Teaching, Living, and Learning

Thursday, February 21, 2008

ONE YEAR WITH AN ENGLISH TEACHER

Day 102, Thursday, February 21, 2008

It came forcibly home to me today, as it often has, that I am too much the center of attention in my classes. When speaking, the students are almost always looking at me, rarely at each other. If I somehow diagrammed the conversations in my room, all the arrows would point from my students to me, rarely from my students to each other. I especially noticed that today, because I was hoping to observe the class as a whole during our discussion, but I couldn't, because each speaker was speaking to me, and I felt like I had to give the speaker my full attention.

Somehow I have to work on developing a greater sense in my students of speaking to each other. Perhaps I should occasionally say, "I don't want anyone to look at me during this discussion. Please look at your classmates. Forget I'm here." That would allow me to roam around the circle, observing discussion behavior and getting a feel for the conduct of the class as a whole.

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I found this quote (below) in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. She's describing Fanny Price's home at Mansfield, but the words exactly remind me of the atmosphere I try to maintain in my classroom:
" ... no sounds of contention, no raised voice, no abrupt bursts, no tread of violence, was ever heard; all proceeded in a regular course of cheerful orderliness; everybody had their due importance; everybody's feelings were consulted."

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The following quote is from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I would like my classroom to be like Dr. Strong's school:

"Dr. Strong's was an excellent school...It was very gravely and decorously ordered, and on a sound system; with an appeal, in everything, to the honor and good faith of the [students], and an avowed intention to rely on their possession of these qualities unless they proved themselves unworthy of it, which worked wonders. We all felt that we had a share in the management of the place, and in sustaining its character and dignity."

If I replaced "agent" with "teacher", this passage from a short story might, I hope, describe me in my classroom:
"The agent spent his days in following what seemed to many observers to be only a dull routine, but all his steadiness of purpose, all his simple intentness, all his gifts of strategy and powers of foresight, and of turning an interruption into an opportunity, were brought to bear upon this dull routine with a keen pleasure."
-- from "The Gray Mills of Farley" by Sarah Orne Jewett