Misstra Knowitall's Greatest Educational Hits

I love to teach. Here's a few thoughts on the subject.

Revision and Innocence: The Life of Aaron Rushing

I wrote a piece for Gawker about a brilliant student I lost too soon. He inspires me every day to think about innocence and joy in my class.

Teaching While Awed

Awe is about witnessing, not dissecting. Awe is not about grading, but appreciating. Awe is essential to good teaching.

The Five Stages of Grading

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Welcome to my winter break with a stack of essays. 

We Built It, Now We Live In It

2008 was my first year of high school teaching and my first year of having a Black President. Listening to my students helped me understand the significance of both. 






Beloved Community: 

King's dream was beloved community. That's the dream I have for my own classroom. 





Elbows: A Meditation :

Getting bruises is a part of the game, on the court and in the classroom. .

Standardized Teaching: 

Can we use data to inform, rather than enslave? 






Teaching Writing and Blowing the Whistle: 

In a test-heavy environment, sometimes the learning that can be easily assessed is the learning that gets emphasized the most. Writing should promote deeper thinking. If it's not, it should be rethought. 

Misstra Knowitall's Philosophy of Technology Education:

How do we teach our kids to use tech without it using them? 

Real Talk:

A student at my school is killed. I had to skim this one, but you might want to read it. Still hard to think about.

Life After Death at ACT Charter school: 

What is it like to live through the slow death of a school? Terrible. What is it like when said school is resurrected? Terribly bizarre.

Teaching While Awed

It's been a couple of weeks since I wrote about grading papers and I've been thinking a lot about one of the most important experiences I left out when reading student work: Awe.

In Parker J. Palmer's The Courage to Teach, he talks about how important awe is to good teaching. Awe is about witnessing, not dissecting. Awe is not about grading, but appreciating.

A teacher needs to have a sense of awe for their subject, meaning recognizing that something within your area of study is greater and far more encompassing than the limits of your comprehension. We are drawn to that large weighty thing in the same way we're drawn to this huge spinning rock in the middle of the universe. Awe gives gravity to our teaching.

(Side note: children, who have not been robbed of their innocence, are deeply in touch with their sense of awe--and that's why they are the best students.)

So, I have to stay in touch with the staggering and humbling feeling that I've only scratched the surface in my understanding of the literature that I present to students. I could teach a book like Fahrenheit 451 a thousand times and still not feel like I've found everything there is to appreciate. I have to feel like I have a lot to learn, not because I'm so ignorant, but because the material is so great. And when I stop feeling that, maybe I shouldn't teach it. And maybe I should change professions, too.

But that's not the only type of awe that's vital. I also need to allow myself time and space to be awed by the children I teach. That means that after completing all of the "work" of grading and responding and entering and conducting the "business" of teaching, I have to set aside time to appreciate the beauty in the writing of my students.

This type of beauty ain't always easy to see, but in order for me to really know my students, I have to be observant and present enough to be awed by them. I have to recognize some essential good thing in their work that connects to some essential good thing in the material we're exploring in class. If I can't see a connection, I'm not the teacher to help them discern the connection themselves, and the class will be a waste of time.

But if I am able to help them connect their goodness, there are few things more powerful than a classroom glowing with the awe of true learning. Yup.

The 5 Stages of Grading

Another winter break is drawing to a close, and this is the time when I get most misty-eyed about my life as a teacher. A time for reflection on the beauty and majesty of the profession I've been called to.

It's also the time when I've got a lot of grading to do. The kids cheered when I said I wasn't going to give homework, and I felt good for them. But with the school bell echoing in my ear, and the students sprinting off towards their break, I started to enter my stages of grading.

Step 1: Denial and Isolation

Looking at your inbox stacked high with papers needing to be graded, you'll look at them, take a deep breath and mouthfart something about a teacher's work never being done. Besides, grading all of your students projects at once couldn't be that difficult. It might even be fun. You grin through your lying teeth and isolate yourself from the papers.

If you live alone, you drop them heavily in your empty house, giving added pathos to your Ikea coffee table. If you have a family, you drop them heavily on the dining room table or some other very public place. Everyone should know about all the fun you're going to have grading awesome awesome papers at home instead of relaxing.

So yeah, you're feeling a little confrontational. And that's why it's a good thing that you just want to isolate yourself. Any conversation you have with a member of your family is going to involve that cue of student essays. No one wants to be around you because you're denial is wearing off. You stink of resentment. You are starting to realize that you are going to spend hours and hours grading. The suck.


Step 2: Anger

Now you're starting to get pissed off. You sit down to see what the papers look like and you are angry. How dare you have to spend all this time reading the thoughts of these pipsqueaks, these ne'er d'wells, these cusses! What they need is for you to go Joe Clark on them! And so what, almost all of them completed it! They didn't do it good enough! And that's because they weren't paying attention in class and didn't take the learning seriously! You're so angry that it starts to feel good. 

Step 3: Bargaining

Well, perhaps things are not that bad, you think. Perhaps there's a way to keep the whole class from failing with their terrible, terrible papers. Perhaps there are a complex series of algorithms that will help drag them up from the depths to which they have fallen. You start looking at the grades and seeing what happens if you increase the value of the signed syllabus assignment to 1000 points.

But looking at your students in this way makes you feel unlike yourself.  You've become a pencil pusher. An accountant. A box checker. You're Ben Stein reading the roll. Beueller. Beueller. Beueller. You feel like a phony.

Step 4: Depression

You are a goddamn phony. This whole time, you thought you could teach, but instead you're just really good at sucking. And look what you've done. You've gone ahead and warped the minds of scores of children. You haven't been teaching them anything, and on top of that, anything they did learn, they learned it wrong. Their minds will be forever misaligned like stripped screws. Ruined by a charlatan.

This is the point where whatever coping mechanisms you've developed over your lifetime start to kick in. Whether it's your family or your religion or your cat, or even a 1/2 gallon of ice cream, you're going to need them. Teaching clarifies the soul, it doesn't tend it. Not in this context anyway. You need a way to renew yourself to be effective. And more importantly to be human. So handle that.

Step 5: Acceptance

You're buoyed by the positive lift you got from your renewal source. You pull out the papers and you take things from a different approach. Flipping through the papers, you stop seeing them as a mass of work, further documentation of your horrible teaching. Instead, you listen to the voices behind them. You read them with the ear of someone who is actually trying to hear what the author is saying, instead of just waiting for the right moment to interject a critical remark. Even in the most garbled writing, if you listen closely, you can hear the voice that wants to be heard.

Hopefully as you hear the child's voice, you don't let yourself get sucked into your comfortable role as evaluator. If you do, you'll probably go all the way back to Step 2. But if you can, just pull back for a minute and realize that the world of this child is bigger than you could ever imagine. Your class, your teaching, occupies space, but you are just one of many teachers. Your job is not to judge who they are as people, but help them be qualified to judge it for themselves. 

But, you also have to assign a grade to the daggone things. In the end, the integrity of the learning requires transparency. A kid deserves to know where they stand, no matter the education they've received. The barber should not hesitate with the mirror. So, you grade them and make as many helpful comments as you can. Re-articulate the objectives for the assignment, and just as importantly, find something in their thinking to praise. Even if it takes a while.

Finally, you will need to frame the experience for your students. After they get their papers back, they need to hear what you heard in their work and how that will affect the learning from here on out. All of this takes time.Time you don't have because you got so good at Step 5, and its resultant insight, that you thought it best to write about grading the assignment, instead of grading the actual assignment.

You might say that's a new level of Stage 1 Denial, but we all know a teacher's work is never done. 

A Teacher's Presence

During my first year of teaching, I studied the faces of my students for the answers to a host of questions: Do you respect me? Do you think I care about you? Do you know that I don't know what I'm doing? Do you think I am a good teacher? Do you know that I'm afraid? Do you like me? Essentially, instead of seeing my class as a room full of individuals, most days I stood up and saw row after row of fun house mirrors, reflecting my own deficiency. I looked to their faces not to find out who they were, but to find out who they thought I was. 

As a result, I suspect the person in my classroom who learned the most during that year was me. I learned a lot about what my students thought about my teaching. Some liked it, some hated it, and some tuned out. But the most depressing outcome was that instead of being about learning, my classroom continually slipped back into a referendum on how good I was at my job. We had great moments in class, and there were students who did amazing work, but it wasn't until later that I figured out that in order to teach effectively, you have to be present enough in your class in order to see the person you are teaching.

Instead of being guided by a question about external impression, the most important question a teacher confronts is Who am I? This is the true essential question for learning in my classroom and before I can get my students to grapple with it, I have to be fully engaged with it myself.

Not only do students need to see that I have considered the question, but they also have to see that I haven't stopped asking it of myself. They need to see that the point of the question is not to provide an answer that can be bubbled in on a Scantron (male, female, teacher, student, black, white, poor, rich) but instead that the process of observation and reflection required by the question is the goal.

Paradoxically, the more I'm engaged and present with the question, the more clearly I'm able to see the individual sitting in front of me. Instead of seeing only myself in my students eyes, I start to see who they are and, perhaps, who they could be. I use this knowledge to shape a classroom experience and curriculum that communicates what I've witnessed. In that way, one of the most important elements of teaching is the ability to witness. It's not coincidence that the first question a witness in court is asked is: Were you present...?

One of the reasons that teaching is such a challenge, especially early on, is that presence is not something you can just pick up when you step in the classroom. You have to manifest presence in your life overall in order for it to be effective in your class. Some days I'm good at it, some days I suck at it. My bag of tricks has expanded over the years, but when I get stuck in class and the learning is stagnant, I still confront the same old questions that I did during my first year, but now I know those questions are secondary to the true matter at hand: How present am I? How present are my students? How will the things we're learning make us more so?

Just the other day I stumbled upon Parker J. Palmer's The Courage to Teach, where he says:

Good teachers possess a capacity for connectedness. They are able to weave a complex web of connections among themselves, their subjects, and their students so that students can learn to weave a world for themselves. The methods used by the these weavers vary widely: lectures, Socratic dialogs, laboratory experiments, collaborative problem solving, creative chaos. The connections made by good teachers are held not in their methods but in their hearts--meaning heart in its ancient sense, as the place where intellect and emotion and spirit and will converge in the human self. 

It's probably no coincidence that in a time when our technology is purposed to promote an illusion of connectedness, that teaching is under assault. Listening to the discourse around education, you would have thought that "true" education only started with "reform" or whatever buzzword being recently applied to schools. But people have been teaching for as long as there has been humans, and no matter the era, the best teachers are still those who are most connected with themselves, with their students, with their subject, with the world.