Teacher on Mute

  

  I sang fully and long and for two days to open our new one-woman musical—Shakespeare's *itches: The Women Talk Back.  On Friday morning, I woke up without a voice.  This had never happened to me before. Honestly, I was panicky—with two big shows coming up within twelve days. I had to rest. I love my classes too much to cancel unless it’s absolutely necessary. I knew that I would have to teach my morning Writing Poetry class without talking: whispering is even worse for the voice. I pushed my Mute button.

     Of course, I had the white board, might even have pulled down the screen and opened up the class PC. Or thrown the students (as it were) into groups for the whole time. But we had an opportunity. What would happen for almost three hours if I didn't phonate?

     Many of us come to this class before the official start time—to beat traffic, to munch Mary Ellen's goodies, to enjoy some chat time.  This is a media-freeze class, so there's nothing much to do but actually connect.  I wrote "Can't use my voice today" on the board. 

     And in my distraction, I had forgotten my book.  OK. Official start of class. I motioned for them to open their books (Mentor and Muse)—hands in prayer position, then open.  I motioned to Megan to begin responding.  She interpreted this as "start reading aloud."  OK. We usually do that for poems, but not for essays. Since I didn't have the book in front of me, that works. At the bottom of the page (I knew because of how her head bent as she read) I made my hands into goose feet landing on a lake. Someone noticed and told her to stop . I wrote on the board: "What did you learn for your own writing from this?"  All I had to do for the next half hour, was to record—point to the question I wrote in the middle of board, and record. I took to including quote marks and students’ names. Some fascinating dynamics!   A collaborative spirit arose, as students interpreted and reinterpreted for each other what I might meant with hand and body gestures—“say more," "stop apologizing" (we're retraining Generra), “that’s plodding,” “ho-hum,” “halleluia.”        

     I noticed that as the students shifted from interpreting my speaking to interpreting my body language, as they relied more on reading the board, their contributions became more visual and kinetic. Adam, who is an artist, read and interpreted my body language the most quickly and accurately to my intent.  He started to offer streams of images for the writing process, such as this for (yep) finding your voice—“it’s like tuning a radio.”  Deanna, too, sitting close to me, became an astute translator of my cues to the class. Students started to talk more softly and with more expression in their voices.  We became much more aware of all the sounds around us.  We retuned!

     When I asked the students what their experience was, they universally Liked (and Shared).  Not, ha-ha, because they would rather not listen to me, but because of how, like water, they were able to flow into the gap I left. These were some of their responses:  “we got to teach each other,” “it was fun,” “we took care of each other.”  I’ll ask again next week, to see how their week was affected by this experiment.

© 2014 Susanna Rich

Training the Elephant

     If an elephant walks along a market street in India, she will reach now to the left for a melon, now to the right for a grab of pistachios~led by her trunk, glutting on the available feast. She will not walk very far. Why should she?  But given some object to hold, such as a stick, she can be easily led to the fields beyond, the brook where she might bathe, the open sun in which to bask.
     It is the nature of the human mind to be constantly scanning~for resources, mates, predators. Now this way, now that. Boredom is "nowhere to focus"~an experience of scanning that devolves into numbness; frustration; anxiety; depression, and its concomitant, anger. The antidote, and corollary tendency of the mind, is to seize on an object, like an owl on its prey. That's the how of golf, Elvis collections, laser surgeries, guacamole recipes, digital cameras. But the need to scan makes us vulnerable~to Nintendo, Tweeting, Facebooking, Cheetos, Black Friday sales, Budweiser, and on~all the things that offer our minds respite from scanning, at our own expense. The need to seize can freeze. If the elephant's trunk is constantly occupied, she can't feed herself.
     Even as I write this post, I find ways to stop myself from scanning. I open a new file to write the post, a not-to-be-underestimated step.  Woody Allen says, "80% of success is showing up." I anticipate what might arrest the attention of my readers. I choose an unexpected image for a teaching essay~an elephant. I find an image of an elephant with an unexpected basketball in her/his trunk. I surprise myself, and hopefully, you, onto the page. I keep a working outline scrolling ahead of me.
     When a student asks me What do you want? the subtext is likely to be Saving me from myself! She is asking for something to help her gather her attention in a direction, so she might move forward. But I, as her teacher, want something that will help me, as her teacher, to focus.  The A paper, if we must talk academic economics, is the one that surprises me with its originality, that stops me from scanning for something to get me through the stack of papers. That is, in short, not boring to us both.
     How do we guide our students to train their minds, so that they will not be vulnerable to predatory politics, commerce, and, yes, predatory teaching?  We can beat minds into submission, as mahouts traditionally do elephants. For that, bring on the hooks, the chains, the starvation, humiliation, the pain of rigid pedagogies.  Beat the elephant so it will walk that street.
     Or, we can resist what unenlightened administrators deem to be "focused": chaining students to hackneyed standards. A first step to this is to help each other appreciate how the mind works~that it will, that it must forage. But it also needs surprise and novelty to move forward.
     Then, when a student asks me What do you want? I turn the question back to her: What do you want?  What surprises you?  What energizes you?  Open questions, by their nature, focus us, lead us to surprise. Next, I ask How can we make this assignment about you? And then, the important step, help her to commit, to hold onto this focus for the ride.
     How are you training your own and others' elephants? Where is your slam-dunk?

Teaching to the Test*: Duh?

                

       “Assessment” derives from the Latin ad sedēre, “to sit next to.”  A lovely image—reading the same page or screen, together; mirroring responses; the side hug of human warmth; creating energy between us.  How very far that is from what assessment has come to mean—teachers stomping at the board or marching the aisles as they drill students, frightening them and their parents about impending test dates, proctoring (shall we etymologize that?) patrolling rows of tykes whose feet might not even reach the floor.  It’s military, hostile, intimidating, and wrong.  These assessment systems serve the bottom-line of litter-box education—coverage and control.

        Teaching to the test teaches students that knowledge is packaged into neat three and four options—all of reality suffering from the fallacies of trifurcation and quatrifurcation—boxed into tiny squares, fill-in holes. Constant choosing between others’ alternatives—not of your own devising.  Emily Dickinson, stop looking out the window and define “hope” (1) to wish for, (2) to look forward to, (3) to mistrust, (4) all of the above.  Where are the feathers?  Where is the singing in the chillest land?  Or, Will, stop nibbling on your quill: True or False, “Macbeth is the moving force in Macbeth.”  Albert failed the exam that would have allowed him to be an electrical engineer—what if that discouraged him from investigating energy?  And math: True or False: 1+1=2?  That’s only true in the decimal system: 1+1=10 in the binary.

           When we teach to the test, that’s exactly what students learn, sort of—how to take tests.  Duh!

            Honestly, if it can be teach-to-the-test assessed—it’s not important.  If it’s important, it can’t be assessed.  I’ll repeat that: if it can be assessed—it’s not important. If it’s important, it can’t be assessed. 

           That goes for assessing teachers, as well.  The most valuable lessons are the ones we can’t teach, directly. When I asked my College Writing: Theory and Practice students (including the chair of my department and several other full professors) what they appreciated most about our work together, I was hoping that they would mention my zippy take on punctuation, or the body of new research we discussed.  Their first answer was my passion for writing and respect for students.  That was not recorded on any lesson plan for the course.

            Learning doesn’t happen in neat, linear increments. I assess my learning and teaching experiences by what stays.  It’s one thing to study for and pass the test—it’s another to forget what you studied under duress, and with NO MEANING.  One student, hating Shakespeare when she entered a class, ended up having a quote tattooed onto her ankle—“And though she be but little, she is fierce.”  That’s assessment for student and teacher, both.  When, years later, I learn that a former student is quoting Emily Dickinson in her activist campaigns—that’s assessment of us all.

           True education is about helping students to develop as creative, thoughtful, compassionate, energetic human beings.  It’s flat-out mean to reduce our educational systems to numbers.  We are truly living in George Orwell’s 1984—digitalized and dehumanized by Big Brother education.

                 Which segues us to the etymology of “test”—the Latin testis for "testicles."  There was a time when testimonies (same root) were conducted by the holding thereof for lie-detection.  Let’s stop ball-busting, shall we?