Coffee,+Compassion,+and+the+Classroom+Teacher+10-24-08

October 24, 2008

**Coffee, Compassion, and the Classroom Teacher**

When I taught high school I collected kids. I always had extra students in my room—students who had study hall or who were trying to cut a class. Students who didn’t have class with me till later, students who had already had my class, even students who weren’t mine. Their boyfriend, girlfriend, best friend, or older sibling had me, or did once. These kids would sit at the tables at the front of my room or in an extra desk. They might do homework or surf the internet on my laptop. Sometimes they’d even participate, if they’d had the course before, or were an advanced student hanging out in a remedial class. I had one girl who liked to come to a remedial section of American Literature whenever we read plays. She’d take a part and really act, so as to provoke the students to take the play seriously and enjoy themselves.

I had loose rules in class. I never wrote lav passes. The bathroom was across the hall, and I would tell the students at the beginning of the year that if they had to go to the bathroom they were to just go. If I ever caught someone wandering the halls instead of going to the lav like they were supposed to, then I would revoke the privilege of having freedom of movement, but otherwise I didn’t need them to tell me they had to go pee. It seemed infantilizing. I was equally loose about tardiness. I’d speak to a kid if he or she was really late or late all the time, but otherwise I never kept track. I hated the bell system as much as the kids did. During passing time I was always chatting in the hallways with colleagues or students I knew, getting a cup of coffee from the cafeteria, using the lav myself. Class always started pretty much on time. Writing kids up for being thirty seconds late just seemed like sweating the small stuff, a recipe for burnout.

And I loved to decorate my room. I had prints and posters everywhere—Van Gogh, Monet, Klimt, Kandinsky, Rivera, Picasso, Waterhouse, Pollock. I could never understand colleagues who left their walls blank. I know it’s difficult if you don’t have your own classroom, but I always felt that staring at white walls for ten months was like being in an asylum. I get frustrated with that now that I am at the university. Only the graduate seminar rooms have things on the walls. All the undergraduate classrooms are bare as bone.

So I got to thinking about all this last night after attending a conference at the [|Connecticut Writing Project at Fairfield University] yesterday evening. The featured guest was [|Jeff Wilhelm], author of //[|You Gotta BE the Book]// and //[|Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys]//. I saw him about a decade ago at a New England Writing Projects convention in [|Vermont], and he was great, really dynamic. So I wanted to see him again, even though it meant driving from [|Storrs] to [|Fairfield] on a weeknight after a full day of work. Coffee, coffee, coffee. That’s my big secret to success.

Anyway, Jeff was conducting a workshop based on the research he conducted back in 2002 for //Chevys//. It mostly dealt with engaging male students. His findings were compelling, and one thing that stood out for me was what Jeff called The Social Contract of Teaching. He said that this was a tangential finding, something based on a pattern picked up by the computer program they used. The program was designed to find patterns based on recurring words and phrases. The pattern it found that surprised everyone had to do with social relationships between the students and teachers. Time and again, the boys being interviewed used phrases like “get to know me,” “care about me,” “care about my interests,” and “help me.” There were also many patterns of words dealing with the competence and passion teachers exhibited about their subject matter. So Jeff conducted follow-up interviews on these issues, and he concluded that boys will at least try in classes where the teachers take the time to get to know the students personally, where the teachers behave in ways that indicate concern for the students’ lives and interests, where teachers make the effort to provide assistance that goes beyond instruction, and where teachers demonstrate genuine competence in and passion for their subject, commensurate with the competence and passion the boys feel for things like sports.

From there, Jeff began to look for these behaviors in the teachers he was observing, and he found both competent, passionate, hardworking teachers who had relative success despite a complete lack of personal interest in the students, and many teachers who were terrible teachers, incompetent, lazy, and completely lacking passion for their subject, who loved the kids and were infinitely kind to them and interested in them, and the students loved them so much they gave them a pass on their incompetence. But the teachers who had the most success were the competent, passionate, hardworking teachers who showed genuine interest in the personal lives of their students. The most recalcitrant boys would do anything for these teachers.

Anyway, I thought about this the whole long drive home. Of course it’s self-evident when you think about it. But in all the training we do, teaching future teachers pedagogical methods and literary content, conducting professional development on site and in districts, mostly aimed at raising test scores, where is that personal element? Is it taught? I’m afraid not. Too touchy feely, too susceptible to lawsuit—or at least a poor observation from an administrator. I tell my teachers-to-be that the most difficult thing to learn as a teacher is how to work within the institution without becoming institutionalized, to learn to adhere to all the rules without becoming a machine or a despot. Try coming up with a standardized test to measure that!

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