On Teaching

Last weekend, a friend, a scholar, former teacher and mentor, Jeanne Cameron, send me an article published by the NYTimes entitled Confessions of a 'Bad' Teacher. William Johnson, author of the article, articulates the disheartening, discouraging, gut-wrenching story of his own "evaluation" as a teacher, by administrators and other non-teachers, labeling him as a bad teacher. This is someone who was noted for his excellence in teaching a few years prior to his label of 'unsatisfactory' by New York City's State Education department. 


As a teacher, I feel compelled to blog about this article and about the atrocity of State Education Departments' 'evaluation' of teachers. I come from a family of teachers. My mentors are all teachers. I value education, its process and the people who lead our classrooms. Teaching is more than a profession; teaching is a lifestyle. 


Johnson talks about the endless self-critiquing that continues long after the lesson ends. He's right. My teacher training, my mentors and my own intuition have all taught me that the lesson isn't over when the class ends. I typically find that my drive home from school is outwardly silent. No radio. No ipod. Without consciously knowing, I usually bite at the skin on my inside right cheek. Jaw clenched. Inwardly, my mind is roaring-loud. 


I rewind the day's lessons and play them on repeat until I get home. I check my students' faces the first time through. Who truly understood the content? Who was faking it? Who wasn't mentally there today? The second repeat, I listen to my own words. Did I explain everything slowly, articulately, completely? How could I have changed my wording to create better student understanding? 


This self-evaluation continues into the night. It drives how I speak the next day in class, how I structure the next lesson, how I re-teach the lesson during office hours or even the next time I teach the lesson (months later).


And Johnson continues by discussing that self-evaluation is not our only evaluation: our students are the ultimate critics. They are the first to respond to the lesson. Are they disengaged? Ask any teacher you know how they know a student is disengaged. Head down? Cell phone out? Blank stares? Notebook doodles? And then, as a teacher, you adjust. You shift the lesson. There is nothing more painful as a teacher to teach a disengaged classroom of students. Conversely, I know immediately if the lesson is stellar. Their eyes sparkle. There is a quickness about their answers that is ignited by excitement. They get it. As a teacher, when we present a lesson like this, a lesson we engineered, edited, revised and  revised and edited again, the hair on our arms prickles. Our eyes pulse with wet shared-excitement. The lesson strips student reservation - the "I'm too cool to care" attitude - and the class takes off with momentum. Of course it doesn't happen every day. But I'll tell you this: Teachers want this. They want it every day, with every lesson and every group of kids. The aforementioned is the response we hope all our lessons elicit from all our students. And you better damn well know we strive for it. With every last lesson we create.


My mother taught me this process. My father taught me this process. Dale and Nancy, Julia and Michael and Kelley and Barb and Brian and Christine and Amy and every last one of my mentors taught me this process. We all share this lifestyle. We are all evaluating, adjusting, respond to student feedback and evaluating again. So who the hell conceived the brain-child that the best way to support teachers and better our education system is for non-teachers to bust into our classrooms, pen and pencil ready, ready to evaluate a content-area teacher on the basis of a snapshot of their classroom? 


Because, ah yes, a school is under suspicion if they do not produce a few "unsatisfactory" labels within this process.


I grok Johnson. I grok the frustration and anxiety every public school teacher harbors for this State-Ed inflicted process. I struggle with words to articulate to you how discouraging this is as a new teacher and furthermore, how disrespectful it is to the men and women who dedicate their lives to teaching.


This is beginning to mirror the literary fantasy of Harry Potter, when the Ministry of Magic sends in Dolores Umbridge to evaluate long-time faculty at Hogwarts (extinguishing many of their careers, including that of the Headmaster), to implement irrational decrees regulating teacher interactions with students, and to restructure the once-thriving educational environment into something heavy with ominous oppression. Surely this connection should be a farce; most would argue Rowling's novels are far from commentary on the United States. Sadly, however, if you wander into many classrooms today, the analogy seems more like one of Professor Trelawney's premonitions of the eventual inevitable, considering the current path traveled by our public education system.


So ponder this. Have a moratorium. Read Johnson's article. It's quite insightful. And build a partnership with your kids' teachers. You are both working toward the same goal of turning your children into thinking, caring, committed and loving members of their community.