A few years ago, I wrote several pieces about my experiences as a teacher. That trail of thought was obstructed by certain events in my personal and professional life, but I am ready to pick up the scent once again, I think, having now ended my 33-year career in education. It is a discussion I have been having with myself for quite some time, and I’m certain it will continue in some form or another now that I have more time for contemplation.
I do not like to use the word “retired” because it makes it sound as though one has gone to bed for a good long while. Maybe that is what I ought to do after more than three decades in front of students in high-school, middle-school, and college classrooms, but now that autumn is near and the lights are on again in school buildings near and far, I find myself still dwelling on these matters. So, let us just say that I have willingly “stepped away” from active duty as an educator. Perhaps I will teach again one day; I suppose I could pull a Tom Brady and show up someplace in a different uniform, with an erasable marker and the Oxford English Dictionary in hand instead of a football…but I expect no one would really care.
In the meantime, I am collecting my thoughts about what I have witnessed and experienced and about things as they stand now in my profession. As you might imagine, much of it is discouraging. In fact, it is fairly easy to identify our failings in the teaching of our children but extremely difficult to render workable solutions. Nevertheless, I will throw some of my own ideas into the wind, so to speak, however idealistic, futile, or redundant they may seem. Please bear in mind that the schools where I have worked have varied pretty widely in character and approach: I taught in private college-prep schools in Florida for sixteen years (also spending a handful of semesters teaching evening classes in freshman composition) and then in the Maine public school system for another seventeen years. Each environment came with a different set of problems, but I should hope that I have gained enough insight to help illuminate some of the big-picture issues.
These issues converge in messy tectonic shiftings. The land mass has broken apart, and the continents are adrift, but often they collide with one another. Nonetheless, I think it is reasonable to address four specific areas where challenges, meaning what we used to call “messes” (I think the army uses the acronym SNAFU) are evident: the changing roles of teachers, students, parents, and administration.
This will be a two-part blog - teachers and students first. Please look for the third and fourth sections next month.
"Everyone who remembers his own education remembers teachers, not methods and techniques. The teacher is the heart of the educational system." (Sidney Hook)
I agree with this quotation from the pragmatist Sidney Hook. However, I will also point out that Hook does not make note of the various reasons a teacher might be remembered. If a former student of mine were to say, “Oh, I remember Mr. Trippe. He told us funny stories,” or “Yeah, I vaguely recall that guy. So boring,” then I would begin to wonder why I had wasted so much of my time and theirs. On the other hand, if a student were to remark, “Trippe? Yes, that was a hard class, but he knew his stuff, and I learned a lot,” then I would say that I must have done my job. Friends of mine have found it hard to believe me when I’ve declared that I’ve never cared whether the kids liked me or not. Oh, I suppose that when I was a younger teacher, I enjoyed feeling accepted by a younger crowd, but in time I grew to understand that it is more important to be respected - and I mean respected not only as the person in charge of the group, but as a master of a subject area (literature and writing, in my case) who is willing to impose the discipline and skills necessary for them to do a difficult thing: to use the English language effectively as writers and speakers and to analyze the strategies of those who have done so already. The teacher should not worry about being liked; if he or she does the job with devotion, enthusiasm, curiosity, fairness, and love, then everything will be fine.
In my view, a teacher’s first responsibility is to promote and further scholarship, but herein lies a difficulty faced by every teacher in every American public school today: one’s ability to fulfill this responsibility is impeded by pressures to perform in other roles which are not strictly academic. For example, on countless occasions in recent years, I have been asked for input on students’ mental and emotional health, something that is certainly a key factor in any student’s progress and success, but one that I am ill-equipped to discuss, since I am not a child psychologist.
Consider this scenario:
“Does the student ever seem sad or anxious?”
“Well, yes, sometimes, because he is human. Some days, I feel fairly sad or anxious myself, but we are starting a unit on poetic meter today, and I have to get through it somehow.”
I certainly do not wish to seem insensitive, but I have sometimes wondered whether we are unwittingly giving students new reasons to doubt themselves, when to dive into their schoolwork - in many cases anyway - might be just the ticket, the cure for what ails them. To learn something new, in an academic context, means a degree of control, and best of all, to become well-versed in something, to really know something inside and out, and to have ideas of your own about it and the ability to articulate them…well, that is a kind of currency which cannot be stolen from you.
This is not say that all kids acquire that sort of control, that ownership of concepts and skills, in the same way. As the ancient proverb contends, there are many paths up the mountain. Those phrases and terms that teachers routinely hear in professional development sessions - “learning styles,” “differentiation,” “multiple intelligences” - are critical pieces of the vocabulary toolkit for teachers today, and with good reason. Although like many other educators at the time, I was skeptical thirty years ago about the idea of varied learning “styles” and the need for accommodations, today I can attest to the truth of their existence. My concern now is whether the individual public-school teacher, already assigned to lunchroom duty, bus duty, after-school detention duty, morning duty, and expected to attend a host of meetings throughout the year with parents, students, administrators, counselors, psychologists, and various sorts of specialists, while serving on various committees for curriculum, discipline, enrichment, scheduling, and so on…all on top of planning for daily lessons and grading written work - actually has the time to keep up with new trends in special education. Some days, it seems that just being prepared to stand in front of a class and say something coherent is difficult enough.
I am by no means saying that the teacher need only stand there, talk for a while, give some notes, a few names and dates, and then expect osmosis to take care of all the rest. On the contrary, it is imperative, absolutely requisite, that today’s teacher find new and creative methods, gleaned from all kinds of sources, to engage the interest of his students. Yes, I do mean internet sources (take a look at the rich literary collections and lessons available on gutenberg.org, the Purdue OWL, or poetryfoundation.org, and the myriad of classroom-activity sites such as edutopia.org and pbslearningmedia.org, for example), but I also know that the teacher must generate his or her own strategies, plans and schemes, intertextual connections, and assertions regarding meaning. Thus, because I wanted my classes to be focused, and because I also wanted make anything we read personal - that is to say, an intimate exchange of ideas between the writer and everyone in the class, including me - I became very selective when it came to online exercises. In order to balance all of those things, a teacher must be as scrappy as Joe Louis, as fast as Muhammad Ali, as determined as George Foreman…if boxing analogies do anything for you. If not, suffice it to say that the teacher must be a chameleon, a changeling, interested in a thousand things at once, willing to admit deficits and ignorance at times, and yet at the same time he or she must be stalwart, confident, well-read and well-versed.
I was not an education major in college; my degrees are in English, and I have always been thankful for that. I studied literature and writing, and after a stint as a journalist, I became a teacher because I am a lifelong reader and writer, and I believe there is value in that. For me, it has made my life far richer than it might have been otherwise.
Now, I know very well that most of my students have not and will not become literary scholars, and that is as it should be. However, when kids entered my classroom, they learned quickly that to me this is very serious business, and that for fifty-five minutes or an hour or an hour and a half, depending on schedules, they would indeed live the lives of budding literary scholars. We were about books, stories, poems, reasonable arguments and discussions, and writing; we were not about laptops and cell phones.
I have passed through the vortex in my career: when I started teaching, I had no computer, and all grades and comments were written by hand; yet now that I have come out on the other side, I believe that I have, at the present moment anyway, a pretty broad understanding of the ways in which technology can be used in an English classroom (although digital artificial intelligence, which I will address in another section, now presents us with a brand-new set of unnerving challenges). Undoubtedly, the days of the charming, bespectacled scholar who can quote from Xenophon’s Anabasis but who cannot turn on his own laptop have passed. One cannot survive in this profession without a decent measure of “tech savvy.” However, the COVID pandemic showed us quite clearly that living human beings are an extremely important component in the successful acquisition of an education.
Ultimately, I would say that If you wish to teach, you should be forewarned: the average kid has never been less interested in your class nor, for that matter, less like you were as a student; the average kid is not bookish, not particularly inclined to study or read, and if you expect ever to reach a few of them, you must expend tremendous energy and effort finding ways to make them believe, really believe, that what you’re telling them is important. And you must really mean it, because one thing they surely can do is expose a fraud when they meet one. It’s a tough crowd.
To put it plainly, teaching has become a very difficult, high-stress profession, but is it worth the money? I think we all know the answer to that question. You will eventually ask yourself, “Why didn’t I go to law school, like some of my friends did?” On this point, however, I will risk triteness and remain firm: all teachers know that their most satisfying rewards will never come through direct deposit. There remains a kind of glory, a heroism even, in the ability to convey something of the magnificence in a work such as Hamlet to a bunch of 16-year-olds. I will go even further and say that for a few, teaching is truly a calling. They are rare, but there are some natural-born teachers among us. I was not one; it was a long trudge for me to learn to be a decent teacher, but along the way, I have known one or two people who, without question, were simply born to teach. It is indeed a gift, and trust me - it is a beautiful thing to witness.
“I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceased to be a man.” (Frederick Douglass)
I really believe that every American ought to read a book called Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. If you happen ever to have been one of those people who have entertained the idea that the Civil War was actually fought for any purpose other than the eradication of an evil institution, this book will cure you of that. Douglass’s courage, independence of spirt, and brilliance enabled him to do something that would have been impossible for most of us, which was simply to tell the truth about his own experience.
And when you do read his book, you will be alarmed and ashamed - not only because of the broad, deep scar of slavery upon our nation’s conscience, but because you will see that a similar (though certainly not equivalent) scourge has already descended on us: in many quarters, our educational system is failing to produce independent, analytical thinkers who can detect and dismiss inconsistencies. In too many of our schools, the “power of reason” is indeed being annihilated. Just as the institution of slavery, in Douglass’s time, demanded that the contented slave feel that slavery was right, and thus sought to “darken his moral and mental vision,” today’s students are subjugated to their masters, whether those masters are technology, trending political postures, the ambitions of those in power, materialism, or mindless conformity. Most appallingly, the cancer grows within the system itself.
In an earlier blog on education, I argued that students now have too much choice, and some readers took exception to that. Of course, such objections serve to illustrate the obsession we all have with the idea of choice (“It’s my choice! It’s my right! You can’t tell me what to do!”), but I was simply trying to say we have to understand that there are occasions when someone else may know far more about a particular subject (a teacher, for example) and ought to be allowed to pick the best thing - best book, best essay topic, best online resources - to enhance learning. For instance, in high school, if I had been able to choose, I would never have taken algebra because I wasn’t much good at it; now I see that my struggles were worth something. I was learning how to think, how to approach (if not solve) a problem, and how to survive with a C-.
As always when I think about my students’ needs, I begin to see that it is all fairly simple. I am merely talking about fundamentals: resiliency, perseverance, endurance, the willingness to consider differing opinions, common sense, civility, integrity…all those things the parents and educators of my generation strove to teach to us and then expected from us. It was good and just and natural to do so, as it should be today, because once those qualities have been integrated into one’s identity, many other things become possible, and the student begins to understand why he or she is at school in the first place.
I would be the first to admit that school is typically the very last place any kid would like to be. The same was so for me. But another important lesson the pandemic afforded us is that being in the place itself, physically, is far more conducive to academic achievement than lounging at the kitchen table in front of a screen, wondering who is on instagram (substitute whatever social media platform is in vogue). I have always embraced Robert Pirsig’s idea about this from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (which became an essential read for would-be scholars and amateur philosophers when I was in high school). He writes that any school is really a collection of ideas, a body of knowledge, a realm of questions, theories, problems, and solutions. The building itself is not the school. Yet in my own experience, the mind generally follows the body, of course, and so a shift in consciousness can result from a shift in environment. It doesn’t have to be a building necessarily - it might be a lakeshore or a hiking trail or a cafe, but one’s physical environment affects learning, unquestionably, and especially for younger people. The trouble is, more and more often in recent years, I have encountered kids who DID NOT KNOW WHY they were in the school building. Walk through the hallways of nearly any public school in any town, and you will see it, too: faces that reflect confusion, anxiety, lostness, sadness, anger, even desperation, when they should be filled with the light of curiosity and possibility.
Why? For many reasons, all of them worth close examination - the trauma of having been exposed to violence and/or mental illness at home, substance abuse by parents or siblings, a dearth of role models and strong authority figures, an emotional hole where there ought to be love and affection, and so on, but I would like for the moment to zero in on students’ over-reliance on specific technologies - namely, their phones and computers. My eyewitness testimony is that our values and sense of purpose have been skewed and and distorted by the misuse of these objects, and this is true not just for young people but for all of us. The trouble is that once you have given someone a cell phone and allowed him to play with it and to feel the rush of gratification it provides, it will be impossible to take it back. So, you also have to give him the tools to manage himself, just as his parents teach him to bathe himself, and just as my parents made it very clear what the consequences would be if I didn’t turn off the television and go to bed when I was supposed to.
Unbridled access to the web has contributed to rising levels of anxiety among youngsters, and I don’t just mean the distress caused by online bullying. Is it any wonder that a child struggles to form a sense of identity (and I am not speaking of gender or sexuality here, but rather of character and an internal moral structure) when he or she is bombarded by images in a world where the criminal has the same notoriety as the hero, where a brawl on a boatyard dock generates far more interest than any act of simple kindness? Who do I want to be? asks the child, who is then met at every click with a myriad of examples, many of them far from healthy, with thousands of voices shouting different answers to the child’s question.
Anxiety and fragmentation ensue. Anxiety is now pervasive in public schools. Young people who should be robust and strong, gritty, willing to take all sorts of intellectual risks and to test themselves physically, with lively minds that move them to openly question senseless rules, mindless authority, useless tradition - the independent and creative thinkers, those who would move us all forward in the most unexpected of ways…are difficult to find these days. Where have they gone? In too many places, they have disappeared from our schools’ hallways and classrooms.
I used to argue that we ought to view a computer simply as a tool, just as the typewriter became an essential tool for writers over time (even though, in the late 19th century, some decried it as an evil machine that would corrupt and destroy the writing process). Of course, I was stupid: computers are far more than a tool. A laptop and a fast connection to the internet amount to many things: a window into cultures around the world, an astonishing array of news sources, a place to learn to tie a fisherman’s knot or bake the fish once it is caught, a soundboard with switches for every sort of music known to the human ear, and an entry into the world’s greatest library, to name just a few. The irony in all this is that it begins to numb us to the joy of discovery; the awareness that google holds the answer key for every test, that you are not the first to have stumbled upon a singular idea, that every note your teacher writes on the board can be “fact-checked” within seconds, that you don’t actually need to learn a foreign language because translations appear magically under your fingertips…it weighs you down eventually, and you can reasonably ask, “What is the point? Why should I even be curious about anything? Why should I be responsible? Everything is right here on this little screen.”
How do we restore the integrity of the scholar’s search for answers, then? One thing we can do is limit their choices. Make them do the thinking. Make them cite sources. Restrict certain sources. Wikipedia is not an academic source. Neither is Breitbart. Nor is the HuffPost. I’m not suggesting censorship, as there’s nothing terribly dangerous about reading those publications; in fact, discernment and critical, analytical thinking are a part of one’s education - perhaps the most important part. The student must become a force in his or her own education. Think of your favorite science teacher from back in the day: in my case, if Mr. Wetzel had simply written a definition of, say, the Doppler Effect or the Butterfly Effect on the board, it would immediately have become just another scrap of abstract information. But when he had us participate in actual demonstrations of these planetary wonders, when we got our own hands dirty, so to speak…then the magic happened.
In general, in discussions with my English classes, I always knew the answers to the questions I intended to put to the students. Occasionally, though, a kid would give an answer I had never thought of, or even better, pose a followup question that I could not readily answer myself. Twenty-five years ago, I’d have found that terrifying. Today I realize that those were some of the most thrilling moments of my career.
Next month, please look for a post on the shifting roles of administrators and parents in education.