The Wikiness

Yesterday I conversed with a young teacher at the start of her first year teaching high school French, something I did many years ago, before I switched to just English. She asked, “What have you learned about how to teach adolescents? Any insights, or ‘lessons learned?’”

I shook my head and told her how embarrassed I am of my first years on the job, when I short-changed  students by teaching from a distance, in staid ways taken straight from the publisher’s materials. I taught this way because my heart wasn’t in it. So much else in my life seemed more important than teaching–growing a business I hoped would save me from having to teach much longer, and working with a challenging partner as we started a family. I took the shortest path to the paycheck, though it meant acting inhumanely in a human service career. 

Subconsciously, I feared and felt hostility toward my students. I cravced the feeling of control, and my inner authoritarian came out. Catholic school culture harmonized perfectly with my dehumanizing methods. Like the priests and my fellow teachers, I addressed the boys by last names only.”Fitzpatrick, that last remark cost you a JUG! (justice under God, the name for their detention).” 

So insecure was my ego that I enjoyed crushing my students’ spirits with multiple choice minefields that I designed to maim even the brightest pupil. If any of them passed with 100%, I considered the test a failure. 

I popped quizzes on them and wrote unit tests that were borderline abusive, emphasizing recall over application, and overloaded with sadistic redundancies. I told myself I was being nice when among two dozen or so multiple choices on a test I’d include “NONE OF THESE” and helpfully write on the board, “Il y a quatre NONE OF THESE sur cet examen.” 

The two Catholic schools I’d taught in celebrated tradition, corporal punishment, and uniformity. My brutal tests and instruction worked fine there, but what humanized my teaching was switching to English instruction and having females in the class. The co-ed public school was a space where nuance, subtext, and delicacy were in order. Strict father morality would not cut it. Teenage girls, I found, demanded more emotional investment from their teachers. These girls, in the words of the famous dictum, didn’t “care how much I knew until they knew how much I cared.”

In my new teaching post, I  learned to understand and empathize with students through writing–specifically the journal prompt responses I assigned and collected each quarter for 10% of their grades. A few would barely do it, but most would comply, and some poured themselves into it. I took time to read every last entry. The journals gave me a window into their lives and the opportunity to respond, not as an authority figure so much, but as a fellow writer and human trying his best to answer prompts like, “What makes for the best relationships?, or “What would an ideal community look like?” 

As I started to go “all in” at my job, I relaxed my guard and my creativity and compassion flowed. I saw my work’s importance and felt a sense of calling. And to my surprise and the students’ delight, as I began taking the job seriously, I also got funnier.

So lessons learned about delivering lessons? Study your students, take your own tests, and keep in mind the importance of your job.