Teaching practice Archives - Page 12 of 13

Personal myths-personal cages

My grandmother is a saint. My father works harder than anyone. My mother pulled herself up by her bootstraps against all odds. My uncle is a brilliant mind who retired at 50, or was it 45? My friend Matt is a fount of knowledge who never forgets anything. My wife is the most organized person I know. I only applied to one school and got in. I had a great GPA, great SATs, never had to take GREs, and wow everyone in interviews. In a few minutes, this paragraph will morph into a plug for The Most Interesting Man in the World.

Recognize that our view of ourselves, even if lofty, is a potential cage for what we could be and how others may see us.

Our personal myths seem innocuous and may even be some of our charm. Some of our friends have a walking joke about our tales. But are they harmless? Hardly. Personal myths develop into beliefs and expectations.

It is believed by some that the personal myth is an extension of the centric view of the world described by Piaget. Children go through a phase where they think that their life is the subject of a film; they are being watched and evaluated. They make faces at walls, ceilings, and other places where people or cameras may be hiding. This comes along with the development of conscience and/or guilt and passes with developmental progress.

Personal myths can overwhelm and cause issues as severe as depression. As we mature, we realize that these truths that we have known do not match the life that we understand. Myths can also be career-threatening as our experiences are inserted into the classroom. In working with pre-service teachers, I regularly stress that we cannot teach our students through the window of our experiences. Our histories have been manipulated in our memory and are unreliable. We have turned our lives into a mythology and we have to frame our remembrances as such. We provide our students with our foggy anecdotes thinking that it provides a level of connection-it may, in fact, cause them to consider that they cannot meet your expectations.

Calibration is key in our lives and our teaching.

A good friend is a successful lawyer who has recently left the city. I remember him most for one thing: When I would tell him something about myself, he would ask, “Do people tell you that, or do you tell people that?” Such an excellent question. Does my view of self come from my own perceptions and experiences or the perceptions and experience of others?

When you tell people something about yourself, do they say, “Oh, really?!” Are they surprised to hear you say that you are a hard worker, an over-achiever, and impeccably neat and orderly? Make a list, mental or otherwise, of descriptors–words that define you. Have a friend do the same with you in mind. Do they match? How do your students view you? Has the view of others been limited by the persona you profess?

Let’s think differently.

Black. White. Alaska. Russia.

Black is not the opposite of white. Think about it. Think about how we learn things.Think about the developmental level you had attained when you first learned about the colors black and white.

You, like the rest of us, were told that they are opposites. When you moved into upper grades, you were given additional and more astute observations regarding black and white. One is a lack of color. One is all colors combined. That is what you were told. But you probably still saw them as opposites. Indulge me and list, mentally or otherwise, the traits of the color black and the color white. If you consider the two on the spectrum, you could probably name more about them that is the same than different. When you think about it, the opposite of both white and black is probably green.

Looking at a map in a book, a child may think that the farthest thing from Russia is Alaska. One is all the way to the left of the page and the other is all the way to the right. We know that they are practically neighbors, don’t we? Some of us, if we’ve never been on long flights might think that the fastest way to China from Philadelphia is to travel East. Until we book that flight and see that we have a stop in California.

Why do I mention these small, obvious, and arguably silly things? Because we need to change the way that we think. We need to listen to what people say and take it all in. Remember it. Stew on it. Ruminate. Chew. And then examine how much of what we heard was colored by the experience of the speaker and by our own experience. Did we agree? Why? Was it because the speaker connected to us and their pacing, verbiage, paralanguage, and/or accent resonated with something within us? We have to separate, in our minds, liking someone and agreeing with someone.

Speakers are compelling. That’s how they make their living. Journalists and authors earn their bones by connecting through the written word. As consumers of media, even when the media is a live discussion, we must be responsible. Even in our own classrooms, we have to be careful that we are responsible authorities and not lords of our domains: doling out information and judging resources unfairly.

We must also be mature. Why is a terrible question. It’s childish and uninformed. It’s loaded and judgmental. It’s a bratty query. You probably really want to know: May I…? Are we able to…? Have you considered…? Is there a reason…? What are some of the questions that we need to ask of our guides and our selves? Are they static questions that have become mantras? Are they dynamic? From where do they come? What are we missing?

Let’s all take some time to revisit the reasons that we do what we do. Reflect on the things that we hold dear, our personal myths and histories. Do these things serve as a foundation for our approaches or do the create blockades to our own development and the development of our students? What are our prejudices? How are they effecting us? Does the unchecked acceptance of a message place a glass ceiling on our own goals?

I look forward to your comments, criticisms, and confessions. Feel free to post anonymously. We need to purge, don’t we? I know I do.

Let’s challenge each other to change the way that we think.

Brush your feet, shake your hands

In my earliest days as an educator, there were few full time jobs to be had and I chose to work in a situation of steady influence rather than hopping about as a substitute teacher from place to place and probably outside my content area. I was in between my fourth and fifth years of college and needed a break from academics and also needed to make a few dollars to pay the bills.

I found myself in South Philadelphia working as an assistant teacher in an early intervention classroom and it was there where I learned many of the ‘tricks’ that I still utilize in my classes today. Whether it was from my students, my lead teacher, or the several therapists who were working in the room, the novelty and variety of practices were never ending. I stole them all. I remember being told, upon hire, I was that the salary was low and the turnover was high–they did, however, get the benefit of fresh faces such as mine who were right out of college.

Being regularly surrounded by students of multiple involvements was a challenge of its own. Many had their own language and vocabulary with an expected repertoire of responses, some were quite distant while some were lucid and possessed more latent delays, and there were a few who were given to violent tantrums. If this were a seminar or in-real-life (IRL) discussion I would probably make some allusion to ‘multitasking’ and we would all smile a cautious smile. These were students who deserved more of us than we could give.

The first lesson that I taught is that the body must be ready to learn before the mind is ready to learn. Every student had a routine upon arrival–this is nothing new to us, is it? Keep in mind that these students had very different routines and, I came to discover, these routines were good for everyone. Routine one: brush your veggies and your feet.

By brushing the feet, lower legs, hands, and lower arms we created static input that acted to organize the nervous system. The students liked it. The brushes tickle and massage, they provided types of input that the students need. We need it too. When our minds or bodies seem out of sorts, we can use these techniques. The brushes that we used looked like this:

Veggie brushes — Brushes come in varied harnesses

and could be found at a variety of ‘frou-frou’ gourmet stores. There is far more to it than just brushing but you get the gist.

The morning was a blur of focused activities categorized by the types of input provided. For those students who needed vestibular input, there was a platform swing which was aluminum and strong enough to hold an instructor and a student. There were weighted vests which, as explained to me, provided downward pressure to help students feel ‘more grounded.’There were all sorts of massaging devices–large, two-handed, AC powered massaging devices that provided sensory input to large muscle groups as well as fingers and toes; and small, hand held devices that the students could manipulate on their own–many of them liked the sensation along with vocalized sound. Along with clapping activities and stomping activities, the room was abuzz with the exact kind of racket that should come from a well-planned course of classroom activity. This was only the first 15 minutes.

Watch for Part 2: Nobody moves, nobody gets taught

Unshouldering the burden

Still wrapping up my thoughts from EdCamp Philly, I wanted to make sure that I put down a few thoughts that sprung to mind while in a session with Kevin Jarrett, Mary Beth Hertz, and Rob Rowe.

Flavio Canto, Judoka and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt was speaking about his techniques, teaching, competing, and his drive to compete. The magazine interview has been long lost and the exact quote has long left my mind but the essence of his remarks were something like this:

I give away my techniques to my enemies in order to force myself to become better. I want to know that I am the best with no secrets and no excuses.

When I read that interview, I remembered something that had happened to me years earlier. I was recently out of undergrad and working in a bookstore’s database department on South Street. One of my coworkers was a writer and invited me to a writers’ get together in South Philly. Being a composer and fan of creative speak, I went along to this open house.

The small home was abuzz with talk of ideas, character discussion, critiques of plots and dialogue, and in a small crowd in the middle of the living room attention turned to me. “So what do you do?” I told them that I’m a composer and started telling the group about a piano piece that I was writing. Thinking that this would be a sympathetic crowd, I shared my current problems regarding the piece. I told them that I was “writing this piece for piano and I am in love with the thematic material.” They leaned in, eager to hear about my process and I was encouraged to continue. Sure that they would understand, I confessed “I like the material so much that I haven’t finished it for fear of ruining it in my mind. It’s really great and I don’t want to destroy the purity of the theme while exploring the development.”

They looked at me like I had three heads. Three ugly heads. With “I hate writers” tattooed on my eyelids. One of them spoke, “Who do you think you are?” I stared back at him. “It’s not yours. I might need that piece and you do not have the right to keep it.” The growing crowd (really, it grew and I think that someone turned the heat on) nodded in agreement. “You need to go finish that piece,” someone said. “I can’t believe you haven’t finished it yet,” said one of the throng. A few people walked away. “How long have you been letting it sit?” someone asked. I didn’t have an answer.

This experience is fresh in my mind. I can still feel the tension. It drives me, though. I think of Flavio Canto. I think of that weird Woody Allen-esque dude in South Philly. I think about how silly I am thinking that I own any of the ideas that come out of my head.

I become protective of my research, of my classroom management strategies, my course design, and my methods of increasing achievement. We all do. We have our pets. We have things that we share when asked. We plan those moments carefully so we do not give away all of our secrets. Why?

Feeling plugged up in your classroom approach? Could it be that you are shouldering a burden that is too great to bear? Education, I am finding, is something that demands to be given away. The same way that a quality story must be read and good music demands participatory listening, education requires action–and not simply the execution of the lesson. It requires sharing, grooming, perfecting, adapting, and giving away of all that you have so that it may reach its potential–without you. Your brilliant ideas will develop and become epic without you…yes, it’s true. Someone will do it better. Be proud. Now do it again. And again.

We think that we own it. Foolish, isn’t it? We protect it like a jealous love or a protective parent. Worse is when we think that it’s not that big a deal, that’s it’s not worth sharing. Also foolish. What are your confessions?