Rainy Day Teacher #1

Days like these days--intermittent bouts of rain, sky the color of steel--make it hard to get excited about anything beyond sweatpants, coffee, and Lifetime movies. Adding to this malaise, I've just finalized the grades for my first quarter at ITT Technical Institute and am struggling with the strange mixture of relief and disappointment that often follows final grade submission. Did I do enough to help my students? Did they do enough to help themselves? Did I make class interesting? Did activities trump learning?

Teaching is a strange profession. Perhaps there are wonderful teachers out there who can tame the lion when thrown into the den, but I have found in my (admittedly somewhat limited) experience, that the effectiveness of my classes are in large part determined by the make-up of the class, the commitment of the students (both in regards to attendance and to how they conduct themselves while in class), and the spoken or unspoken expectations communicated by the school at which I'm teaching. In short, I've held the opinion that a lot of a class's effectiveness is determined by factors outside of a teacher's power. Sure, a good teacher can motivate the apathetic and can set a standard of expectation separate from the school, but I've always thought that good teachers needed students who had, on some level, the will to learn. Perhaps that's why a recent article in The New York Times caught my attention. (You can find the article in its entirety here.) It's subject: teaching teachers to teach. Its thesis: good teachers can be made.

We hear this debate all the time, especially with writers: are good poets born with some innate talent or do they develop it through intense study? Putting that issue aside so that we can move past an endless nature vs. nurture debate, the article brings up some great, concrete ways to turn your sluggish classroom into an industrious factory of learning (perhaps a poor metaphor, but check out the videos linked to the article for the proof). The biggest observation brought up in the article is that in many education programs, very little time is devoted to teaching teachers effective teaching methods. (How's that for repetition?) I flash back to my teacher training and think about how helpful it would have been to learn classroom management techniques, such as Cold Call. I'm not disparaging my training nor saying that I should have expected to be trained this way. (From what I hear, many TAs are tossed into the classroom without the two-week training and sustained support over the course of the first semester that I received.) It's just articles like these and the work that these teachers are doing infuses me again with excitement to get back into the classroom, even on dreary days. Teaching, for those who feel at home in the classroom and are looking for more than a pay check, is a constant process of development, of introducing new techniques, of cutting exercises that flop. These kinds of articles give me a new set of tools to try out. Like an angler with a new fly rod, I'm eager to see what I'll hook.