First Day of School

In July, as I was mulling over the barren stretch of time between the end of my summer school courses and the start of fall classes, I wondered if it would ever be possible to enter a school at the start of the year and watch everything from a teacher's perspective.

I wanted to see the first day of school, and the days before, when the halls were quieter but the classrooms no less busy as teachers prepared.

Amazingly, I got my wish. I was offered the opportunity to be an interim teacher for the first week-and-a-half at a local elementary school. I was able to sit in on in-service sessions, data meetings, planning sessions of all stripes, and even had the chance to set up the classroom for the teacher (out on medical leave).

It was exhilarating and exhausting, in equal measures. I unpacked boxes, tried to think about systems and supplies placement as a teacher would, brainstormed math games, listened to veteran teachers make their reading intervention plans, made some new friends, listened as administrators explained and developed procedures, and saw firsthand how much effort is expended in the 72 hours before the classroom door opens.

And then, the classroom door opened.

I found myself thrown into the deep end of classroom management without swimming lessons. My training hadn’t encompassed that yet, so I was following others’ suggestions and going with my gut instincts. I failed miserably and I succeeded admirably.

The students listened to me as I taught a brilliant social studies lesson incorporating the Civil War, Annie Oakley, a lesson on measurement skills as we determined how long the hallway was (90 feet: the distance Annie could shoot a playing card edge-wise!), and even a splash of the arts as we watched a portion of Annie, Get Your Gun.

The students ignored me as I reviewed the four types of sentences.

The students interacted with me as we talked about Woodstock, the dangers of drug use and the neighborhoods they come from.

The students disobeyed me as we learned how to walk the school hallways quietly.

I was alternately competent and disastrously incompetent. I sweated for hours on a day’s lessons, only to watch it implode because of my classroom management deficiencies.

But I also had shining moments when a student showed me a pithy sentence explaining the character of Homily in The Borrowers: she’d listened and learned and thought it through.

How many teachers get to practice being a first-year teacher? Not many, I don’t think. When I do my student teaching, or internship as it’s called on the graduate level, I’ll get to observe and act within a classroom, but it’ll be in the middle of a semester.

I have been given an amazing chance to rehearse something scary that I’ll have to do later. What great preparation…and how very much I have to learn in a graduate classroom before I learn by doing in my own classroom, on my second first day of school.

The Development of Superman

Eight-year-old boy, bath towel and safety pin, old stump: prescription for flight. If only I'd been born on Krypton. Superman never had to pretend; he was the guy that all of us superhero-wannabes wannabe.

But even Superman started out as Superboy, growing up and developing a sense of identity and responsibility. This week, as part of a Learning and Teaching class, my group took a look at the various stages of emotional and moral development that all children go through. Different rates, yes, but identical stages. We decided to apply these to Superman for a creative project. 

He is invulnerable and can fly, burn with his vision and freeze with his breath, lift cars and see through walls...but as it turns out, Superman is just like me. And you.

He came to a sense of himself, obeyed rules for others' sake, then chose to obey them for his own sake, then developed a moral code that he chooses to stick to. 

Oh, and hey. We both wear glasses and were journalists. All part of the process.

These are the stages of moral development as put forth by Lawrence Kohlberg. Our group also tackled the eight stages of development according to Erik Erikson:

The Way We Were

In my Teaching Science class, we've been considering the value of an inquiry-based classroom, one in which questions aren't simply asked and answered, and we're finished, thanks very much, have a good day. 

A teacher has to find out what a student already knows (assessing prior knowledge) and build on that, and the way to do this is to ask questions and not immediately supply the answers. 

A lecture or a classroom talk is not the same as a textbook, but today I found a science text that demonstrates how not to do this. 

This is a page from a 1961 text, book three in the ABC Science series. What if a teacher asked the questions on this page and then answered them as the book does? A student has no time for conjecture. 

"How do plants get the oxygen they need?" Silence. Imagine the answers. "By eating dirt." "The air." "It breathes." 

A teacher could hear the misconceptions and steer the conversation. "Eating dirt is an interesting idea. Can you tell me more about that?"

Eventually the discussion covers processes the plant uses to survive, but meanwhile the student has learned to think, to guess, to feel it's acceptable not to know, and to collaborate. And eventually, s/he knows how a plant gets oxygen. 

A science textbook probably shouldn't contain only questions for conjecture. I'm not saying this book is a failure. 

But teachers shouldn't teach like a book. What teachers need is to have less information freely dispensed, and more questions that leave everybody in the room a bit hungrier to find answers for themselves. 

Orion

Each year in winter, I receive a visitor. He's a rather flashy dresser, best known for his jeweled belt, which he wears everywhere. It easily catches my eye every time I see him. Three sparkling beacons, and I know he's there. His name is Orion, and he's a hunter, which is odd for a guy who has such a distinctive sense of fashion.

Orion is, of course, a constellation...stars hanging in space with no relationship to each other except the connections which my eye provides. From where I stand, breath hanging in the cold air, there's the belt...then his body, arm raised, warding off a wild animal or aiming a bow or wielding a shield, depending on the lore I read. 

Orion doesn't move or change, or at least he hasn't in my lifetime. He's predictable and consistent and obvious. He's a given, a known quantity. I can take him for granted. 
Or can I?

I'm a new graduate student, leaving behind two other careers to train for a third. I want to be a teacher, an expander of minds, an introducer of new things. But if I'm going to teach, first I have to learn, and then I'll learn again through teaching. And before I can learn, I need to unlearn. 

So, the first step is admitting that Orion isn't Orion. 

Orion is a collection of individual gassy flames, long distances from each other and my eyes. Because I see the sky as flat, the stars that make up his skeleton appear as bright dots on black velvet, arranged conveniently for my brain to recognize. 

But if I could leave Earth and travel to a point 90 degrees away from my current vantage point, I would no longer see Orion's belt, or Orion himself. Oh, the stars would still be there, but the three in a row that make up that beautiful belt would be scattered, because they're not lined up beside each other. 

Maybe I would see new constellations. Is one of Orion's belt stars now the ear of a fox? Maybe the tip of his bow becomes the foot of a satyr. Perhaps his stars, appearing together on a flat sky for me, are actually so far apart they're not even visible together in someone else's sky.

I have to say goodbye to what I know now in order to see something new. I have to unlearn to learn. 

Science, I think, is like this. We know lots of facts. We know there are facts we don't know. And we know things we don't realize we know.

But that fourth quadrant...that's the biggie. We don't know what we don't know. We don't know how much there is that we don't know. That's why we explore and change and correct and re-guess and give up and try again. Because there's so much we don't know. 

And it's the same with history. Dates, places, people...yes. Understanding why...no. 

Math: so much unknown beyond so much known. 

Music: a finite number of notes yielding an infinite number of patterns and new sounds. 

So many subjects to unlearn, and learn, and teach, and learn again. 

Let's get started.