The Worst of Years…Becoming the Best

The ’08-’09 school year was the worst of years for me.

I taught high school seniors for the first time. I figured they’d be a lot like college freshmen, who I loved teaching in the early 90s. (They weren’t!)

I taught an Advanced Placement class for the first time. The retiring teacher assured me, as she passed the metaphorical baton, that the class would be “fun.” (It wasn’t!)

I struggled with health problems that were supposed to be resolved prior to school starting. (They weren’t!)

Unrealistic expectations.

Personality conflicts.

Bad attitudes.

(And the students had issues, too!)

What went wrong? Who’s to blame?

The Courage to Teach

As I try to make sense out of last year, to understand why I spent so much time feeling so incompetent, I’m reading Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach.

I am heartened by his honesty: moving into his third decade of teaching, he admits to asking a recurring question, “Might it be possible, at my age, to find a new line of work, maybe even something I know how to do?”

I am especially encouraged by his self-reflection:

“One of my favorite essays on teaching is Jane Tompkins’s ‘Pedagogy of the Distressed.’ . . . With wonderful candor, Tompkins says that her obsession as a teacher had not been with helping students learn what they wanted and needed to know, but rather with ‘(a) showing the students how smart I was; (b) showing them how knowledgeable I was; and (c) showing them how well prepared I was for class. I had been putting on a performance whose true goal was not to help the students learn but to act in such a way that they would have a good opinion of me.’

Then she asks, ‘How did it come to be that our main goal as academicians turned out to be performance?’ Her answer rings true for me–fear: ‘Fear of being shown up for what you are: a fraud, stupid, ignorant, a clod, a told, a sap, a weakling, someone who can’t cut the mustard.’

That is how it sometimes is for me. Driven by fear that my backstage ineptitude will be exposed, I strive to make my on-stage performance slicker and smoother–and in the process, make it less and less likely that my students will learn anything other than how to cover up and show off. I conceal my own heart and am unable to weave the fabric of connectedness that teaching and learning require.”

So that’s who’s to blame? Not my old nemesis! Surely after twenty years, I couldn’t have fallen victim to the same villain that takes down newbie teachers?

But the fingerprints are unmistakable.

As I replay painful scenes – “discussions” that consisted of 24 silent staring students…essays that reeked of SparkNotes…caustic barely-under-the-breath comments by brilliant students – the common thread is obvious.

A Year of Fear

Fear.

And an entire year of fear is a very long year.

Palmer explains his book’s title this way:

“The courage to teach is the courage to keep one’s heart open in those very moments when the heart is asked to hold more than it is able so that teacher and students and subject can be woven into the fabric of community that learning, and living, require.”

Clearly, I lacked this kind of open-hearted courage last school year. Even now, everything within me wants to deny last year ever happened, urges me to stomp off into the next year with a scowl on my face and a no-nonsense atmosphere in my classroom.

But I believe the fear-full Mrs. G of ’08-’09 can teach me to have this kind of courage next school year, as long as I’m open to learning from her. The lessons I learn from my worst year will move me forward on my journey of becoming the best teacher I can be.

Last year may have been my worst of years as a teacher, but as I reflect, rather than run!, it may well become my best of years as a learner.