Month: August 2013

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Teaching By Learning

4 The Lord Jehovah hath given me the tongue of them that are taught,

that I may know how to sustain with words him that is weary:

he wakeneth morning by morning,

he wakeneth mine ear to hear as they that are taught. (Isaiah 50:4)

There is no teaching unless there is learning, and the deepest learning comes by teaching.  This has become my motto in forty years of teaching high school and college.  Honestly I didn’t truly understand it till I taught college, but it is equally true at every grade level. I first experienced it in the fifth grade.

We were having a class discussion in about sheep-herding in Scotland. Why do I remember this? It is because I was teaching as well as learning. Mr. Glaser, my teacher, asked, “Why were sheep the best animals for industry in this contry?” or words to that effect. I raised my hand, as I seldom did in those days.

“Because they’re adapted to the ways of the land.”  Mr. Glaser paused a beat and said, “What did you say?”

Hoping I was on the right track, I repeated, “They’re adapted to the ways of the land.”

“‘Adapted to the ways of the land,'” he mused. In the next moment he said, “Where can I find a piece of paper? I want to write that down. I want someone to know one of my students said that.” Whoa! Can you see why this memory is burned into my brain for the last fifty-five years? I was suddenly the teacher in a fifth grade class, and I would always know why sheep and wool were Scotland’s most prosperous industry.

After teaching for a few years myself, I began to realize how Mr. Glaser had taught me indelibly. I wasn’t the most brilliant student in his class, I was just the most reserved, but he had made me feel brilliant by turning me into the teacher. Much of what I consider permanent learning began with the role reversal of the student becoming the teacher. Sometimes it comes with a sleight of hand, and sometimes the teacher is transparently amazed by what his student says or writes.

Many of my male teachers probably captured my attention by pretending I taught them something.  “I never thought of it that way,” they might tell me, and I would never know whether they really didn’t or just wanted me to think so. By thrusting me into the role of the teacher they lifted my awareness and my confidence to another plane.  I felt enormously alert and receptive, an ideal state of mind.  It was a moment when teaching and learning were almost indistinguishable.

Although learning takes many forms, some of them fleeting or incidental, learning that excavates a place in the memory seems to matter. It is not only what is remembered, but how it is remembered.  It may be a milestone that records a developmental phase or the arrival on a plateau of understanding, but it is unforgettable.

Great teachers have always been portrayed as fonts of wisdom overflowing to their students, but when we listen to them carefully, we hear them encouraging us to learn as they do. Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it” (Luke 17:17).  Children typically are quick to move from learner to teacher and back again without even noticing. During the first six years of their lives when they are learning language, they are taking in words and grammar and experimenting with them at dizzying pace.  It was this kind of awareness and growth that Jesus prized in his disciples, a sense of wonder in what we learn and a sense of humility in what we don’t yet know.

Jesus kept this sense of wonder as he taught.  He was often surprised by the outsiders, those who were not raised as Jews.  When the Roman centurion said famously, “Just say the word and my servant will be healed,” Jesus was said to be “astonished.” “I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith” (Matt 8:10).

Once Jesus showed uncharacteristic frustration with a Canaanite woman who relentlessly followed him, pleading for the healing of her daughter. “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs” he chastened her (Matt 15:26).

But she parried his figure of speech with her own,” . . . but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table” (27).

Realizing he had been out-maneuvered by a determined mother, he responded, “Woman, you have great faith. Your request is granted” (28).  This surprising exchange shows Jesus becoming the student and being taught by an unlikely teacher.  The Canaanite woman had no status, being female and Gentile.  How would she presume to teach the great rabbi of the day?  Perhaps Jesus broke his own stereotypes to hear wisdom from such a source.  The anecdote shows how Jesus learned by submitting to wisdom from wherever it came.

One of the great parables about teaching and learning is the Parable of the Sower.  It concludes with the best conditions of teaching and learning: “But what was sown on the good soil is the man who hears the word and understands it. He produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown”(Matt 13:23).  We can learn much about learning from this conclusion.

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Short-Timers

When I taught high school, I was allowed into a Friday afternoon club called “the short-timers,” so named because these men (sic) who frequented local taverns together at the end of the work week, were within 2-3 years of retirement.  I was an honorary member, since I had no more than eight years of teaching behind me, while these gentlemen had taught at least 25 years apiece.  They were slightly jaded, but every one of them cared about the students they taught, even in a brusque way.

I continued my high school teaching career for a total of twenty years, during which I earned my Ph.D. and went on to teach teachers at a public university.  Twenty years later I am still learning to teach by teaching teachers. It is a profession that rewards a lifetime of practice and study.

I am disturbed by the article in the New York Times (Tuesday, August 28) “At Charter Schools, Short Careers by Choice” by Mokoto Rich, because it implies that the new trajectory for a teaching career is 5-7 years. From my experience that upper limit represents the flowering of a teacher’s skills, so such “short-timers” would  be leaving the profession at the height of their development. To say, as KIPP director Wendy Kopp  claims, that “The strongest schools develop their teachers tremendously so they become great in the classroom even in their first and second years ” is to severely limit what it means to teach.  In 1-2 years you can learn about as much as an accomplished substitute teacher: how to engage students’ attention, how to manage discipline, how to execute a lesson plan, how to assess a unit, and how to talk to parents.  This is not to underestimate what an experienced substitute teacher can become, should he or she remain for the long haul, but KIPP and Teach for America are only interested in the short haul.

If you think teaching amounts to mastering a few routines, you do not  understand the depth of teaching.  Only after the first two years  of teaching do you really learn how one student differs from another in needs and capability, how to bring disengaged students back into the class, how to deal with chronically absent students, how to uncover hidden strengths, how to nurture independence and group inter-dependence, how and what to re-teach, how to challenge your own stereotypes and so on.  Those who claim to have mastered these skills in two years are deluding themselves about the complexity teaching.

Instilling the “habits of mind”  is another late-developing skill.  Although teacher educators emphasize the so-called “critical” and “meta-cognitive” strategies in their pre-service classes, there is only so much about these habits you can internalize without watching students trying to operate without them.  To truly get the meaning of “habits of mind” you need to see what happens in their absence, what is happening in many, if not most, high school classrooms today. This is usually a late-developing awareness for both teachers and students.  To be honest, my own understanding of the significance of these habits came during my eighth and ninth years of teaching English.  I knew the importance of “habits of mind,” but I didn’t recognize how much they enabled or disabled students until then. I was admittedly a late-bloomer in teaching.

When teaching is compacted into the mechanics of selling a prefabricated curriculum and grading the products, it may be mastered in 1-2 years, but this is not what we once considered a “master teacher.”  Masterful teaching is about building trust and grading on successive approximation.  It is about dealing with resistance of all kinds, in students, in colleagues, in administrators.  It is about negotiating with principals and parents about what may be taught in your class and who may be given an alternative book to read or assigned a writing consultant to increase feedback.  It is about relationships, fragile and durable.  You can teach for thirty years and not understand it all.

We are making a virtue of necessity by claiming that teaching is a technical profession and teachers are easily replaced.  Today teachers are burning out early from the unwieldy size of classes, from the pressure to raise test scores, from micro-managed, scripted and lockstep curricula, from the reduction of services to students with learning, language and behavioral constraints.  Because teachers are treated like replaceable parts, they feel utterly dispensable.  They lose hope during the second and third years, just when they should be developing more confidence, so they pass through a revolving door among disillusioned novices.

Will we ever again see “short-timers” like my erstwhile colleagues, who made a career of nurturing the full diversity of students? Teachers who could reflectively read a new class through the eyes of experience? Teachers who saw behind the bluster or feigned helplessness to the latent ability? Teachers who recognized the difference between arrogance and aptitude?  Teachers like my veteran colleagues who had faced up to a succession of challenging students their whole lives?

No, the vintage teacher is becoming the freeze-dried technician.  The whole profession is now regarded as an entry-level experience for young intellectuals with a higher calling, either in school administration or a more “respectable” career.  The recognition of partial learning and the flexibility of alternative strategies are being lost to one-size-fits-all linear instruction.  What can be learned in the latter half of a decade of teaching is being lost to the ages.

In the future when we refer to the “short-timers,”  we will know the depth, as well as the length, of their careers.

 

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Government by the Menacing

Yesterday the New York Times noted that the vacationing men and women of Congress were holding fewer Town Hall Meetings to get the pulse of the people. Maybe it’s because the people are not well represented at these meetings. Increasingly the meetings are dominated by ruthless and menacing citizens zeroing in on a volatile issue like immigration or health care reform or the current anti-abortion legislation. The discourse on these issues has degenerated to threat and indignation with the intent to intimidate rather than inform.

Admittedly I have not attended such forums, and the media reports mostly on the sensational episodes of the Town Hall. But I am not likely attend as long as the occasion is hijacked by fanatical groups hoping to scare the wits out of their representative with the message that moderation will be summarily punished at the polls in 2014.  And apparently our legislators have reached the same conclusion about Town Hall Meetings.

I don’t blame them.  Our legislators and I would like to believe they vote their conscience or at least the will of their district in the Halls of Congress. If they have been bullied into concessions by our most strident citizens or at least intimidated enough to vote only with their Party, they give up their independence and their conscience.  They become the lackeys of an outraged minority.

Most Congressional representatives will declare they are independent and unswayed by threats, but their lockstep voting with their Party and their 38 symbolic votes against Affordable Care indicate a certain suppleness in the spine.  There are few courageous votes like those few who defied their Party to vote in favor of background checks for gun owners.  In the House of Representatives there is hardly any legislation at all.

Washington is awash in currents of power, so there are multiple causes of the failure to legislate. But the uncivil interests of all stripes, from nativists to abortion rights radicals, can take some credit for the inertia, the sabotage of deliberation in Congress.  Every vote has become fraught with risk.

To those who rule by the volume of their demands or threaten by criminalizing compromise, I would like to say, “Shut up!”  But I won’t, because that would be uncivil.

But I would like to speak for the civil voices, who manage to express their political will by collecting signatures or writing a blog or peacefully protesting or with restrained debate.  We are not intimidated by the volume of your campaign or the fire in your threats.  We are not moved by your stubbornness and unwillingness to listen.  We are not backing down in the face of your apoplexy. We are going to write and speak and vote our consciences as if you were mere static in the air waves.

And the government of the most vocal, by the most ruthless and for the most menacing shall perish from the earth.

 

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Defy the American Jihad!

All the loose talk about shutting down the government this fall gets some politicians and voters excited, because they are convinced that the federal government is an absolute evil, and that programs that help the poor, such as Food Stamps and Affordable Health Care, are targeting their hard-earned savings.  You might say it is the flowering of conservatism in America, but you might as easily say it is an attempted coup of the will of the majority. Some might even call it “jihad.”

We have come to a strange turn in American history, when those aspiring to the highest offices in Washington are campaigning to destroy it.  It has become a popular theme in some parts of the country, but it has crossed the border of healthy argument to sinister subversion.  If the leaders of this movement had Arab or Russian surnames, people might be whispering about “propaganda” or “terror,” but with names like “Cruz” and “Rand” and “Rubio”  and “Boehner” we have given them a pass and called them “patriots.”

As Gail Collins pointed out in her Thursday column (“Politics of a Screeching Halt,” N.Y. Times, August 1, 2013), the three loudest naysayers are relative novices in Congress, but they have discovered the fastest route to power is declaiming against most of the legislation on the floor and some legislation that has long since passed (the Affordable Care Act).  They have discovered that they can make it impossible for the party in power to govern and subsequently campaign on the claim that nothing has been accomplished.  For lack of stimulus, the economy will falter, and for lack of implementation, the Affordable Care Act will not reach expectations in 2014 and 2016.

The strategy of sabotage did not work in 2012 and it will not work again in 2016, but in the meantime it is undermining the economy and the struggling middle class.  While larger numbers of the unemployed and the underemployed fall below the poverty line, the right-wing demolition crew  fire-bombs the programs that could save them. It is a national tragedy that “Immoderates” are able to control the flow of legislation in Congress without a majority mandate.

The silent majority of Congress needs to step up before the fall rendezvous with government shutdown. Regardless of all political differences there ought to be a hidden consensus that government should act and pass legislation, because the majority of Americans believe this.  To allow a few vocal saboteurs to control the flow of legislation and its economic consequences is a sign of moral apathy.  Above all, this moral apathy is what stirs Americans to give Congress its lowest favorable rating in history. That apathy must be challenged.

We have already seen p0liticians break ranks over issues like immigration and privacy.  It would be more noble yet to break ranks over the integrity of government. Already there has been dissension in the Republican Party about the Draconian budget-cutting measures placed on the House floor.  Before the federal government is brought to its knees again by fiscal hostage-takers, the conscience of Congress needs to stir and take a stand.  It would send a message to our friends and foes alike that America still has an active core and a heart for the majority of its citizens. It would revive our pride in democracy.

Before another budget is taken hostage or another vote against the Affordable Care Act is perpetrated, the coalition of the reasonable must step up!  If there is a conscience still alive on Capitol Hill, let it speak against the few who wage sabotage and destruction.  Death to unprincipled legislating!  Death to obstructionism and opportunism!  Death to the American jihad!!