COUNTLESS TEACHERS IN ROOM 2

On the surface, it may appear that there is only one teacher in

my 9^th grade English class, but actually the number of teachers  is

incalculable, even infinite. Of course, on days when I’m inattentive

to what’s actually happening, I pretend that I am the only

teacher – that all the English learning depends entirely on my

ability to cause it to happen. I say it’s “my” class and the kids

are “my” students, as though I am solely responsible for the ongoing

expansion of the students’ ability to think, read, and write.  That,

unfortunately, was my attitude for the early part of my

teaching career: I was the sole teacher, and any learning in my class

was primarily my responsibility. Now, with the passage of more than

forty years, I see clearly the folly of such thinking. To consider

myself the only teacher in my English class is about as foolish as

thinking clouds are the only cause of the rain.  Moisture-laden

clouds might be the immediate cause of rain, but the line of linked

causes that created the clouds extends back into the endless past,

and the line of causes that ultimately produce learning in my

classes is just as immeasurable. I might be the most direct cause of

learning, but how many countless causes worked together to create

me, with my particular knowledge and abilities, and then enabled

me to be in Room 2 on a given day at a given hour in the year

2010? And how could we possibly count the forces that worked to

bring the students, with all their distinctive and diverse capabilities,

to my classroom at any given moment in time? Trying to identify the

one and only cause would be as silly as identifying one drop of water

as the sole cause of high waves at sea. As their “official” teacher, in

truth I am only a drop of water in the immense sea of my students’

English education. I cause things to happen the way a drop of water

does—by being a steadfast but modest part of an endless,

unfathomable enterprise.