Seven years ago, when I began teaching high school in the Bronx as a NYC Teaching Fellow, I had every expectation of being the next Socrates. I had just completed a rigorous summer training program that I naïvely assumed would give me all the skills I needed to connect with my young charges and open their minds to the lyricism of Robert Frost's poetry or the pathos of Shakespearean tragedy. Through my determination, tenacity, and love of learning, I would not only ensure that my students passed their Regents exams; I would teach them to love English, and by extension, to take the whole of their studies more seriously.
The students had other ideas. My most vivid memory of those first two years involves a group of kids known by their teachers as the "sunshine class." (The kids traveled in blocks, so several teachers had the same group at different points during the day.) That season, the cafeteria served little bags of baby carrots to the students during lunch; two periods later, those same baby carrots -- carefully pocketed, instead of eaten -- would be launched at the back of my head whenever I turned to write on the board. No amount of yelling, threatening, or pleading ceased the onslaught; I was unable to turn around fast enough to catch the culprits, and the kids knew it.
They might have been throwing vegetables because my lessons sucked. Looking back at the journal entries I wrote at the time, it is quite apparent to me that despite the intensity of my summer program and the classes I was taking at night, I had no idea what I was doing. In one entry, I describe having the students draw pictures to illustrate scenes from To Kill a Mockingbird -- to what end, I haven't a clue. In another journal entry, I pat myself on the back for the high scores my students received on a test -- one that, when I unearthed it from a folder several years later, I found to contain purely factual questions, requiring no deeper analysis whatsoever. I'm not sure why I thought it was important to test the students on the ages of the characters in Walter Dean Myers' YA book Monster; these days, I'd be much more concerned with their analysis of the moral gray area presented by the book's protagonist.
When I think back on these things, I cringe. Not only did I not become the next Socrates, a paradoxical thing happened -- the longer I stayed in teaching, the more I realized how much I didn't know. As the months and years passed, I learned that teaching is one of those evolving skills without any real end; you're always learning how to do things better. I could never have known early on how lousy I really was. Maybe that's for the best, or else I'd have been too demoralized to stay put. In retrospect, I realize I hit my stride around the end of my second year. It was only at that point that I'd accumulated a body of useful teaching materials, gained the confidence to manage a classroom of rowdy teens, and most importantly -- through trial, error, and watching more seasoned teachers -- developed some sense of what good pedagogy entailed. None of these were things I could have been taught in any training program; they were gains I could only have made through experience.
more . . .
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/llana-garon/highly-qualified-highly-m_b_802177.html
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