A Thoreau Reflection

After complaining enough about my classes, I have finally been thrown a bone and got permission to visit other classrooms in my area on Wednesday to see how it's done. I jumped at the opportunity, since it meant a day of paid work where I could leave my darlings with a substitute and have a change of pace for a day.

This day was prepared by a teaching coach and they planned an itinerary for me to visit some of the best and most well-managed classrooms the local schools had to offer.

My first classroom visitation was quite shocking. The teacher sat at the front of the class while sipping coffee and read questions aloud about The Odyssey. Four undoubtedly bright students eagerly shouted out the answers to each question. The other twenty kids, however, learned nothing. A few kids actually got in a fight, pushing each other into walls in the corner. This went either unnoticed or ignored by the teacher. Kids shouted, texted, and slept, but as long as four students were giving the answers, the teacher mustered forward, never leaving eir perch. I can run a classroom like this one, I thought the point of this visit was to see a model of one that was better.

The next classroom was even worse. There wasn't fighting, but in the span of an hour, all that was accomplished was attendance, a homework check, and using ten random vocabulary words in sentences. A whole period went by with next to nothing being accomplished, what's the point of a classroom without education? The teaching coach asked for my opinion after the class and I tried to think of positive things to say, but then I looked like a fool when the coach admitted that that was an example of some pretty shitty teaching. I had been thinking that the whole time, but then why was I taken to this classroom as an example?

The following two classrooms were also underwhelming. They were both fairly well managed, but they were junior high schools, so the kids aren't quite as rude and defiant to begin with. The teaching was not bad, but not particularly good either for that matter. In a seventh grade math class, a student named Jackie noticed me sitting in the back and asked the teacher if I was a new student. The class laughed. The teacher asked, "Does he look like he's in seventh grade?" I was afraid of the answer. "Kind of." Sigh. I know I look young, but a seventh grader? Really? "Would a seventh grader wear a tie and not expect to get beaten up?" the teacher asked. Jackie flashed a large obnoxious smile my way. Jackie was poking fun at me and knew it. Jackie also thought any number divided by itself was zero, so I'd still say I'm smarter.

Overall, I wanted to laugh. Did this experience show me that my own trials in teaching are not unique and that even classrooms deemed "the best" have countless flaws. Has the California public education system settled for the smallest of standards? Do barely adequate or somewhat functional classrooms constitute great ones? What I witnessed simultaneously made me feel not so bad about my own situation, but also soured me to the hopelessness of the profession altogether.

There was only one other classroom I visited on that day, a high school class for students still mastering the English language. Before the class, the teacher told me ey would be teaching transcendentalism. Internally, I laughed. I can't teach my language learners a haiku, let alone something as intense as transcendentalism. My English teacher in high school, widely regarded to be one of the best, gave me no real accessible understanding of what the movement was. This teacher, however, broke it down in pretty simple terms, but didn't sacrifice the depth of thought ey expected the students to have on the subject. Ey challenged the students to apply the concepts to their own lives.

Though I was supposed to be observing the lesson, I more so absorbed it, participating in it rather than above it. I found the whole thing inspirational as both an educator and, more importantly, an individual. I'm not going to pretend that the students were digging it as much as I was, but they were paying attention and trying, so it was impressive all the same. Meanwhile, I was in the back having my mind re-blown over Thoreau's revolutionary approach to life. The teacher's enthusiasm excited the English major dork in me.

What it all boils down to is that I, too, want to live my "life deliberately." I had such intentions when I first entered the profession, but then the wealth of mitigating factors prevents me from that transcendental life of simplicity. I feel I have little control over the outcome for my students' knowledge and behavior. It makes me feel a little better to know that 4/5 "good" teachers seem to be not much better than where I'm at. It makes me feel even better to know that there's at least one person who can do it well and deliberately, because if I'm not going to be doing this job, someone's got to.