I suppose I've waited too long to post another entry here, which hopefully does not reflect a lack of conscientious thought on my part, but now that I'm in the thick of job searching and preparing to have a classroom of my own, unsure of exactly which challenges of teaching I'll face in whatever setting I end up being hired into--and with the additional time of (temporary) unemployment on my hands--I find myself reexamining exactly what it is I can and cannot compromise as a teacher.
The pressing concern for me at the moment is how I can/should set up my classroom. From what I understand, a large part of the school's curriculum is already determined. I've only seen the summaries online, and haven't had the opportunity to see the curriculum itself, but I'm starting to really wonder--I'm not a student-teacher any more, and my placement isn't training for me. I'm an actual teacher now (assuming I'm hired on by someone, fingers crossed). I have a responsibility to myself and to my profession to do what I became a teacher to do--teach students to inquire into literature, use literature as a tool to help them learn to think about the world around them, think about the relationship of literature and culture--media and culture, too--and become better people, better citizens because of it. And to teach them to write unabashedly and without fear and honestly and well about their convictions and what they've observed based on the world around them. If they see something amiss in the world, something perhaps that reflects an issue raised in a piece of literature, I want to teach them to engage with it, analyze it, and finally write about it so even more people can think about it, analyze it, and, hopefully, come together to fix it. To me, this is the whole purpose of art and literature--to provide us with a microscope to analyze the actions of characters, biases of authors, and compare what we see there with what we know to be true about the world, and to use that knowledge to interact with and improve our world. This is how art, at its best, has always functioned. But if I'm given a curriculum, can I make room for conversations about the purpose of literature? Can I ask students to make connections with the world around them, if there's no place for those types of connections in the curriculum?
These are very confusing questions for me, and ones that I perhaps don't fully understand myself. But I feel I need to get it together, come up with a clear and consistent professional purpose, before I step into a classroom--otherwise, what good am I? These are questions we didn't talk too much about in my teacher training (though we did read theorists who had similar questions and goals), presumably because not everyone has the same mission statement, professional purpose, conviction, or what have you. So now I find myself wondering what I can do. Is this a professional concern that I can't yet engage with, since I'm only a novice teacher and have specific teaching skills to hone? That doesn't seem like a good enough answer to me, but maybe it's the only right one. But if I'm meant to be developing as a teacher throughout my first year of teaching, shouldn't I have a goal towards which I want to develop? And shouldn't that goal coincide with what my perceived purpose for teaching is?
I'm starting more education-related coursework in the Fall, though it seems more scientifically-oriented, so I don't know to what extent it will help me work out these questions. Hopefully being hired by a school, getting a look at the school's mission statement, curriculum, and students will help me to develop my idea of what I'm striving to become, as well. We'll see, I suppose. I just feel that there's no use being a teacher if all I'm doing is teaching students mechanical skills. I feel that an English classroom is for more than that. Clear communication and reading comprehension are important skills for students to have, but isn't it more important for high school students to understand their role in the world, and have the tools to engage the world appropriately? And doesn't that require critical examination of texts, including a critical examination of the English discipline and classroom?
It's very possible I'm making too much of these concerns. I've got Harry Wong's The First Days of School sitting on my desk waiting to be read. Maybe once I read it I'll be so struck by the practical concerns of preparing for a new school year that these more ideological questions will seem far too theoretical and intangible and unanswerable to even concern myself with. In any case, any advice, thoughts on alternate purposes for the English classroom, thoughts on how to present curriculum with an eye towards critical engagement of the world around us, or any other responses are more than welcome. Also, wish me luck in the job hunt! It's brutal out there (as if most of you reading this don't already know that!)
