I’ve been reading these days a delicious book edited by non-fiction guru Lee Gutkind, What I Didn’t Know: True Stories of Becoming a Teacher, and I’m borrowing his title for my post (you can take a peek at the book on Google Books). This lovely volume gathers together twenty brief memoirs by a variety of US teachers focused on the beginning of their careers, some going back to the 1960s (most authors are women, by the way).
Despite the different circumstances and approaches, the memoirs share a similar pattern. A person chooses a career in teaching, either as a first choice or a second chance in life, either in primary or in secondary school, only to find that the actual practice of teaching is very different from what they had imagined and how they had been trained. This is an optimistic book and so most of the memoirs begin with a period of great difficulties, followed by necessary adjustment leading, finally, to a happy career. All the teachers face the same main obstacle: the bureaucratization of teaching, which has turned students into cogs in an immense testing machinery rather than into the protagonists of their own learning process, as they should be.
I am awed and humbled by the energy these teachers and many others have employed in educating so many children in the USA and elsewhere. It is obvious to me, as it should be to everyone, that primary and secondary school teachers never receive the acknowledgment they deserve from parents and from society in general. As happens in all professions, there are bound to be a number of totally useless teachers but my impression is that as a whole the teachers are doing their best given the pitiful state of education these days. Readers of Gutkind’s edited volume will wonder at why teachers need to battle so much disrespect in the classroom, even from very young children, but this is an attitude that reflects the general disrespect for their task. Children no longer hear at home positive opinions of teachers and possibly also disrespecting their parents they project onto their teachers the aversion they feel for the whole adult world. Most teachers in the volume focus precisely on how they won their students’ respect after much effort, but they never present themselves as master manipulators of the children in their classroom. They try to understand the children’s background and the moment they do this opens up new avenues for mutual empathy.
I wish there were a similar volume on the experiences of university teachers. If there is one, please let me know. My impression is that when we speak of teaching we hardly ever think of the university, perhaps because the institution itself does not care much about this aspect of our profession. One of the teachers in Gutkind’s volume is a former scientist with a PhD and some college teaching in her CV. She is made quite angry by a headmistress who not only wrongly assumes that doing research takes a couple of hours a day but who tells her that having a PhD does not mean you know how to teach a subject. I should think that in this point she is perfectly right. We now have at my university a programme designed to give new teachers basic training (I’m not sure how many actually take it) but it has been traditionally assumed that a good researcher must be a good teacher. This is, clearly, a very wrong assumption since generating and communicating knowledge require different sets of skills. We all have been as students the victims of academic luminaries with an erratic sense of grading and a tendency to regard lectures as time detracted from precious research. There seem to be fewer of these unempathetic teachers (if they deserve the title) but surely they still exist, if only among the oldest segments of the profession.
I have written frequently here about how the hardest part of being a university teacher is not the disrespect that plagues elementary and secondary school teachers, but the obligation to be entertaining. University students have a very low tolerance of boredom and a too high expectation that learning must be fun because this a message they have received again and again. In the case of my own area, I remember plenty of language schools advertising their English courses as great fun rather than hard study. This possibly explains why so very few Spaniards can maintain a basic conversation in English (22% at the last count, and this seems high to me).
Whereas the teachers whose memoirs I have been reading narrate a process of coming to terms with their students’ realities and reaching a compromise, I find myself getting increasingly crankier and being less than willing to be entertaining. A student once defined me as ‘proud’ and maybe what she meant was that my inflexibility has been growing. I acknowledge that: words like ‘gamification’ make me cringe, concepts like ‘teaching innovation through digitalization’ seem to me abhorrent. Of course I use my virtual classroom as an extension of my physical classroom, but as I have been writing again and again no teaching innovation can happen without working on what students contribute to their own teaching. As things are, they are treated as rather passive participants in most pedagogical currents.
Perhaps a problem hardly ever mentioned is that we teach for too long. I was aghast to discover that Maitland Jones jr., the teacher recently dismissed by NYU following a letter of complaint by 82 of his 350 students, is 84. He started teaching at Princeton in 1964, which means that his career spans now 58 years. He may be the best teacher in the world, for all I know, or the worst but there is a turning point after which the generational gap is just too big. You need to consider that the students’ entrance age is 18: by the time a teacher hits 36, that’s twice their age; at 54, that’s three times their age; by 72, which should be the absolute limit, the teacher is four times older. You don’t want students to be taught by their grandparents’ generation, in my humble opinion. Ideally, they should be taught by persons not older than 60, but this view probably comes from my having been a teacher already for 31 years, even though I’m only 56. I’m just very, very tired and shudder at having to face more 20-year-olds for at least 11 more years. Not because they misbehave (not at all!) but because I am beginning to lack the energy my job requires, much more so the energy to be entertaining. Can I please be old and boring?
This takes me back to my first day in the job, back in September 1991, when I was 25 and, so, only seven years older than my students. I don’t remember any details and it would be impossible for me to contribute to a volume like the one edited by Gutkind, but I do recall that my main concern was being a better teacher than my own teachers. I was beginning my doctoral studies, which included two full academic years of tuition, and I believe that being both teacher and student in that period helped me very much. I did not receive, as I have noted, any specific training (I had taken a course but aimed at secondary school teaching) and I often felt lost and lonely. I recall preparing classes down to the last detail in crowded worksheets, a habit I have progressively lost. My class notes are now just a few lines because the best part of the Literature class are the spaces for discussion that open up as we debate, and that cannot be fully controlled. My best lectures, I think, are always the ones that begin at one point and branch out in unexpected ways because a student makes a clever comment. In fact, that’s what I love best as a teacher: not knowing 100% what’s going to happen in class.
So, what I didn’t know on that first day of class is precisely this: how to relax and take it for granted that not everything is under control in the classroom. Unlike the teachers in Gutkind’s volume, I have no external board checking that I have completed my programme, but I have learned to plan content in more realistic ways than I did at the beginning of my career. Gutkind’s teachers obsess about making their students ready for their final tests, I worry that mine meet deadlines but, basically, I respond to no authority (only to my Victorian sense of duty). The way we work, the students are adults entitled to lodging complaints if things do not work well, but we are not monitored subject by subject by the university (each degree is monitored every few years and, of course, each degree Coordinator keeps an eye on us).
This means that the teaching experiences at university level are immensely varied, possibly even within the same degree and Departament. We don’t really discuss them much, though at least in my Department we meet once a year for a workshop I have been running since 2014, Teaching English Language, Literature and Culture. My colleagues have shown so far interest, but not really enthusiasm… I wonder what would happen if I proposed that we write something along the lines of Gutkind’s volume. Now that I think about it, I’ll propose that as the topic of our next workshop. And I’ll let you know next January what we didn’t know that we now know as teachers.