Lest I Sound Self-Righteous

Today, as I reflected on my last three posts, all of which are aimed at offering those outside the teaching profession a look into my world, I began to wonder this: "Am I painting an unrealistic picture of myself?  Am I portraying myself as some model teacher who is the Mother Theresa of the educational landscape?  Am I sounding snippy, defensive, and egotistical?"

Thus, I want to attempt to make one thing clear.  I'm no Superman.  I'm not the last bastion of virtue in public education.  I don't have all the answers. I'm not a martyr, and I certainly don't want anyone to ever think I have delusions that being a teacher makes me more righteous, noble, or persecuted than the next guy.

I'm a work in progress, a guy with good intentions who is learning day by day. I'm not always brimming with compassion. I don't always make the right calls when it comes to managing students. In short, I have the capacity to "fail" students, not by giving them F's, but by simply not being the best I can be for them.  At times I may talk like I'm the most dedicated professional on the planet, but there are days when...well...there are days, right? 

However, on a good day with the wind behind me, I'm a little more wise than I was the day before. I honestly believe the trajectory of my professional life is positive, though sometimes my progression is a barely noticeable upward grade at best.

As is true for all of us, educator or otherwise, my struggle is to do the best I can because that's what is right and just for me to do. We all have our rough patches, and none of us can do our job perfectly at all times, but that does not excuse us from striving to fulfill our calling to the best of our ability. Such striving calls each and every one of us to deep reflection and, at times, brutally honest self-evaluation.  

To offer just a bit of insight into this struggle, as I've experienced it in my profession, here is a selection of a piece I wrote this summer entitled, "Primum Non Nocere," translated from the Latin as "First, Do No Harm."

Primum Non Nocere
If there was one goal I had when I got into this profession, it was to make children love writing.  I wanted them to understand the power of the written word and to respect the potency of the pen.  I wanted students to be freed to explore all aspects of life through their writing and to inject their own voice and personality into the world around them.

So, how did I go about achieving such a lofty goal? It was simple.

1. With dictatorial authority, I assigned enough writing work that my students would likely have traded places with the unfortunate souls picked to labor in the construction of the pyramids at Giza. I saddled my poor pupils with an unholy amount of work, much of it assigned in an attempt to fatten the gradebook, and explained it away as just a part of "rigorous" course expectations. Additionally, when students wrote, it was always game time.  Unlike football, a sport in which practice time exceeds game time by a five to one margin, my writing assignments were all high stakes games intended to determine winners and losers.  When the assignments are as numerous as the stars, there's no time for practice, so my I made sure my students knew I expected perfection in every writing...all 10,557.3 of them.

2. When grading that work, I taught them to respect my authority by essentially writing a counter-essay on their paper.  My best estimates are that I was routinely killing off one pen for every 1.7 essays I graded.  I offered no shortage of red-ink feedback, and while there's no way to recount every insightful comment I offered students, I can assure you I had a plethora of creative ways to say, "WRONG!"

3. When my young pupils got a creative tingling in their spines and left the safety of a writing formula, often leading to poor decisions, I chastised them by asking, "Why couldn't you just have done it the way I asked?" After all, I had clearly told them that I wanted them to sound just like (insert name of professional writer here), right?

4. To really make my student love writing, I spoke of due dates as Levitical law, required students to follow arbitrary processes I don't even follow (do as I say, not as I do, right?), and made them so scared of putting a comma in the wrong place that they simply chose to abandon comma usage entirely.

5. To put the proverbial cherry on top, I preached what I didn't practice.  I pushed students to write from the heart and to wrestle with how to best express their thoughts into words...even though I hadn't in a long time. I was a teacher, not a writer.  Through the way I conducted my class, I confirmed to my students that writers were people who lived in New York, wore funny hats,  and eked out a meager living unless they were willing to write about vampires in love with humans; teachers, on the other hand, were people who weren't brave enough to move to New York, couldn't pull off wearing funny hats, or weren't desperate enough to write about vampires in love with humans.

Put simply, the medical community has the perfect word for the teaching strategies I employed early in my career: malpractice.

All of this may sound overly dramatized, and perhaps it is to some extent.  There were moments of success; not everything was a failure. However, as I reflect on the first few years I spent as an English teacher, I can clearly pick out numerous teaching tendencies that were far more detrimental to than helpful in developing my students' abilities and desire to write.  While it was definitely tough to look back and realize that I may have actually turned many a student away from writing, that harsh realization has led to a renewed and deeper commitment to the goals I had nine years ago as a new teacher.

So what's my new plan of action?

1. Practice, Practice, Practice. My students will still write...a lot.  However, whereas I used to make every writing a high stakes situation, I now plan to incorporate more freewriting as an opportunity to rehearse strategies as well as create the raw ideas from which major writings will be formed.

2. Coach more than I criticize. The best coaches instill two things in their players: confidence in their existing abilities and a drive to become better.  Few coaches, though, do this by overloading players with criticism and exasperated correction.  I should be no different.  Rather than treating student work as a fault-finding mission, I want to find every reason to affirm their successes and to encourage them to build on those.

3. Birth writers instead of cloning them. Formulas can be helpful and offer safety to developing writers, but formulas can also kill the personality that makes each writer unique. So can expecting kids to imitate professional articles used as mentor texts. In my class, I want to encourage writers to develop their own unique voice and style.  This will, undoubtedly lead to some missteps as students seek to find their voice, but that's part of the beauty of writing; there's as much to be learned in getting lost as there is in arriving!

4. Let them write like writers.  Not all writers work with solid deadlines and not all writers follow the same processes.  Friends of mine who are published writers often set their own timetables and none of them faithfully follows a one-size-fits-all writing process involving notecards, outlines, and the like.  What if students, knowing what they were expected to produce, were asked to responsibly set up their own timetable for completion?  What if students, after being exposed to different writing strategies, were allowed to develop the writing process that best suited their personality and needs?  While such propositions sound scary, they also sound a lot less like coercion than were the strongarm tactics I used to use.

5. Show them how a writer works.  It is my mission to  destroy the false perception that writers and teachers cannot be one in the same.  I am a writer. I just happen to be a writer who works in a public school.  I wrestle with ideas.  I struggle to find the right way to pen what's in my head.  I agonize over revisions.  I want my kids to see this happening.  Rather than hearing me talk about writing, I want my kids to see me write.

Only time will tell if these strategies will help me develop and inspire young writers. However, I have no doubt that these plans will, at the very least, help me live out the words of Hippocrates, "First, do no harm."

Bear in mind that this piece is still in progress.  I haven't touched it in a while, but I do plan on refining it further. As I tell my students, very little of our writing should ever truly be "done."

And why do I offer this?  I post this primarily for the following purpose: I want to assure everyone that while I may take a stand on a super-sized "high horse" from time to time...though I might shake my fist at the sky some days in spirit of self-righteous indignation, you can be assured that I am keenly aware of this fact:

On even my best days, I am an imperfect teacher (not to mention husband, father, coach, man of faith, etc.). I want to see students do great things and I really do love them, but I have failed them before and will fail them again.

It is my sincere hope that if nothing else, though, I am genuine and honest. I ask that of my students, so I have no excuse for not doing so myself.