing to think--as if I'm going to spend two years in a school in the Bronx and suddenly the students will realize that they have value and will become scholars and grow up to be congress(wo)men, all thanks to my self-sacrifice. Maybe it is arrogance, but I think it's important for me to work with students who other educators don't want to work with. Maybe it's a misguided feeling--I can't really fully articulate a rationale for it, but I feel that it's important for me to do it, and maybe that's enough, but maybe it isn't. Anyways, regardless of my motives, last week, when I was feeling lower than a bow-legged caterpillar, I was certain that I wasn't qualified to work in an urban school--I was sure that I didn't have the "with-it-ness" (or is it spelled withitness?), the classroom management skills, the rapport-building-skills, the experience with "difficult" students to teach in an urban school. But then, something funny (not in the "hahaha" way, but in the "oh-my-word" way) occurred to me--urban schools are the ones with the job openings, the ones where we, entry-level teachers, are often told we may have to work for a couple of years to gain experience before getting the jobs we "really" want. Shouldn't we be sending our best teachers to our "high-need" students and leaving the ones that "you can't mess up" to the rookies? I don't know how much of my reasoning here is solid logic with facts to back it up and how much is my cynicism coming across, but I know the job I'm going to get as an entry-level professional will not be working with "good" "independent" learners--they're a reward for dealing with the tough kids for enough years, it seems.

Anyways, what this weird little aside comes down to is simply this: I don't know what the role of a teacher is/should be, and I don't know how much that changes based on the "neediness" of a particular group of students. And I don't know if it's even fair to think of urban schools as "high need" schools. Who are we to think they need us? (Those pronouns aren't plural because I have a group in mind, but mostly because I don't want to think of myself as the only arrogant starry-eyed educator to feel this way) Do they, or don't they? Do low test scores mean high need? Are students failing just because they're not doing well academically? Bob Fecho wrote about students in his "urban" school in Philly, which served a largely black and Carribean student body, refusing to "play the game" of standardized tests. (Sorry, I don't have the book with me right this second to give a full citation) I don't know if that can be generalized to all "high-need, low SES, urban" schools, but I know in my placement, many of the students with below basic scores on their PSSA pretests seem smart and engaging enough to me, but they don't want to play the game of school. Is it clear, I wonder, what I mean by that? These students demand authenticity, transparency about purpose. If they're doing worksheets just for the sake of completing a packet and covering a unit, they don't buy it, and they don't care. And then they don't do well, and so teachers give them lower level work. Then, they care even less. And I can't blame them. Is it my job to make them care? (The answer to this question may be different between my pre-service year and my first year teaching)

It all comes down to what English classes should look like, and this was another question I had. A lot of my students don't care about English, because it's hard for them--many of them have learning disabilities that make reading really hard for them--and the purpose isn't clear, so it doesn't seem to be worth the effort it takes. I wish they saw words the way I do. I love words so much, because I use them in so many ways, and I see how much they empower me--they put me in dialogue with experts in Education, many of whom I'll never be able to meet, they help to expose me to so many different world views and cultural perspectives that inform my own and help me see the richness of the world, they help me express myself, understand how I'm feeling when I miss my fiance who's living in NYC but also can't bear the thought of going in to a class I know I don't understand, they help me tell others about my struggles with my teacher prep program and seek insight into my career trajectory, and they help me see through political speeches, media bias, and so much other crap that gets thrown at me daily from all sides (for example, I'm at y brother's house right now, on his computer, totally inside, with the TV off, and I can spot 5 advertisements from where I'm sitting) This awareness gives me power. I want them to have the power of words, too!

But they're not getting it by filling out worksheet packets. Or by not filling out worksheet packets while their teacher shakes her head.

The Purpose of English Class: The Power of Literac(y/ies)

I don't know what the students think the purpose of English class is. I don't know what my placement school or my MT think the purpose of English class is. But I know what the purpose is for me. Making students strong, strong, strong. Showing them how to determine what was influencing the author of a text--living in a racist, sexist society, for example, and either incorporating those assumptions into their texts or pushing against them. Talking to them about how we can read a book to think about history--not the facts of history, but an artifact of a cultural moment. Teaching them to read the world around them with a critical eye. Teaching them how to advocate for themselves, how to actively oppose unfairness without needing violence. I want them so badly to know the power of writing in their own voice, dialoging with themselves through writing to understand themselves. I care so much about English and so much about students. But is this really what English classes are for? Is that what my MT's classroom does? I don't think so. Maybe I'm wrong. About a lot of things I've written here. But I know it's possible to gain autonomy and power from literacy, because I've read parts of Malcolm X's biography, and I've read Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and I've read Virginia Woolf and Luce Irigary and Gloria Anzaldua (forgive the absence of accent marks, I have no idea how to insert them in a blog post. Why can't html cooperate with word processing software keyboard shortcuts?) and so many others who say such brilliant things that people get to read and talk about only because they're written.

These students aren't reading these things, though. So is this a canon war I'm fighting? Or is it a pedagogical one? Or is the "war" a figment of my imagination, and, really, an overreaction to a fairly good education system. (Sir Ken Robinson doesn't seem to think so http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U ) But what do I do about that?

Let's say we can buy my premise that English classrooms are about empowering students with literac(y/ies) skills ( I just got Reading, Writing and Rising Up and Teaching for Joy and Justice, 2 books by Linda Christensen, at the recommendation of a very smart peer/colleague of mine, we'll call her Catherine, and I suspect, though I haven't read them yet, that they may support this premise, as well. She spoke--Linda Christensen, not Catherine--at the PCTELA conference I wrote about last time, and she dealt with this idea a bit) and that my presumption that AP kids are fairly independent learners with a pretty sophisticated repertoire of literacy skills, and that the students not in AP classes--the students in my MT's remedial reading class, for example, with IEP's and low-SES backgrounds, who live in foster homes and haven't been "good at school" in a very long time--aren't getting access to those literacies, which leaves them, in some ways, disempowered. Oughtn't someone step in, and say, "enough, quit cheating these kids out of a fair chance in a game that is, in a lot of ways, fixed against them." Okay, so that's a grossly oversimplified way to think about it, but it conveys the general sense of frustration I feel when I try to negotiate the sophisticated "best practices" I'm learning from Pitt with the students at my placement who just need me to make sure I don't mess up too badly, and with my prospective job options--what I feel I ought to do, would like to do, but don't know if I can do vs. what I think I probably could do but don't feel "called" to do. I know the notion of being "called" to work in an urban school sounds so, again, condescending, and I don't mean it to be. I don't know, perhaps my attitude isn't the right one, and I'd be inauthentic and not confident enough and wouldn't be successful in an urban school as a result of these types of thoughts exactly. But who's going to teach in the cities, then? New teachers waiting for the jobs they really want to open up?

Sorry, this entry really must be laborious to read. It's what I'm thinking right now--back and forth, back and forth, highs and lows, highs and lows--which must be torturous to read--assuming anyone's bothering to read by this point--but maybe it'll put you in my shoes a little. No linear path of logic to follow. Just trying to navigate a minefield of thoughts and doubts and questions without losing all my limbs before getting to the other side.

But, since I'm into the topic of what English classes should look like, I might as well move on to my arch frenemy for the year--unit planning!

Arch-Frenemy for the 2011-2012 School Year: Unit and Lesson Planning

So, you would think, based on my very idealistic, very powerfully stated, very passionate and certain-sounding proclamations about why English class is important, that I'd be a really excellent lesson and unit planner. Not so. I'm actually very bad at it. In fact, I feel pretty stupid for the first time in a very, very long time.

This Tuesday, I was in one of my University of Pittsburgh classes, and we were planning our lessons and coming up with unit foci for Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust. Now, this was challenging enough for me since I wasn't crazy about the book. But more so because I still don't get this backward planning thing. If you're not an education student, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. But conceptually focused units that focus around an inquiry-based question like "What counts as American Lit? What does it mean to be American? How does Pain lead to Growth?" or something like that--these are pretty weak examples, but I'm thinking on my feet here! Anyways, I totally understand the theory--you teach with end goals in mind. You know from the beginning generally what you want to accomplish and how you're going to determine whether you've accomplished it or not (summative assessment), and the lesson plans map out how you get there. Each lesson should have learning goals and a way to measure if students have met them, and the activities should facilitate their successful completion of the formative assessment, which should prepare them for the summative assessment, which should measure the depth of their inquiry into the unit's focus question. It all sounds fairly simple and straitforward. Really, it almost seems like common sense, right? Wrong.

Where does grammar fit into that? I know you could have a unit on literacy, something like "How can using language in different ways work differently," and you could talk about audience and grammar in relationship to one another. And in this unit, writing would fit in well, and close readings of other literary texts looking more for technique than for content. But what if you're teaching within a curriculum, and it doesn't allow you to plan your own units per se, so you have to fit grammar into a unit on a piece of literature. How on earth can you expect grammar learning goals (on the lesson level) to reflect the conceptual focus of the unit? I guess maybe they don't have to, because you could think of them as writing improvement strategies which will help students with their summative assessments. And what about IEP assessments and benchmarks? how do I make time for these in my tightly-structured inquiry-driven highly-cognitively-demanding backwardly-designed units? Do the IEP kids just have to figure out ways to make things up? Is there ever any space for downtime? Free writing? SSR (sustained silent reading)? These are things we're being directed against, but which I think are super valuable, if not essential, to students who are trying to learn, but also trying to survive adolescence.

It's hard to put out hypotheticals, and I don't want to alienate any non-educators who are reading this blog, because I need all the potential sources of feedback I can get. Suffice it to say, I still don't see how I'm supposed to balance everything I'm learning and turn it into a coherent unit plan with these dainty, structured, perfectly synthesized little lesson components. I sound like I'm being sarcastic, but that's totally how it feels--like unit and lesson planning with UBD is just way too structured and neat and tidy to allow space for everything I want students to get from my class--it's so narrow! And it really seems contrary to the inquiry-based learning idea. But any far-reaching planning seems contrary to inquiry-based learning. I honestly probably don't know what I'm talking about. And by now, my professors are probably rolling their eyes (mentally, of course) because I still don't get it, and I'm still asking the same questions over and over; my MT sure doesn't care, because to her, UBD is just some new educational trend, and is no better or worse than diary mapping for unit planning; and I don't know if my supervisor is really that concerned about the planning aspect of things--I think she's more there just to check in on my classroom presence, presentation, withitness, etc. So I don't know where to go for answers. And Smagorinsky (he's an educational theorist who we read quite a bit of in our program, and he talks A LOT about backward planning) just leers at me from the pages, scowling self-importantly, so pleased with himself that what he proposes makes no practical sense to me. So, here I sit, making myself feel more and more stupid with every stupid sentence I write to even try and explain how I'm struggling. Hopefully, things get better. And better still, hopefully it doesn't take until my second year in the field for everything to come together for me!

Professional Development and Colleague Collaboration

Today, I went to the first professional conference of my career/life, the 2011 PCTELA (Pennsylvania Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts), and it was generally a pretty great experience. I got a great deal out of the experience, but I think what stood out the most was the sense of community I got to experience, and the ideas I got to engage with.

Community: Stumbling Upon the Wealth of Professional Resources

We read a lot of theory in our English Education program, which is super important, I think, in guiding every single decision we make in our classrooms (I way our, though I haven't, really, the right to, yet, since I'm still only at my placement once a week, but hopefully you'll tolerate it from me, since being at the PCTELA conference today made me feel like I really am part of a community of professionals, even this early in my career/professional development!). And, of course, in our placements--my placement, at least--theory sort of becomes invisible. I'm often unsure of whether or not there is a theory backing any given choice my MT makes. That's not to say that there isn't, but if there is, I'm not always aware of it.

Being at the conference was interesting because it, perhaps, bridged the gap in some ways. I learned a lot about the different resources available to me as an emerging professional. Who knew there were SO MANY websites out there that cater specifically to English teachers!? I think I knew there were resources out there, but it's nice to have guidance from more expert professionals, because it's often really hard to tell what's a good resource, what's a mediocre one, and what's just downright bad, especially at this stage in my career, while I'm still cementing my own educational theory and philosophy.

And what was really great for me was the exposure to adolescent lit authors. Because I never really had a phase in my life when I read adolescent lit. I picked up the Harry Potter books in high school, and I read a few "adolescent" texts, like The Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Giver, but I'm not much of an educated consumer of adolescent lit texts. So it was really helpful to hear from some people who are respected in the field, and get an idea of what good adolescent lit might look like. I'm already picking some up from my classes, where we've been reading some texts, geared at adolescents, that I've found just beautiful.

Ideas that Made me Stop and Think

In addition to just being blown away by the exponential growth in the pool of resources at my disposal, I also got to hear some really great educators/authors speak on some intellectually provocative topics.

Communities in our Classrooms

They got me thinking about a couple of things. One is how we can establish community in our classrooms. I think my program at Pitt was trying to address this when they asked us to create and enact a lesson in our classroom that promotes literacy community, though I wasn't really sure exactly what that was supposed to mean, and maybe I'm still not quite sure. But in any case, the idea is that in order for our students to do really compelling, inquiry-based, intellectually stimulating and personally relevant work, they have to feel safe in the classroom, trust the instructor and trust each other.

The question is, naturally, how do we get them to that point? And what Ms. Christensen said was basically that it doesn't happen over night. You don't walk into your first day with a group of 30 students, hand them an "I am a scholar" pledge and expect them to be on board with you and trust you implicitly. She suggested that you provide them with a space to share and engage with their personal experiences, but also not force them to go there if they're not ready. She gave me a lot of good ideas, and she also reminded me not to fret--my students at McKeesport don't seem to fully trust me yet, but I'm only there 1 day/week this semester, and I'm only student-teaching--because it takes time and work, and it'll come, if I try, and if I'm trustworthy enough. And I think I'm making progress already!

What's Appropriate in Young Adult Lit (and/or in the English Classroom)?

The other really relevant topic at hand was that of the "appropriate content" for young adult literature. We've (the other English Ed students and our profs) talked a lot in our classes at Pitt about what texts are suitable for us to incorporate in our curricula, and which are too "dangerous." I have to admit, some of these concerns came to my mind, too, when we read James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and talked about whether or not we might teach the book in our placements, for example. I thought, "this might offend some students, some parents. It might be perceived as racially charged."

But recently, I've been questioning the notion of a dangerous text. There were times and places in the world when education actually was "dangerous," for various people. People have suffered really severe consequences for reading certain texts, for writing or speaking on a certain topic in a certain way. Bringing a book that brings up topics of racism into an English classroom, for example, is NOT dangerous in the same way.

We should be able to ask our students to critique the books we read as representations of the world(s) from which they come, and not as absolute truths. And, anyways, we don't read To Kill a Mockingbird or Oedipus or Romeo and Juliet as texts containing some absolute truth. Some parents would probably not be comfortable with their students reading about a teenage girl who meets a guy who kills her cousin and then plans to elope with him before killing herself, if it were written in a contemporary setting.

Anyways, the topic came up twice today, and just reinforced what I'm coming to believe. Maybe it's because of the age of my students, or maybe it's part of my developing philosophy of education, but I'm now sure that mature topics have a place in YA lit. Ms. Christensen talked about something Sherman Alexie said in his article "Why the Best Kids Books are Written in Blood." ( http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/06/09/why-the-best-kids-books-are-written-in-blood/ )

Our students have mature experiences. They are "young adults," and we call them that because they've had enough life experiences to qualify as approaching adulthood. A lot of them have experienced death and hardship and they're maturing sexually and emotionally--they're not only ready for these books, they need them.

Mr. Crutcher talked a lot about this, too. If we're going to validate YA experiences--in the way that we need to if we're to create a community of learners--we have to present them authentically. Otherwise, they'll know that we're sheltering them, they'll feel like they're "playing school." But if we present books to them that are written to them and for them, that describe things as they "really" are, then school stops being a game, and they can feel like they're really learning something, something tangible and real. It's fine to teach Shakespeare, but teach Alexie, too, and teach what the students are reading, and teach it in a way that students can access and can construct their own meaning through.

These are just sort of tentative thoughts; I can't speak definitively for young adults and say what they expect from books, or what they expect from English classes. But these are my suspicions.

In any case, whether I've formed lasting opinions, or I'm just working my way through my thoughts, it was really great to engage some provocative ideas, and it was really great to think and learn alongside some vet teachers from all different districts and grade levels. It was a really valuable experience, and I can't wait to go to more and more of these things as I become a vet teacher myself!

What does/should Education look like?

Today, I observed another teacher's class, and it reminded me of some concerns I have about education broadly--not just specific to me/my program, but the way schools are structured. So this entry is perhaps to be a bit more philosophical, but I think it's of critical importance, at least to me, as I prepare to take my place in the American education system as we know it.

So, what I observed--I sat in on a 9th grade history class, as they worked on crafting a piece of historical fiction. Students started out the class by thinking about setting, and the class developed into a writing/illustrating (they were making posters to go with their compositions) workshop. Perhaps the students were learning quite a bit by thinking about a realistic, historically accurate character, and perhaps they weren't--it's hard for me to say, based on the single lesson I observed. That's not really the point of my inquiry, though, because what other teachers--English teachers--had to say about his lesson surprised me.

"Is this you fulfilling your long lost dream of being an English teacher?" they joked.

The teacher who led the lesson also offers an elective course called "military history" that investigates the wars in which the US has participated through reading and writing short stories as well as historical texts, which makes sense to me, because it provides a space that is desperately needed and, in my experience, rarely actualized, for content-area reading instruction. Students learn to read history books vs. short stories. He called it a "hybrid" English/History course.

Because of the importance of reading/writing to History (really, to all disciplines), I was really surprised by the English teachers' comments, good-natured as they were, because they revealed a real compartmentalization, even in the minds of educators, of education. But this isn't the first I've seen of this.

My mentor teacher frequently says things like "this is about as math-y as we're going to get in an English class" (when talking about syllogisms and formal logic) and "That looks like shapes and numbers, put it away, you're in English class," to which the student replied, "It's not math, it's physics," to which my mentor replied, "That's even worse, that's math, shapes, and science!" (When a student was working on physics homework during her English class). I'm certainly not saying that she should be more willing to teach math, or that she should let students work on other subjects while in her class--I'm simply pointing out the clear delineation of what "is" and "is not" English, History, Math, Science, etc.

And I was put in mind of some of the comments I heard two weeks ago from students when I was presenting my lesson to introduce them to the Enlightenment and the American Revolution, and I asked them to think of people/ideas/events that they knew of that related to this time period. I remember one student objecting, "Why do we have to do this? We're not in History class! I'm bad at history!"

But History and English are so related! And science and math, too, in various ways, to say nothing of the "non-accademic" disciplines, the arts, music, etc. All of these disciplines inform how we understand the others; without understanding quantifiable methods of determining value, the lists Thoreau makes in Walden mean nothing to us; the idea of Frost's "two roads diverged in a yellow wood...I took the one less traveled by," which asks us to consider the relationships between values of quantity and quality, would be meaningless, and the comparison wouldn't be there; without science, what would "The Birthmark" mean, how could it exist, or how could Frankenstein? So if we can clearly see the way we use information from all disciplines to make sense of the information we're asked to analyze in any one classroom, why do we insist on these delineation's?

Sir Ken Robinson, with the RSA, gives a much more articulate critique of American education than I can do justice. This video is super interesting and really made me think about why our schools are the way they are, why they're structured this way, and how they end up functioning:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

For those of you not watching the video, what he argues is that the American school system is currently set up in the image of industrialization, producing "educated students" in batches, treating students as automatons, and knowledge as a single product that can be given to individual students, and then they simply have it (I think his critique comes close to the "transmission model" of education, where teachers have "truth" and can transmit it to students, eg through lectures and readings).

I think his critiques are really smart, and I think the relationship between the various disciplines--how they rely on one another and overlap--is some of the strongest evidence of the need to change the paradigm of the American school. But I have a really hard time imagining what the alternatives might look like. The closest I can come up with is something more like college, where students are allowed to excel at what they're good at--reading, preforming, calculating, etc--while collaborating with one another to enrich each other's understandings. But how do you group them? Surely you need to group them somehow? Age/grade level? Area in which they excel (which again presents the problem of how you determine/separate subjects/disciplines)? Some totally random/arbitrary grouping, so they have a diversity of peers to collaborate with? I'm at a loss...

So I know things need to change, but I'm also becoming a part of the paradigm, and I'm struggling with how I might challenge it in my classroom, without hurting my students chances in the world which is structured with the understanding of the current paradigm in mind (students have to have grades, for example, and be able to pass tests on grammar/vocab/reading comprehension--otherwise how will they get into college/get hired? Or maybe this doesn't necessarily follow...?)

But, I think what I observed today was the beginning of a slight paradigm shift, even if it's only on a small scale. The lines between two disciplines are being intentionally blurred. So that's a start, right? And I can certainly do that in my classroom by incorporating a variety of texts and allowing students to produce a variety of texts, and to collaborate with one another (and with other classes?). Hopefully these ideas are getting at something valuable--any thoughts?