On the face of it, being a teacher is a rewarding and privileged job. Like a very natural-looking ordinary rock or stump, when you pull back the face of it you find that the real business going on underneath is cacophonous, murky, endlessly absorbing, and too alive for comfort most of the time. So, it's best to replace it and get back to admiring the face of it. Well, in the Treehouse, faces last only so long.
My first year of teaching has been akin to walking into my classroom, ramming my head into a brick wall repeatedly for seven hours, driving home, nursing my bloody head, and falling asleep afraid of the next day's beating. So, why do I do this? Well, there are the callouses. They deaden the pain with repetition. Perhaps I hope to see the callouses through the wounds, but I'm not quite there yet. Certain shocking realizations about students' learning habits and abilities become norms you face each day, which may sound like a recipe for lowering one's expectations, but really it's about adjusting your internal compass to match your point on Earth on a daily basis, which I think tends to keep the brain pliant yet exhausted. As for the wall, teaching so far has been all about adjusting how you actually hit the wall, learning to ricochet, to absorb a hit, to find the most forgiving spot, and then over time to finally realize that the only wall is the one you yourself have been putting up between you and your students. Duh, you might say. Indeed, I say.
In education school, you learn about all types of sorcery and you practice them on your fellow masters' degree students. Yeah. They don't tell you that you need to first know alchemy to be a successful sorcerer. More importantly, your students must come with the same raw materials readily available and the motivation to help you make the magic happen. The magic tricks themselves are predicated on the fact that those students actually have been trained to know the same basics you expected them to have and, most importantly, they must have a desire to achieve what you want to achieve with those basics. In the end, compliance or motivation? What are you going to teach for? (and does it still matter whether or not you end a sentence with a preposition? Does the word 'preposition' even matter now?)?? So many question marks.
I guess that's the sign I'm in the right profession. All those question marks keep coming. When you are sitting in the muck, or the wall rubble, or deep in the pit with no escape route... are your gears still turning? I think back on when I was working at Munich International School, surrounded by International Baccalaureate whiz kids with three languages under their belts and dreams of not just university but the Oxfords and Princetons and Stanfords, who conducted themselves like the budding and critically-thinking adults we want all our students to be, but who could and would still screw up like any kid. That was about the time I knew I wanted to teach, to be a part of that level of thinking and that culture, though I hadn't stepped foot into any one of their classrooms to see how or what they were being taught. I counted all their teachers as my friends and role models of wisdom and still do. I sat in steam baths and saunas and biergartens with them, through four hour dinners and episodes of Lost and on long train rides across borders with them; but I never really dallied into their pedagogy or the theory behind how or what they were teaching. Now, I feel this great disconnect between that community and my present. Even after I went through my education program and ran off with my masters, I hadn't really stepped into a classroom. Now, I think I'm living more of the reality and that Munich was the dream. The struggles are the norm, and we have to be prepared for the non-idealized, value-scattered, social media-mimicking microcosm to be the standard, all without lowering our high expectations and not getting in the way of those bound for greatness because, really, there are far more paths to a good life than the few I've known in my life.
Perhaps I'm too idealistic to be theorizing, too young a teacher to be trying to put it all together into a neat idea, too hard on myself to recognize my strengths and my successes, too hyper-analytical to be musing in public and airing my laundry for all to see (then again, this is my treehouse). But I will end with this: I have mentioned all of this, all that I've bared to you here, to my students at some point. When things are mucked up, I stop and have them weigh-in on the good, the bad, and the ugly of their first-year teacher's role in their education. Thankfully, they are very forgiving, receptive to honesty, and are fully capable of discussing some of the systemic problems than we may give them credit for. That gives me hope. My deep desire is that they take a role in crafting their education and learn to have some significant responsibility for themselves and for each other. Even deeper, I hope I never forget to listen, to always keep my gears turning, and to encourage and help others do the same.
Meanwhile, I could really use a sauna and a four-hour dinner and a chinwag with some colleagues, like, on a daily basis.
