Some people, from the time they are in the first grade, know they want to be a schoolteacher. For others, deciding to become an educator is a gradual process, a feeling that ferments for years in the mind and refuses to die.
Not everyone, though, is cut out to be a teacher. A vast difference exists between the ideal of teaching and the reality of the classroom.
Before we began our teaching career many years ago, we believed that our commitment to the language and literature we loved would be enough to charm our students. We envisioned classes of teenagers readily succumbing to the power of poetry and the spell of prose.
But, as we said, that was before we began our professional journey in the nation’s largest workforce.
The disillusioning truth today is that many of our students, even those from seemingly affluent families, are disaffected with the traditional language arts courses. They seem to find no relevance to their own experiences in the programs that constitute the English curriculum.
Students whose race, religion, language, or family customs differ from the so-called Anglo European culture even find less relevance to their lives in such pursuits.
Even as we tried to adapt our traditional approaches to appeal to these uninvolved, often disconnected students, often our efforts failed.
Unwilling to live with our failures, we decided to redesign our teaching instruction and classroom strategies to engage those apathetic and indifferentstudents. We even tried to dispel the “myth” that“English” is a kind of covert cultural code, the knowledge of which belongs to an exclusive club of English instructors and their apprentices.
Probably all educators have experienced some of the frustrations of working with disenchanted students.
Thankfully, toward the end of my career, my instructional approach turned to one of engagement.
I did this by tapping into my students’ natural enjoyment of relating stories about their own lives. I learned that without such engagement I could impart only marginal academic trappings scholars needed to survive in an increasingly complex world: skills woven into discreet learning units that involved problem solving, career planning, and other practical expertise necessary for daily life.
And what is more, the latest electronic wonders now offer students an opportunity to build on their individual interests, experiences, strengths, and cultural identities—all of which can be shared with each other, contributing to their own growth and development.
Effective English teachers currently strive to select coursework of recognized literary merit that reflects the diversity of human experience, but there is no substitute for the teacher’s own creativity in response to disenchanted students.
Reaching out to unmotivated children holds the greatest promise in the 21st century.
One of the first tasks of teachers today is to gain the trust of their students, especially those who are predisposed to feeling alienated from formal classroom instruction. For them, scholarship holds little, if any, relevance.
Like the speaker in one of Emily Dickenson’s poems, they are “nobodies” in the traditional school setting. They are the detached students who have built a shell against anticipated failure. By the time they are in high school, their disengagement manifests itself as indifference to learning.
The basis of success, however, is the interest that students have in finding out about themselves—as each one explores the meaning of his/her own experiences.
And like some characters in a Charles Dickens’ novel, our teenage students lead contradictory lives. At home they are still dependent on their parents and are subject to their authority, yet they have more opportunities to make independent choices than ever before.
At school, their lives are controlled by teachers and administrators, but the campus is also the social nucleus of their lives. They are prejudged by their choice of peers. Many feel unloved and unwanted.
In short, our teenage students believe they are living in “the best of times and the worst of times,” much as the fictional characters did in Tale of Two Cities:
“It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way…”
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Top o’ the morning!