We are freer than we think

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? .... )