Teaching, Living, and Learning

Monday, May 12, 2008

ONE YEAR WITH AN ENGLISH TEACHER

Day 147, Monday, May 12, 2008

Today, during our literary discussion, I asked the students to not look at me. "Forget I'm here," I told them. "Look at your classmates when you're speaking." I've said that occasionally this year, but not nearly enough. It should be a major theme of my teaching -- that I am merely the background to the students' foreground. What happens in my classroom should never be about me but always about the students. They are front and center; I am off-stage clapping and giving encouragement. As the year goes by, they must be more and more and I less and less.

……………………….

This morning before school I read a few of my old journal entries about teaching, and it was a soothing and energizing experience. I read an entry about how much good I can bring to a student's life just by paying him or her a tiny compliment, and another entry talked about the importance of "constructing" each day in the classroom with as much care and precision as a builder constructs a new house. It was just a few brief minutes of quiet reading, but it unquestionably helped me prepare for the day ahead.

No comments:

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

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."

...........

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