Teaching
The observation, however clichéd, that professional teachers play a unique role in shaping the lives of their charges is no understatement. And so I’m very conscious of the New Testament caution given in James 3:1 that, because of the power we wield, “We who teach will be judged more strictly”. There is vast opportunity for well-intentioned but poorly equipped educators to do irreparable damage to the students that depend on them for guidance. Some teachers, for example, believe it’s their duty to dump their brains’ contents into their students’ heads, teaching them what to think without question rather than how to think by questioning. Unfortunately, there are students have experienced classroom injustices such as these enough to believe similarly that it’s their duty to tacitly, trustingly receive the wisdom of the supposed sage adults who stand in front of them.
Certainly, there’s an equally vast opportunity for well-intentioned and very capable teachers to help facilitate students’ academic and emotional success. To that end, I believe it’s young people’s job to be the best students they can possibly be by exploring the limits of their knowledge and creativity, developing reliable methods of analysis, building their schemata to accommodate new models of understanding, and producing exquisitely crafted artifacts worthy of their efforts. It’s my duty as a teacher then to help young people in their endeavors by modeling the same behaviors and assisting their cognitive and affective growth. I encourage my students to think clearly and logically, but also, simultaneously, flexibly and creatively in their efforts to discover truth, and, likewise, I encourage my students to critically interpret all available evidence to effectively support and stylistically defend arguments for their discoveries. It’s my goal that once students leave my care, they’ll be discriminating consumers and producers of language, able to participate positively and productively in the agora.
I teach from established educational standards according to students’ needs; content material is a secondary concern. Some critics and skeptics are eager to decry standards-based education, but I’d ask them, without quality standards how could we be sure of the safety of the food we eat or the medications we consume? Without professional standards, how could we trust the expertise of our doctors or other professionals? Without engineering standards, how could we determine the reliability of the airplanes that carry us to our destinations? Our educational standards are baseline guides to creating instruction that attempts to build students’ basic skill sets in order that all students have at least an equal opportunity to succeed as citizens in the free-market after they graduate. Of course, these standards are only the minimum measurement of student ability; there’s nothing in the standards that proscribe teachers from helping students achieve higher.
I maintain exceedingly high but not unrealistic expectations of work and behavior for my students. I want my charges to be and do more than “good” or “good enough” work, for good is the enemy of great. So I encourage students to reach beyond their own and others’ estimations of their abilities; I respect students enough to offer them rigorous challenges and allow them to stumble if they need in the process of overcoming those challenges. If I didn’t create meaningful tasks for my students to complete, establish consistent procedures for them to follow, define clear boundaries for them within which to work, and set definite deadlines for them to meet, that is, hold them accountable for their learning, I’d be complicit in diminishing the quality of, even stealing from their educational experience.
My classroom is always open. All administrators, colleagues, and especially parents are invited to come and observe and question and even join in class interactions anytime. Most importantly, I’m available to work and talk with students whenever they need.
I used contractions as often as I could in this writing, and my prose is dense. Snap!