My formative years in teaching happened at a small, alternative high school, a public school in a large suburban school district that served at-risk students mostly who had decided the traditional, large high school did not work for them. Those students, who saw the Matrix behind the veneer of large classes, stressed-out teachers, overachieving classmates, opted for the leap of faith. Others had no choice. They all taught me how to be the teacher I am today, and sometimes I forget how that experience still shapes me, my philosophy about learning and about teaching teenagers, and how I expend my energy on all of it.
Over the span of 25 years, there are two things that resonate with me still–the permission, even the encouragement, to take risks because whatever had been tried before had not worked for these kids AND the necessity to make what I was teaching relevant and meaningful for them.
Taking risks has always taken the form of trying something new, something different. I have always read education journals, explored some crazy pedagogical theories, and spent two years studying experiential education at a non-traditional college where I bought into a multitude of ideas from sustainability to progressivism to gender equity. Every quarter, I taught a new group of students in a new collection of 5 or 6 courses, all invented by me. Sometimes we just read and talked about my favorite books. Other times, we went to the bookstore on a shopping spree and every student was required to find a book that would interest them. At some point, I started teaching film as well, putting to good use my undergraduate courses in cinema studies.
On many occasions, I bombed.
And sprinkled in there were a few moments when magic happened.
Listening to America Ferrera on Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead podcast recently, she had this wonderful thought about her role as a leader, a director, and I would argue it works as a teacher too: “How do I create an environment in which the unknown gets to happen?” Too often, teachers feel like they should plan for every second of every class period or block of every day. When we do that, we don’t make room for the “unknown,” for the unexpected gifts that come from hanging out with young people every day. I promise the unknown has popped up in my classroom more times than I can recall, and I know they were never written down in my planning book.
Even more important than the risks, though, was the need to answer my students’ “why.” I’ve taken a few personality tests over the years, and I know I always focus on the “why” because I also need it for everything I do. I don’t need some longwinded explanation of when I will use this (I actually discovered while looking at the COVID curve that understanding functions that move can be quite useful!) nor do I need some promise of application for my future. I just want to know why you think it’s important, even essential, for me to be exposed to a particular concept.
I had a quirky theater teacher in junior high (quirky would be the kind term I now use as an adult but at age 13, he was weird, really weird, and I didn’t like it) who asked us to do all kinds of crazy games, strange exercises, and seemingly pointless activities. At one point, he met with my mother because I was struggling in his class and he explained to her that I was learning things, but I didn’t know what they were–as if the secrets of his teachings were too deep or too elevated for me to comprehend on the surface but were being absorbed nonetheless. Needless to say, I call bullshit on that nonsense, but not because I did not “get it” but because he never took the time to explain why it might be useful for me to make up ideas on the spot, to respond to the actions and feelings of those around me, to cut loose and try on someone else’s personality for a while.
So when I started teaching students who made John Bender look like Alex P. Keaton, I knew I would not get far without some sort of nod to the “why” of things. Today I teach in a large, much more traditional high school than where I began, but I still spend some time, probably too much time in the eyes of some, on trying to figure why am I even teaching this and why do I think you might benefit from learning it.
I can’t explain why I’m even thinking about this these days, especially when you consider all the other frustrations I could yammer about, but maybe that’s it? When the world seems to be spinning out of control, when everyone is screaming again about going remote or not going remote or requiring masks or not requiring masks, it seems to help to go back to where I started.