After watching a video about teacher stress I came up with a few ideas that might make teaching easier. But of course, I’m still in my anticipatory phase, which means that I’m a shameless idealist, an excited romantic. I wasn’t surprised to discover that novice teachers experience various phases during their first year of teaching that move from anticipation and excitement to the daily struggles of survival mode followed by utter disillusionment. Having had a variety of life experiences, this sounds fairly par for the course. Especially if one has great expectations about the endeavor she is about to embark on. Herein lies the key to avoiding disillusionment. Have no expectations. Easier said than done, but worth a try! Also worth remembering is the lesson that Pip learned: kindness and conscience are more important than scholarship (props to Charles Dickens). But wait, there’s more to the phases and they go like this: if coping strategies are properly attended to, novice teachers can bounce back from the depths of despair feeling rejuvenated, ready to reflect on mistakes and problems which will be followed by another anticipation phase that looks forward to a new year: one that will be faced with new coping and planning strategies. (Cue the sound effect: needle scrapes across the record.) Since I am still in my first anticipatory phase, the one characteristic of brash assertions and risky system-bucking behaviors, I propose that the upward turn of phase in this case, is due to obsequious adherence to convention. Rejuvenation thus stems from the hope that conformity will yield better crops; and reflections consist of gazing over the map in order to avoid the same dirt paths and dead ends one might have been lucky enough to avoid in the first place if only… But I ask you, what place does convention hold in our education systems? Is it our fate to repeat over and over the failures of the past? I don’t disagree that acquiescence may have its place in the overall scheme, even Galileo had to admit he was ‘wrong,’ but the matter is delicate, and these children are the future. Most of what I have just proclaimed may have sounded inconceivably conspicuous, and that is as it should be. For now, let us move on to my first brilliant idea (one of many more to come) that is both ahead of and behind my time. I speculate that much of the frustration that teachers experience stems from year after year of new classes full of new students all of whom arrive with different learning levels and abilities that they must get to know before they can help. It takes an enormous amount of time and energy to build the kind of trust, understanding and emotional bonds that facilitate real growth in learning. The longer this takes, the less time a child has to do the serious work of progressing along the learning continuum. Therefore, my proposal for this blog—based on the intuitive thoughts that rose to the surface of my cerebral cortex during the video—is that teachers continue to teach the same students year after year, grade after grade. (Ideally we would drop the whole “grade” thang too, but for now I’ll stick to one suggestion for easing the novice teacher into her vocation.) By growing and progressing from grade to grade right along with the students, teachers would have the opportunity to best manage their classrooms, develop relationships, understand student needs and be innovative with lessons. This strategy is called “looping” in some progressive circles and, if I remember correctly, it was regularly practiced eons ago in the first one-room schoolhouses that speckled the land. The classroom community would evolve and change, yet connections would be easier to facilitate and work would be most efficient. The main downfall of this restructure, as I see it, is the risk that teachers and students would become patterned. That is to say, familiarity breeds contempt. It is sometimes the case that we become “comfortable” in our relationships and/or settings. Often we strive for the comfort of the habitual only to become bored with certainty and its stagnant waters. Without awareness we can end up typecasting based on preconceived notions that can be harmful to others and ourselves. However, a well-trained teacher knows how to avoid this pitfall. She knows that the boundaries of a person are limitless and that everyday we can come face to face with riddles that force us to change the way we think. A teacher well trained in the art of living and teaching, knows the value of ambiguity and spontaneity and she uses tools like these regularly.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorNatalie Nickerson; that's me. Archives
March 2016
Categories
All
|