New Year, Old Me

The new year presents a most opportune moment for me to finally return to my blog. There is much to explore, particularly upon completing my second Master's degree and teaching arguably the worst students I've had to date in my teaching career this past semester. I think I will address that issue while it's still making a black mark on my soul.

I didn't have enough AP students sign up for my class this year to make three classes, and so I had the opportunity to teach two classes of AP Language and one class of English 4. Now, it had been four years since I had taught anything other than AP Language and Journalism when I discovered this news, and so I felt pretty apprehensive. After all, I had spent considerable effort trying to structure my teaching life around courses that I felt mattered more than teaching shop-worn literature and poetry. Yes, I did just use the potentially disrespectful term "shop-worn" to describe literature, some of which is a thousand years old and which people much smarter than me have established as being genius. I do not contradict those findings in the least because it is simply a truth that the staples of English 4, Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Beowulf, Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, 1984 and Brave New World are simply fabulous. However, they are fabulous in my own brain and when I am discussing them with other folks who share my dorky obsession with literary criticism. It does not hold this merit when I am trying to be in charge of 25 18 year-old seniors who occasionally go to jail for the night because of getting caught with marijuana or accidentally shoplifting.

But the powers that be, AKA the writers of the South Carolina state standards for English Language Arts, feel that high school seniors should be able to identify major trends in British literature. Perhaps this information will serve to reform these students into culturally aware, model, tax-paying Americans. There are those who argue that there are just some things that everyone should know. Being able to read literature and make predictions, and decipher character motivations help build useful critical thinking skills.

The thing is, though, that these are the lies that people who deeply care about literature have to tell themselves in order to justify that their only skills lie in deconstructing words. In truth, this is whipped cream. And I can say all this because I'm judging myself in all of this.

Watching movies like The Freedom Writers can convince anyone about the power of the journal. But really, we're expected to believe that journaling can lead to the emancipation of the struggles that students living in poverty endure? Or really any students, because all students are now slaves to the mirage of pop culture.

By diving into journalism and AP Language, I was hoping to leave all of this faux soul-searching behind because I would be dealing with the real world instead. I would no longer exert mental energy finding ways to relate Beowulf to single, teenage mothers. But then this year happened.

The gloves were off once I heard the first student drop the F-bomb during class.  My only saving grace was that I was out two days a week for three months completing the internship for my last class. That's how I know there is a God. My long-term substitute left notes at the end of each day telling me which students refused to do any work, which talked back to her, etc. It was always the same students, and despite assigning detentions and the occasional ISS, nothing worked. On the days I was there to teach them, students would not bring their materials, they would fall asleep, they would talk to each other in a normal conversational tone, indifferent to my presence, and some would simply refuse to do anything I asked them to do. They would curse each other out, talk about which types of birth control you could take and still get pregnant, how they liked to drink and smoke and party in general. With no shame.

So my goal was simply to survive. All while I was taking my last class, completing my internship and all of the work that entailed, teaching my two AP classes, and taking care of my own family. All while dreaming of the end of the semester. My husband kept telling me that all of it didn't really exist. Once the semester was over, it would be over. Like it never even happened. Just endure and persevere.

But that doesn't make teaching worth it to me. The people who run our educational system often have never been teachers themselves and certainly have no idea what challenges a typical student poses to a teacher. The Common Core State Standards are much better, in my opinion, because they call specifically for more instruction in nonfiction and argumentative writings and for students to publish materials using the Internet, to collaborate online, and to synthesize various sources and mediums of information into their own ideas. In other words, students have to do their own learning. They can't rely on me to present a Power Point of the major facts they need to know about Anglo-Saxon England in order to better understand Beowulf.

And let me add that students doing their own learning is why so many of my AP students resist and battle me. They are typically used to being in Honors English courses where there is more memorization than in a CP course, but it's still teacher-heavy learning and instruction. That's just not interesting to me, though, and it bores me out of my mind.

I started using some of my AP materials in this English 4 class, believe it or not, because if I had had them read one more poem out of our textbooks, I was just gonna go ahead and walk out the door. We read a chapter about the theories behind argument, watched An Inconvenient Truth, and discussed some argument articles. They especially enjoyed one about how supermarket aisles are arranged on purpose according to marketing strategies.

However, no grand transformation took place, I'm sure much to Erin Gruwell's disappointment. After about two good weeks, they were back to their old, obnoxious, barely tolerable ways. But I'm going to insist that real-world learning worked for them, at least for a little while. And instead of trekking through a useless literature research paper with students who couldn't actually remember my name, I had them complete my usual banned books research project. We got to read some offensive books (well, the word offensive is relative, isn't it?) and they argued about the merits of book censorship and intellectual freedom (but I couldn't actually use that last term because it was too confusing).

And so while it is true that I will no longer be a classroom teacher after this school year ends, this brief foray into the darkest side that I've ever experienced showed me that literature might have its place, but it's not in a classroom like the one I found myself in for four months this year. It just isn't. It does the literature an injustice to pretend that it's accessible to everyone. It really does. Education needs to become more than this. English teachers cannot become English teachers simply because they love to read. Because not too many people do, and when the classroom becomes a struggle between the one prolific reader and the 25 book-haters, let's just call it a day.

The classroom needs to become a place of thinking first and foremost. Give the students issues to think about in the English classroom. Create ideas and questions. Then find reading to match it. Critical thinking skills are not special to the classics only, and teachers need to reach out to the wealth of ideas, questions, and readings around them that most certainly are not in the textbook.

And so in this upcoming new year, I'm going to resolve to go back in time to re-become the old me. The one who just couldn't wait to become a teacher. To go into my classroom in January, for the last first day of school that I will ever go through as a classroom teacher, brimming with ideas and excitement. Because the truth is that no matter how truly horrifying that English 4 class was this past semester, I still can't help but to look up ideas on the Internet during my Christmas break and think of how I can use a wiki in that class. My hope is that my students, even though they resent how hard I make them work for their own knowledge, will see that I just love ideas. I love sharing, seeing what their reactions are, and showing them that they are smarter than they think. Considering ideas they have never heard of before. "Guess what we can do this semester?" I will say, my eyes gleaming. And the answer is, anything we want.