Teaching...and learning

This is an interesting article from the NYTimes about the experience of teaching:

September 10, 2006, 10:00 pm
On Thinking About Talking About Teaching

By Bill Evans

It’s like there are two worlds: the world of talking about education and the world of doing it. As a classroom teacher, I live mostly in the second. It’s a human place, filled with kids. It’s noisy and lively, and its basic transactions are emotional and verbal. It is a realm run riot with relationship – experimental, exploratory, expansive, inclusive. And it’s at least a two-way street. To teach my students effectively, I have to understand who they are. I have to listen to them, and not just what they say on the surface; sometimes, I have to be able to listen beneath the surface. I have to be able to hear and act on what my students mean in a given situation and not necessarily get hung up on what they say. And it works the same way on their end. The better they know me, the more they can understand what on earth it is I’m trying to get them to do. If content is The Mystery, then language Points. As a class, we communicate our way to the lesson’s door, and then everybody gets to knock on it.

What I’m trying to say is, there’s something extremely tentative and fluid about the classroom situation. It is never, ever a sure thing. A teacher does his or her best to stack the odds in favor of success, and a consistently high level of success is definitely attainable, but a classroom is not a machine. Learning is essentially a private, almost secret, inner event, and schools are extremely public and social arenas that attempt to facilitate that event’s occurrence. Ideally, the friction between these two realities creates sparks. But learning is stubborn. It happens on its own schedule. It is extremely difficult to understand what one doesn’t understand, to see what one simply cannot see, and that’s the soil that learning sprouts out of, at least initially. But not to get hung up on horticultural metaphors — fortunately, learning is also explosive. Those sparks can do the trick, and do; I’m here to attest to it.

If teaching has taught me anything, it’s that learning happens. I’ve seen it repeatedly. I’ve grown to trust the process, and the longer I teach, the more comfortable I’ve become with the fact that I, as teacher, don’t seem to be in charge of this process at all. I am much more a witness, and when I’m really good, a facilitator.

The truth is that given enough time, support, interesting material, cheerleading, and practice, there’s no telling how far a student can go towards mastery in a particular direction. I do know that initial talent is not a necessary indicator of future success. I’ve watched kids with real language issues in their early years become the best eighth grade writers I’ve ever seen. And it’s not just drive or persistence either, although drive and persistence are surely gifts. Nothing beats liking it. Nothing beats being into it. If, as teachers, we can illuminate and clear those twin passages, well, then we’re getting somewhere interesting.

It is not true that people pop out of the god’s head fully formed. Likewise, the self one presents to the world, especially as a teenager or soon-to-be teenager, is in effect an image, a flexible theatrical presentation. Self, skills, abilities, direction, no direction – in short, who we are and what we do are all up for grabs. Very little is definitive. Very little is etched in stone, as the saying goes. I try to remember this at school, because it helps keep me tolerant, and open, and curious. I’m still working on relaxed. So far, calmness is a virtue that eludes me