Several years ago I was nominated for a teaching award. The application required several long essays about your personal philosophy of teaching. I had applied a few times before and I was not looking forward to the work. I put it off until literally the last moment. So on New Years Eve of 2006 I rang in the new year by writing these answers for the application. I had intended to just get it done so that I could honestly tell the student who nominated me that I did it.
Sometimes you capture the ideas that you are trying to put on paper in exactly the right way. I love it when that happens.
14. Who was your best teacher? Why was that teacher outstanding? How has your teaching been affected by that teacher?
This is the fourth time that I have been nominated for a Golden Apple Award in my career. Each time has been an honor, but each time I complete an application I finish this question last and spend more time thinking about it than all of the others combined.
The reason for this is that I never really had a feeling of connection with a teacher.
In the past I have shared some moments that I remember from teachers who made an impact on me. I remember Ms. Hamblin’s kindness and I wish that I could tell her what it meant to me at the time. I remember how Mr. Neiweem handled the day after a friend and classmate was killed in a car accident. I wish I was able to tell him about that before he passed away last year. I remember a lot of moments from different teachers. But the truth is I never really had that kind of relationship with a teacher.
I know that I am likely the reason for this. I know that I kept teachers at a distance and avoided telling them all of the reasons that I was struggling in school. I know that I pushed aside their efforts to reach out to me mainly because I was too proud to admit that I had anything wrong or that bothered me.
Yet I write this because it has affected me deeply. I want to be the kind of teacher who leaves an impression with his students. I want to be remembered for teaching them something essential, but also for teaching them about life and our changing world. I want to teach them how to figure out the truth from all of the different and conflicting messages that they are being bombarded with. Mostly I want to reach them. I want to reach past their distractions. I want to be the teacher that won’t be fooled by a well crafted outer appearance, who gets to the heart of a person and then helps them to learn about the world.
I want their heads to explode with the things that I teach them about the world and how it works while showing them how to have a better life. I want them to have my lesson on their minds hours after class is over. I want to celebrate with them when they succeed and I want to help them when they hurt.
In this way, my teaching has been affected by what I didn’t have. I have tried to become the teacher I wish I had.
14. Part II- What are the most important competencies for the children you teach to achieve? How do you help your students master them? Paint us a picture in words of what goes on in your classroom.
A student who walks out of my class is going to be mulling over a burning question, a question that compels them to seek out information for themselves and learn. Then they need to think independently and critically about what they learn. That is essentially what all education is about. I teach them how to gather information and reflect upon it.
All other competencies they may need are a subset of this goal. If they can’t read or lack another essential skill, it prevents them from gathering information. If they are distracted, it prevents them from gathering information. If they have a learning disability, prevents them from gathering information. If they are bored, it prevents them from having the desire to gather information in the first place.
I could easily list a thousand skills that I have found my students in need of. It is overwhelming to me the number of things that I need to be teaching them and giving to them and addressing with them. So in order to simplify how I look at my work I have boiled down what I do to one simple focus: What do they need in order to be able to learn? Then I teach them that.
My Collaborative United States History classes are made up of Special Education students as well as regular Education students. In these classes I have students who have behavioral disorders, emotional problems and other challenges in the same room with students who have scored in the low thirties on their ACT. My alternative high school classes have students who are just out of rehab, some who live in their cars and others who are in their late 30’s and 40’s. They are so different and have such different needs that I just do whatever I can to get them past their distractions and teach them how to learn.
If you were to come into my classroom you would see me soothing their anger, drying their tears and patting them on the back. You would also see me teaching some how to read, giving others an idea of what else they could read to push themselves farther, or tutoring them about how to take tests. Whatever it takes.
But what I am really most proud of in my classroom is that if you came in you would see us laugh and joke around. You would see us play. You would see us sing or yell. You would see them smiling as often as possible. This is because the idea that learning is a solemn, solitary act of drudgery is ludicrous.
I try to blow their minds every day.
14. Part III- Describe your planning process. What are the critical factors you take into consideration when planning your lessons?
My planning process usually begins late at night because I am an insomniac and I stay up late into the night putting the pieces of the lesson together. But it starts by asking myself “What do I want them to know?” I look at the State Standards and what academic skills I want them to develop and then I fit that together with the content. I think this is standard for most teachers, though, and is important.
Whatever you teach has to mean something to them or you shouldn’t teach it.
More important however is how the content and skills are presented and put into context for the students. This is when I ask myself, “How can I make these things valid and meaningful for my students.” The lesson has to resonate with what they know about the world and what they are experiencing today in order to take root in their minds. I try to give the lesson an urgency in their life that will make it necessary to them. A lesson about Chester Arthur is meaningless unless you do this. Be honest, what do you remember about Chester Arthur? Exactly! But Chester Arthur was a friend of Teddy Roosevelt and both felt that the other betrayed a friendship. Their personal fight changed America
In time, my classes will start trying to guess how I am going to connect the lesson to their lives. It is sort of a game that we play, but it is really them learning to make their own connections without me playing a hand in it. I have gained some of the most useful information I possess by listening to the ways that they connect the information to their lives.
At the core of teaching today is the need to know who you are teaching. Who is in the seats in front of you? I don’t mean their names and their faces, or even what year they are in school. I want to know what their goals are and what keeps them up at night so that I can provide them with options and ways of achieving a solution or making their dreams real. So a large part of planning my lessons involves gathering and then using what I have gathered.
14. Part IV- What do you see as the single greatest impediment to your influencing the development of the children in the classroom? What do you do to overcome it?
The greatest difficulty to overcome in teaching is how effective the world is at grabbing everyone’s attention today. Advertising is intelligent and flashy. The media target markets to particular groups. TV shows are racy and compelling. The internet is teeming with exciting things to do and see. It is all so endless. You can’t finish it. Cell phones, laptops and I-pods allow people to carry all of that with them where ever they go. So when we are in class the internet, music and movies are right there in their bags and purses. Their friends and families are within arms reach.
In order to wrench their attention away from their lives for an hour we need to be powerful enough to compete with their I-pods and phones. We are not just hoping that they go home, turn off the TV and do their homework. We are hoping they turn it off in class. We have to push ourselves to be more necessary than the media is. We have to get their attention and show them that we are going to teach them something compelling and necessary every day.
We can be better teachers and we can be more effective by setting the bar higher for ourselves. We don’t just need to teach a sound lesson. We need to market it to them. We need to know their needs and show them how what we have is the answer to their life’s problems. But even more so, we need to make sure that it really is the answer to their problems. That can be hard but we can do it.
We can teach them about the media today and how it works. We can dissect popular culture. Ultimately we can show them how the forces all around them effect them and play a role in their lives so that they can operate autonomously in a society hell bent on influencing them in everyway possible.
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