One thing I’ve been thinking about this week is what it’s
like to be a teacher. You have to be careful to walk this line – You don’t want
to assume you know what’s what. You want to challenge yourself. But you also
have to be real. Recognize not only your own personal limitations, and the
constraints of the “system” so to speak, but also the impossibility of doing it
“right.” There is no right way that will catch everyone where they are. Every
time you teach you will learn something that you can learn from. Things that
work great one day or with one class, totally flop in a different context. It’s
hard on your heart. I’m thinking about all this not because I’m curled up in
the fetal position crying about you guys – but because I literally DID do that
sometimes as a younger teacher. Teaching this class is challenging – though in
completely different ways than your contexts. And other aspects of my life that
are important to me compete with the imaginary vision of the super teacher I’d
like to be. Those things continue to be important – and I want you all to
remember that while you are a teacher – you are a lot of other things too and
that is real and valid very important.
I think having a child helped me reframe this a bit – the
pressure can be so huge you have to just realize… the kid will find a reason to
go to therapy. You can’t do it “right.” All you have to do is be the “good
enough” parent. The best I can do is teach him what matters to me, teach him
what I know best, and try very hard to understand where he’s coming from and
not assume he’s just like me. Then I just cross my fingers. And trust the
universe.
Teaching is like that. Teach some. Learn some. Repeat.
On a completely different note… In my Critical Ethnography
class we are reading this wild book called Getting Lost by Patti Lather. She’s
writing about poststructural approaches to research methodologies… which has
little to do with this class, but it kept making me think about critical
pedagogies. About sort of the irony and paradox of going into education, a
system that’s pretty notorious for reproducing oppression. Like going IN to it
– to become an actor in it. We are choosing to become a part of The Machine.
But we do it for a reason – because that’s where the kids are. That’s where the
work that needs to be done is located. So how do we reconcile this knowing that
whatever we do we will be doing harm (colonizing, gatekeeping, standardizing
etc.) with the desire to make things better. Well this is where
poststructuralism helps me out – on p9 (if you happen to have the book lying
around) she says this (replacing ethnography with teaching):
If, as Foucault (1998( states, we
are freer than we feel, how can we feel freer in this space? How might we think
[of teaching] as “an art of in between,” of finding ways of using the
constraining order, of drawing unexpected results from one’s abject situation
(de Certeau, 1984, p30), of making the dominant function in another register,
of diverting it without leaving it.
So schools get in our way, but they also offer a way. And we
have to accept the impossibility of our task if we are to accomplish anything
at all.
Finally, Matt’s blog about the art of writing and the damage
done by standardizing, mechanizing, making things more streamlined, made me
think about how teaching writing in certain ways is a social justice
issue and how streamlining, standardizing and assessing in certain ways
evacuates agency, forbids thinking, is anti-justice. We should be teaching
students to create writing is more than just filled with grammar and
correctness. (note I wrote this before our classroom talk and wasn’t really
thinking about it in particular during that discussion)
My question then, combining all this
stuff I’ve been writing about is – how can we assess our limitations (time,
emotional energy, knowledge, prejudices, implications in various oppressions,
standards, colleagues, too many students etc.) and ask – what can I do in this
space? We are freer than we feel.
(Incidentally as I was posting this I recognized that I'm using a genre from my own life, not any of those taught at school. Without thinking of it this blog follows the format of many UU sermons - a mix of apparently independent reflections on a text, a personal story, another person's story and a conclusion that attempts to pull these things together. Who knew I'd internalized this way of making an argument? What would I have thought if a student turned in something like this? .... )