New Teacher Diaries
How learning happens
Feb 14, 2008 12:10 PM
I work with a fellow who is a contrarian. In the Lakota culture, a contrarian would have to ride a horse into battle backward and behave in a backward manner around the village — the purpose being to act as a mirror so others can learn certain things about themselves. My colleague’s contrarianism, by contrast, serves no purpose at all. He is, in fact, plain and simple a backward educator.
He implores me as I photocopy a chapter from Mark Bowden’s “Black Hawk Down,” “You can’t use that book. They can’t read that book.” I ask him why. His reply: They don’t know the vocabulary necessary. I scratch my chin and ponder which of the responses floating in my head to go with. I don’t want to rock the proverbial boat seeing as I am the new teacher. I try to be diplomatic. I try not to let my true heart show. I simply respond: Isn’t that the point?
Later this colleague tells me that he will not teach anything beyond grammar, usage and mechanics until the students have mastered grammar, usage and mechanics. In 20-plus years, I ask him, have your students ever mastered grammar, usage and mechanics? No, he said. So, you’ve never taught how to write an essay, how to organize a five-paragraph essay, because your students didn’t yet master grammar? For the past two years, I have discovered that this fellow’s educational philosophy is, in fact, to not teach anything a student doesn’t already know. I can’t yet seem to wrap my head around such a thing. We don’t teach the essay to our students until they master grammar. At first glance this may seem reasonable, but this fellow has been perpetually teaching grammar only since Reagan was president. He seems perplexed when I try to teach unfamiliar words and ideas to my students.
It’s not the first time I’ve encountered this variety of contrarian. I met a few back in college. There is a strange educational philosophy that says we shouldn’t teach Shakespeare in the inner city because it is not relevant to the students. This philosophy extrapolates, in my view, to include any challenging thought or idea, any high-order thinking.
I have a different philosophy: high expectations yield high results. And to be clear, I don’t expect a round of applause for inventing the wheel or discovering fire here. I enjoy using words like egregious and contrarian with my students. Within a few days they are using those words as well — and correctly. A remarkable phenomenon, some might say. My amazing philosophy: we should be teaching stuff students don’t yet know. This is how learning happens. Even a second-year teacher like me knows as much.
Mr. History is a pseudonym for a second-year teacher in Queens. A version of this post first appeared in the UFT blog, edwize.org, where “New Teacher Diaries” is a regular feature. If you’re interested in writing for edwize, send an e-mail to sperez1@uft.org.
