Frank Thoms, Teacher in the Rye

I have thought a lot about how we choose our paths in life. Some say we are predestined, others say it’s by chance, and still others say we are called. I fall into the last category. Perhaps it’s hindsight, but other than briefly considering the ministry becoming a teacher was always there.

“Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path,” writes James Hillman.  “You may remember this ‘something’ as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a particular turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am…

Robert Kegan writes in his seminal book, The Evolving Self,

The greatest inequalities in education are not between schools…but within them; greater than the inequalities of social class or achievement test scores is the unequal capacity of students to interest others in them––a phenomenon not reducible to social class or intelligence, and which seems to be the more powerful determinant of future thriving.

Teachers can recall students who seemed to have been hiding from them, those who have “the unequal capacity…to interest others in them?” They may well remember in the first days of school that they discovered a student she hadn’t ‘seen.’ He slipped through the cracks.…

Carol Dweck, a respected educator, writes, “for twenty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value.”

She contrasts two mindsets people can have:

The first, “believing that your qualities are carved in stone––the fixed mindset––creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over… There’s another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you’re dealt with and have to live with…This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts.”

Wisdom can come from anywhere. We often think that it takes years. Yet, we can be surprised. Molly Ness, a first-year teacher offered her wisdom seemingly well beyond her years.

I have learned that children are unbelievably resilient. My students have been handed immeasurable challenges and have tackled them with the courage, grace, and strength that many adults fail to demonstrate.

I have learned how to make personal sacrifices for the greater good.

I have learned that it is easy to be idealistic in thoughts and words, but much harder to keep that idealism alive in actions every day.

I have realized that not enough people in our society today devote their lives, their energies, and their souls to making this world a little better than they found it.

And…

In the mid-nineties, at Central Park East Secondary School, Debbie Meier and her faculty developed five habits of mind that became the heart of their curriculum across the school and the basis for judging student performance; they were posted in classrooms.

• Questions about evidence, or “How do we know what we know?”
• The question of viewpoint in all its multiplicity, or “Who is speaking?”
• The search for connections and patterns, or “What causes what?”
• Supposition, or “How might things have been different?”
• Why any of it matters, or “Who cares?”

What if these five habits of mind were posted in every classroom in every school across the country? What if…

When Benjamin Zander was teaching at the New England Conservatory of Music, his students insisted on playing perfectly whenever he was present. He became frustrated with their dog-and-pony shows, which they were doing in order to get their A. Zander wanted to breakdown this grade barrier and become free to teach.

He missed being their teacher, because his grading system focused on performance, his students played perfectly whenever he was present. He decided to ask them to write a letter to him in the past tense dated at the end of the term to explain how they earned their A.

Twenty-five years ago, teacher Suzanne Rubinstein wrote an insightful look at the life of her students. "These days, too many of my students come to me without the stability symbolized by the family dinner. Was it different 10 years ago? I think it was.…They came into my classroom better able to concentrate on the practical learning tasks, their minds free of the weight that loneliness and insecurity impose. She continues…

Haim Ginott, a teacher and writer, wrote, “I have come to a frightening conclusion I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather.”

Anyone who’s been a teacher or one in charge of children at any age, understands this. Regardless of expectations from authorities and supervisors, when a teacher closes her door it is her domain. In Ginott’s words, she can say to herself. I possesses “tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal.”

Joseph Featherstone, the keynote speaker at a conference in the early 70s, stated that “good teaching is the art of creating the content of a thoughtful conversation.” He connected teaching with creating, on having the meaning of what is being taught emerge through thoughtful conversation. As a colleague said, conversation admits to the past, the future and the present. It means speaking with the intent of listening and listening with the intent of speaking.

In one of my earliest posts, I wrote passionately about my love for democracy. The threats in recent times have awakened me to how precious our two-hundred-forty-nine years have been. Our nation has withstood threats throughout our history, but what we are experiencing is new to most of us. For the young, it has been their whole experience.

I am repeating this post, which speaks directly to my concern. The final paragraph addresses what teachers can do in their classrooms. If students emerge from their public school education as citizens of character, teachers will have done their part in this time of crisis:

In a recent conversation with friends at breakfast, we remarked how valuable being together face to face is. Having long advocated in my writings for classrooms as face-to-face opportunities for students without phones, I found myself paying close attention to our comments in ways I’d not thought about. I recalled our meetings on Zoom during the pandemic. I now realize that our face-to-face conversations mean more than simply being in a room with one another.

Something happens when we are in the presence of others.…

In the late 70s, I was dismissed from teaching in an open-classroom format where I taught all subjects to middle schoolers for seven years. I was assigned to teach social studies in a team with math, science, and language arts teachers. I quickly discovered that I could continue to use my gifts to strengthen my teaching, generate complex topics, take risks, engender serious conversations, ask for the best from my students, and enable them to have choice. And as I wrote in my journal at the time, “Teaching as conversation, where each person––teacher and student––is heard, respected, and cared for.…

Societies evolve. No way not to. Sometimes when discussing my concerns about the isolation phone that screen time causes in the lives of today’s children, I find myself lauding the freedom of my childhood. And I think about having opportunity to give that freedom to them. “Here, go out and play. Get on your bikes and ride to the park. Stop at the drug store and get a coke or an ice cream cone…”

I loved my childhood. My friends and I gathered to play baseball, football, guns, red-rover-red-rover-come-over, hide and seek, et al. at different places in town.

It’s not about responding to dance cards.

The more teachers teach to the dance cards of others, the more they will feel off balance. When they have to look over their shoulder to see who’s watching, they hesitate to act, hesitate to be themselves. The path to teaching from their own rhythm requires attention and persistence. Closing their door, stepping away from the front of the room, actually and metaphorically, is a good first step.

This is the last paragraph of my upcoming memoir, Teacher in the Rye: Doing It My Way. It speaks emphatically to the essentials of effective teaching. 

August 6, 1945. Hiroshima. Toshiro Makatsu, a blind man, who on August 6^th would be 89 at exactly 8:30 am. Noah, one of my students in the mid-80s, wrote in his poignant story of Toshiro.

Toshiro left his kitchen and moved to a shady bench in his garden, no sooner had he sat down than a great invisible force picked him up and tossed him with the rubble of his tiny house, back into the garden. It was 8:15 am. Fifteen minutes before his 89th birthday, Toshiro Makatsu passed into history as a statistic, merely one of the 100,000 people who died with him in the same instant.

Have you ever considered stepping away from your curriculum, from routines, procedures, daily lesson plans? If you have a self-contained classroom you could take time off for a day or part of a day; if you teach in a schedule of class periods, you could step away for a period or two. Time off, no lesson goals, where you and your students can ‘just be.’

In the early 70s, nearly all my students had seen the movie of the moment, “The Sting,” and were buzzing about it.

In a classroom that has work areas that children can choose from, I learned early on that each station had to be an invitation. Each one took place of a teacher giving directions from the front of the room. Each indicated possibilities for responses. Some examples: the drama area had props suggesting ideas for plays, the math area had books and apparatuses, the reading area books from which to choose, and the science area with instruments including a microscope and suggested activities. And something wonderful happened in the clay area.

We live in a school culture run by the ringing of bells in hallways, the maitre’d of the school day. Whatever is happening in a class, it ends abruptly even if the teacher is speaking. The bell, a trigger to terminate, to end, to leave, no matter what was occurring in the moments before.

But I was fortunate to teach without bells…

When I returned to New Hampshire from teaching in Oxfordshire, England, I found an opportunity to continue with my newfound progressive practices. I was hired to teach in a self-contained room with fifth graders, because the grade had a surprising overflow of students for its four-person team.

I would be responsible for all subjects except French and band. I prepared my room with work areas for science, math, writing, painting, calligraphy, and clay, et al. Tables replaced desks. A tan rug on the floor in a corner, where all of us will meet and where children could read.

In the early 70s when teaching in a progressive school in Oxfordshire, England, I discovered the joy and power of reading aloud to my 7-to-10-year-olds. It was common practice in the county but new to me. One of my early choices was to read Russell Hoban’s, The Mouse and His Child (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). I read it aloud near the end of every day. It was a remarkable time, invoking curiosity, listening, and commentary.