Required Reflection on the First Semester in the Trenches
Well, as trenches go, my first semester has been the proverbial up and down. Luckily for this post, I am currently up for the down stroke. This post is going to be mostly just a medley of ideas running through my head about what's been working recently and how that reflects the changes I've gone through over the last four months.
Long thought:
What I feel like people expect/want me to say: I should have started off this year as a stricter teacher. I should have come out harder in terms of my rules, procedures, and management.
I think that statement would be largely false. I think, oddly enough, I came out as hard as I could. I planned out my procedures as best I could; I was as strict as I could really imagine being; I was as authoritarian as I could imagine being. The classroom I created was much different than the one I had during summer school and even than the one I though I would have during summer school. Mostly, this decision was one of (accurately) low self-confidence. I was very right to think I am not yet a good enough manager to have the classroom environment I want to have. I'm still not (obviously).
None of this was good enough. Management is not simply a matter of procedures, rewards and consequences. The tone behind management seems to be the most important aspect of management. When you lack the institutional support to back up your "objective" ladder of consequences, it seems that you need to get the students to respect you, personally, enough to back up all those consequences in house. In this culture, that becomes uncomfortably Machiavellian. Respect here seems to be almost synonymous with fear. Fear has to come even before love. Gaining students' respect becomes a matter of asserting emotional and psychological dominance over each student individually, and then once this hierarchy exists of showing the students that you will, in fact, love them. This love, in turn, allows them to maybe begin to try to think about loving you back.
Some people seem more able than others to develop this tone of fear and love in their classroom. As a TFA-er I was recently talking to told me, the best white male teachers she knew were the ones that have yelled at their students. In fact, I've been told on multiple occasions that i need to "yell" and get "angry" at my students. "Yelling" just operates as a way of creating that tone of fear. Once you've gotten word out that you can "yell," you have to do it less and less. Once you've got your own back, you're all set.
Unfortunately (or now fortunately) for me, only yesterday, did I, for the first time, feel like I had even begun to be able to impersonate someone who might be said to have such a tone. It wasn't even that I was angry that they were talking; but I needed them to think I was angry or they wouldn't listen to me. As one of my more annoying students said, "Mr. Weimer is becoming a man." It is the beginning of me trying to speak to my students in a language of verbal violence that they can understand so that eventually I might be able to show them another way of expressing those emotions or thoughts. This sort of "angry" tone is a function of a behavior that I do not want to have. That is a person I do not want to be. It is one of the reasons why I don't think I should stay here too long. For one, I honestly don't believe I will ever be able to impersonate a person who can have an angry tone well enough to convince these students. I need to be that person, which is a person I don't want to be. At the same time, just being able to impersonate that person adds a skill to my tool-belt I never thought I'd have. In most any other teaching situation, I think just the confidence behind the ability will be enough to secure respect.
Shorter Thoughts:
I love teaching. I love watching students think. I love helping them think. I love seeing them smile. I love seeing them frustrated by thinking. While these moments can often be rare in my poorly managed ninth-grade classes, they come around every so often. They are more frequent in Algebra II.
Non-verbal management is priceless: a look; a hand gesture; an eyebrow raise.
I don't know where I'll be in a year, but it'll be in a classroom.
posted by Dave @ 6:57 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
I want you to go back and re-read(or read) some of my responses to earlier blogs and to recall some of our conversations. In particular, assertiveness which allows for the expression of anger while owning the feeling(with the implicit concept that "anger" is a normal, healthy emotion. It is how that emotion is expressed that is unhealthy at times as you have been discussing. However, it is okay to raise your voice. Really! It doesn't make you less gentle nor does it make you a "bad" person.
Do you recall me saying something about having to really work and struggle if you are going to attempt to implement a different apporach?
Um, might I ask how you could feel confident in classroom management having never really done it before nor having gotten much in the way of useful ideas for same? And, low confidence, again, is okay. It's low self-esteem that will lead to trouble.
Now, I can definitely remember talking about respect. You have figured out the key to management, some of the time, and that is a mutual respect. I DO NOT believe that you have to make respect and fear synonomous and if that is where you are headed, out of necessity, then you had best get out of there.
I did mention acting. Showing anger when you might not feel it or
for that matter, love when you might not feel it.
An aside: have you considered the possibility that some or even most of your students already respect you but in a different way than they, or you are used to or know how to express?
If you act angry does that mean you are becoming "that person" or merely, as you say, using a tool? If that tool gets you to a new place which is the place you want to be, then is it worth it?
Maybe showing the movies about the principal who carried a bat around and instilled fear vs. the one about Heime Escalante who taught math in LA could stimulate a discussion on this very topic.
The most important thing here that I see is that you know, in your heart, that you love teaching and, you know, in your heart, that your approach to management could and would work in the right environment. It could even work there but it would take much time and be fraught with incredible frustration. And, apparently, no support from ANYONE.
We will talk, you and I.
You do not need to show the angry white man side of you Wiem. The kids we teach want that so badly, they want for us to yell and to lose our cool, if we do they win. Wiem, continue to be the cool dude that you are and they will come around. Just be sure to stick to your procedures.
Post a Comment
<< Home