Teaching, Living, and Learning

Sunday, February 10, 2008

ONE YEAR WITH AN ENGLISH TEACHER

Day 95, Friday, February 8

Today I taught the morning classes in almost total unawareness. Yes, I had a good lesson planned, and I carried through with my plans, but I'm afraid I was more of a robot than a mindful human being. I went through the motions in a sort of mechanistic way, from one orderly, mechanical step to another. I'm disappointed in myself. If Emily Webb from Our Town could have seen me, she would have been very critical of my lack of awareness -- she who went back from the grave to beg the living to appreciate every moment.

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Several kids were absent a few days this week, and I'm ashamed to admit that I hardly noticed. Talk about unawareness! It's a teacher's duty to be thoroughly attentive to his students, both the ones who are present and the ones who are not. How can I allow one of my students to slip completely out of my mind just because he or she is home sick???

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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