Last year I taught in four different classrooms. You may remember my meditations.
This year, I have been blessed with my own space. Given that I took the time to complain reflect about not having a classroom last year, it’s only fair that I take a moment this year to acknowledge the delights of having one of my own.
Continue reading The Boundless Joy of Having My Own Classroom
Moments from this semester that made me happy to be a teacher and/or forced me to draw a very purposeful breath…
I want to write more about my fellow teachers, especially the ones I consider masters of their craft. There’s no better person to start with than my English colleague Lea Longerbeam, who is retiring next week after 33 years in the profession.
I have fond memories of most of my teachers, but weirdly the most influential teacher in my life is someone I haven’t spoken to since I left her classroom, and I have had no interest in ever contacting since.
At the midpoint of the school year I gave my honors students an anonymous survey. The first question was whether phones have made school better or worse for them. Because most of these students attended a middle school that had a pretty strict no-phone policy, they are able to reflect on the difference. So has the tech liberty of high school made the school experience better for an honors student? I was genuinely curious what they would say. On the one hand, teenagers love their phones. On the other hand, they can be very perceptive and critical of themselves. Before looking at the results, try to guess what you think the breakdown of responses will be.
There’s no problem finding me between classes. No matter where you are in Woodgrove, you can track me down instantly thanks to the din caused by the four utility wheels screwed to the bottom of my oversized wooden lectern. Where other transient teachers push their LCPS-issued “carts” silently and inconspicuously down the hallway with something resembling dignity, my rig groans with an embarrassing attention-demanding roar every foot of the journey. And the show isn’t just limited to sounds! Occasionally in the jostle my mouse will slide off the pad and burst apart in the crowded hallway. Turning a corner too fast and my guitar will swing like a pendulum and bop the corner. One afternoon the file holder I’d installed on the side spontaneously broke from its fastenings. But the noise is definitely the lectern’s calling card: at least once a week a student will politely suggest that I bring in some WD-40 to alleviate the noise. A few times I’ve had to ask a student to retrieve my lectern from the English workroom. You can hear the roar as they bring it, first faint, then deafening, the once-happy student now wearing an expression of clinch-jawed humiliation. The other day I passed a custodian pushing these giant trash containers on wheels down the hallway, and I realized that both these devices use the same wheels, that my big showy Mr. Scott Education Rig makes the same noise as a mobile trash can…
I use the notes app on my phone to jot down small moments at work. They’re are all unified by…something. I don’t know what exactly. They’re off-beat. They give me inner peace. So I call them my Zen moments. Here are some from the first twenty weeks of school:
I’m taking a shameless victory lap. Or, perhaps more appropriately, I should say that I am placing the oaken garland upon my head. My English 10 honors students just completed a month-long unit in which they read Coriolanus and (most of) Julius Caesar. In addition to comprehension quizzes and in-class discussions, they wrote an argumentative essay that compared the two plays, which they converted into presentations that they shared in-class this week.
But my victory lap is not simply due to the fact that I forced students to undergo this experience, an experience perhaps as daunting as Caius Martius rushing alone through the enemy gates of Coriole. Rather, it’s because of the results of an anonymous survey I gave yesterday…
After writing my thirtieth letter of recommendation last fall, I had a little intervention with myself. This can’t happen again, I vowed.
And yet it most likely would happen again. How could it not? After all, I was teaching all juniors, and therefore the prospect loomed that I might be asked by upwards of fifty students to write 500 to 700 words explaining their virtues to an admissions committee. There had to be a fair way to put a cap on the number I write.
I’m half a year late in writing this, but I wanted to take a moment to appreciate the work of the late Professor Paul Cantor. I never met him in person, never took one of his classes, and obviously I didn’t keep up with him well enough to hear the news in February that he had died. However, I am compelled to express deep appreciation for the impact he has made on my teaching life. This impact all came via his “Shakespeare and Politics” lectures, a series of 57 hour-long lectures, freely available on YouTube, in which Cantor examines Shakespeare through a lens of classical and Renaissance (don’t call it early modern!) politics. It may not sound like the most seismic thing to impact one’s teaching, but I can say with confidence these videos have probably had the most significant impact in the way I teach literature over the past five years.
