One thing I did last week was go into Bulkeley High School and teach a demonstration class in one of my advisee’s classes. His name’s Mike. He’s student teaching there. The situation was not ideal. Besides the fact that Bulkeley is more than a little run down and the classrooms were cluttered and overcrowded, this was during CAPT administration. So these were seniors who had been detained in the auditorium for the duration of the science test. Then they were released for a seventy-five minute period prior to lunch. Furthermore, two classes were combined. Therefore, I had more than thirty seniors crammed into one basement room, who had just endured being essentially locked up for more than two hours, and who hadn’t eaten yet. Oh, and even though this was a British Literature class, they were reading The Catcher in the Rye because there were not enough copies of anything on the Brit Lit curriculum for all the students. My advisee, an education student from University of Hartford, and three members of the English department came to observe.
Mike suggested that the students might like to ask questions about college in general and UConn in particular, so after introducing myself I opened it up to Q&A. I was met with deafening silence. I waited. Thirty seconds into the silence a boy laughed, so I said, “Great, you get to ask the first question!†He responded with shock, so I said, “Don’t you know that rule? First student to laugh has to ask the first question? C’mon, you mean you’re a senior in high school and you never heard that rule? Everybody knows that rule. And then after I answer your question you get to pick the next student to ask a question.†Well, that’s all I needed. I asked the boy his name. It was Joshua. Joshua asked a question. Conversation began. He got to pick another student. Soon discussion was pretty fluid and I didn’t have to use that ploy anymore. The students asked many personal questions, like how did I get into teaching, and did I like students, and what did I like to teach, and what was the difference between high school and college students. I asked them similar questions. I spent no more than fifteen of the seventy-five minutes, but in that time we built some nice rapport that was easy to build upon once we began talking about the novel.
When I began thinking again about the question of what makes a good teacher good, I kept thinking about this day with the students at Bulkeley, and how easy it was to walk into an unfamiliar classroom with students I don’t know in a less than optimal situation and still manage to facilitate a really successful discussion. There was a content component, since I did know the material really well. And there was a pedagogical component, since I designed an effective series of writing activities and I know how to ask good questions and get students to respond to one another and not just use me as an intermediary through which all responses must pass. But I think the big thing was taking a few minutes to get to know the students and let them get to know me. They were willing to listen, participate, and behave because I had taken the time to humanize them and myself. I thought that perhaps this is the most important thing in making a teacher good.
I was part of two conversations yesterday and today that reiterated this to me. First, yesterday, I had another advisee who is currently student teaching come and speak to my juniors in the Advanced Composition course. Ostensibly he was there for them to ask questions about his approach to composing the big term paper for my course, but the students also wanted to ask him a million questions about student teaching. And when they asked Shaun if he witnessed good teachers and good teaching, he responded that there were plenty of really good teachers who connected with their students, but that there were also plenty who were just mailing it in, who sat aloof behind their desks and handed out worksheets, and who hit the parking lot before the busses had even left.
Then I had a conversation today with an advisee about Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, and I found myself telling her about my colleague Dennis. After a few years of teaching that book, Dennis began asking the students to write their own memoirs in imitation of Cisneros’ style. This was a pretty popular and successful assignment. But then one year Dennis’ mother died a few weeks before he began teaching Mango Street, and when it came time to ask the students to write their memoirs, Dennis began writing down his own memories of his mother. And he shared it with his students. In a word, they were captivated. It would be hard if not impossible to quantifiably demonstrate that the students that year became better writers than the students from previous years, but clearly they were more engaged than ever before.
Yes, Dennis was doing some really sound pedagogical things, such as using Cisneros’ book as a mentor text and modeling the writing processes of a capable, adult writer—himself. But I am inclined to say that the most important thing was that Dennis and his students shared their stories with one another. The rapport that emerged from this enabled Dennis to push, require, and demand more from those students than if he had been to them nothing more than a remote authority figure. Had he remained so, he would likely have encountered the same stoniness I did before Joshua’s laughter broke the silence and reminded us all that there were thirty-some-odd people sitting together in that overcrowded basement room.
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