A Teaching Life

In my last post, Letter to administrators, I received an email from Tom. He wrote, “Amen. Schools should be run like hospitals. Hospital administrators oversee the building and develop general policy. They do not dictate surgical procedures.” In one sentence, Tom captured the heart of my post. Teachers are caught up in a hierarchical web that has been the foundation of public education since the earliest 20^th century.

So how did Tom’s ‘hierarchical web” begin? I wrote in my book, Conversation Classrooms: A Profound Shift from Delivery of Information to Partnership (Rowman & Littlefiled, 2024): “Perhaps, from a conspiracy theory point-of-view…(I am going take up a lot of space to clarify. Stay with me.)

I was a classroom teacher for forty years and worked for an educational consulting firm for twelve. I worked with administrators through those years. Some were allies for my endeavors, others impediments insisting I do their bidding. Like most teachers in middle and high school, I was “trained” to teach from the front of the room, responsible for the flow of my lessons, which I prepared with set outcomes.

In my first year, the principal had me select textbooks for my ninth-grade European history and expected me to take charge of my four classes. He seemed to trust me. For my one senior section, my department head asked if he could co-teach with me, “because they were a rough bunch.” We taught that class his way with no input from the principal.
 

Angela Lee Duckworth recalled Walter Michel’s infamous experiment in the 60s, the “Marshmallow Test,” a study of self-control and delayed gratification where children choose between getting one immediate marshmallow or two marshmallows if they wait. Evidence from the marshmallow test lingers, now more than fifty years. Its research contends that to lead a happy and productive life depends upon being able to delay gratification, exhibit self-control, embrace challenges, and remain cool under pressure. Delaying gratification in the classroom, Duckworth contends, is a better predictor of academic performance than IQ.

We live in a fast-paced culture. We are compelled to keep up and move on to the next thing before we digest what’s before us.

Willem de Kooning wrote about fishermen who “throw in a line to see if they can catch a fish. Most of the time, they never do. I know they don’t care, because it’s like make-believe. Except, the fisherman has to believe he might catch one. So he has to do his best, otherwise it doesn’t count.”

Is this the plight of the classroom teacher? All of us in the business of “catching?” Are we engaging in “make believe?”

In her extraordinary book, Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth, and Everyday Magic, Martha Beck recounts when on one of her endless runs, she saw “something glinting in the grass…It lay there in the emerald grass like a tiny, rosy, translucent Easter egg.” But when she stopped to pick it up, it “was nothing more than a chunk of Styrofoam,” disgusted that she was “holding a piece of pollution.”

Recognizing her cognitive prejudice, labeling the same object first one way and then another, she decided when serving at a college’s dining hall not to invoke judgments of students, “to resist assigning labels to my classmates as they filed through the dinner line."

A guest speaker stood before a group of high-powered business student over-achievers and said, “Okay, time for a quiz.” He pulled out a one-gallon, wide-mouthed mason jar and set it on a table. He produced about a dozen fist-sized rocks and placed them, one at a time, into the jar. When the jar was filled and no more rocks would fit, he asked, “Is this jar full?”

So began a lecture popularized by Stephen R. Covey. The students in the lecture hall answered, “Yes!” Given that he just began his lecture, it was obvious that Covey had more to suggest.

Emily Perl Kingsley writes on the website,“Life with Autism,” in which she shares her disappointment when imagining that she's flying to Italy when her plane lands in Holland. Her misadventure is unexpected, in her case the delivery of her Down Syndrome son, Jason.

In Kingsley’s story, the plane landing in Holland becomes a metaphor, not only for its unintended location but also for its unforeseen potential. She comes to understand that “Holland” is not “Italy” any more than a ‘child with disabilities’ is not ‘normal.’

We read “The Guest House” by Rumi, 13^th century Persian poet, and wonder if we can imagine ourselves as being his “this being human…a guest house, every morning a new arrival,” welcoming everyone who comes in, “the dark thought, the shame, the malice meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.” Inviting them––and ourselves––in with joy no matter how we arrive.

We can’t predict who will come into our sphere from one day to the next. And we can’t predict how we will come into our own. Rumi asks us to accept all regardless of how we come, disheveled, happy, forlorn, joyful, confused, sad––and that includes ourselves.

School teachers will never make the history books. Perhaps a few will, like Maria Montessori. But not the rest of us. I’ve often wondered about the meaning of our presence on the planet, those who stay in the classroom for the long haul, twenty-five years or more, some in the same school for their career, teaching every day, 180 days a year (or thereabouts), usually alone with children or students, for a salary that doesn’t make ends meet, now having to live outside the community they teach in often priced out of the housing market.

And most recently being threatened by politicians, angry parents, and oppressive authorities, and likely jaded from the pandemic and its aftermath. On top of all of it are…

Margaret Mead’s famous quotation,

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it’s the only thing that ever has,”

applies more widely than sometimes acknowledged. Jesus and his disciples, the Founding Fathers, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and his compatriots. But also, Adolph Hitler and his generals, the 9/11 Twin Tower terrorists, the Proud Boys and their henchmen. Their ripples resonate. And then there is Florence Reed…

Dorothy Day intrigued me when she wrote,

People say, what is the sense of our small effort. They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that.

Four short sentences, each packed with wisdom. The first, “what is the sense of our small effort” reminds us to pay attention. No one may observe us, but we make the effort anyway. When we think about it, the world is made up of such efforts. It’s what makes the world work.

John Updike in an interview with the Boston Globe said, “Every literate and intelligent person has a crazy belief that you have some exciting news about being alive.” I had not thought of that despite living an active, involved life and engaged in my beloved teaching career. But his pronouncement has stuck with me for the fifteen years since I read his interview.

I was particularly taken with his “your witness to the universe can’t be duplicated, that only you can provide it, and that it’s worth providing.” Sometimes it’s hard to wrap my head around it when I know that I am but one of billions of people on this planet.
 

Timothy Snyder, a premier writer on the threats of authoritarianism, in his Substack Thinking About…“the Strongman Fantasy” (3/17/24, updated), writes about the collapse of schools under a dictator:

Schools collapse anyway, since a dictator only wants myths that justify his power.  Children learn in school to denounce one another. Each coming generation must be more tame and ignorant than the prior one. Time with young children stresses parents. Either your children repeat propaganda and tell you things you know are wrong, or you worry that they will find out what is right and get in trouble.
 

In an article in the Times about AI enabling students to copy AI’s writing for their papers, Clay Shirky wrote, “Contrary to much popular opinion, college is not in the information transfer business; we are in the identity formation business.” Shirky’s insight relates to all educators.

I have argued from my earliest years in the classroom that teaching is about what students learn, not about what teachers deliver. Shirky’s discussion of how AI allows for college students to “transfer” information is a metaphor for classroom teachers whose pedagogy is to deliver, the same transfer process applies. In the delivery classroom, students are to internalize the material and demonstrate retention on tests.

Elissa Ely writes,

In a reality cooking show, during the relay segment each chef was allowed ten minutes to work the recipe before the next chef (who was blindfolded) had to figure out what to do. Their energy was frenetic, except for one older man who appeared immobile in front of his frying pan.

“Gladiators ran past while he stood in his apron. After about a minute of stillness, his face started to glow with a look of comprehension. He understood what he needed to do. Newton’s apple had fallen, and he was in position to receive it. Now, he was ready to cook it.”

Nikos Kazantzakis in Zorba the Greek, awaiting a butterfly to emerge from its cocoon, writes of his impatience. He chose to breathe on it.

I shall never forget my horror when I saw how its wings were folded back and crumpled; the wretched butterfly tried with its whole trembling body to unfold them. Bending over it, I tried to help with my breath. In vain… That little body is, I do believe, the greatest weight I have on my conscience. For I realize today that it is a mortal sin to violate the great laws of nature. We should not hurry, we should not be impatient, but we should obey the eternal rhythm.…

Students coming to school are not remembering yesterday. They arrive at home alone. They forget to do their homework. Much of their lives have been heavily scheduled with little time to play, to explore on their own. All through the day, their smartphones––whether with them or not––await with texts, tweets, Instagram, TikTok, et al. When their phones are on, whether out or in their pocket, their presence is unmoored.

When phones are put away, ours and our children’s, a plethora of possibilities emerge. We connect, look into each others’ eyes, talk and listen to each other, care about each other. We form memories. How do we get there?

Jamie Vollmer, a businessman, who on January 3, 1990, was addressing 290 teachers, principals, bus drivers, aides, custodians, and secretaries. During the Q & A, a teacher asked him, “What do you do with an inferior bunch of blueberries?”

“I send them back,” Vollmer replied.

“That’s right!”––barked the English teacher who asked the question. “We can never send back our blueberries." 

After “10-2” (see the previous post), Mary Budd Rowe offered a second important methodology for the classroom, a compact practice that she named, “Wait Time”: After asking a question teachers are to wait three seconds and wait three seconds after hearing a response. This is in stark contrast to the common practice of teachers waiting less than one second in both instances. When they are able to implement “wait time” student learning improves. Rowe discovered, perhaps surprisingly, disciplinary moves in the classroom decreased. And I imagine that the pacing of lessons becomes more reflective.

Two pedagogies, 10-2 and wait time, two seemingly simple ideas, each improving learning for both teacher and students.
 

What does “10-2” have to do with teaching you ask? I believe it may be the most important classroom methodology for teachers when they want to provide students information. It was formulated by Mary Budd Rowe in 1983, more than forty-five years ago. Yet, teachers for the most part continue to ignore her research.

What is it that they are ignoring, you ask?