Why Teaching Is Fun, or Why I Laugh Too Much in Class

I'm teaching Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, and we are taking turns reading scenes from one of the book’s story-chapters.

As a student reads the beginning of a scene where Nector, who is literally standing, comes figuratively crawling back to Marie, who has literally just been on her knees, my eyes glance down a few lines and I see what Marie is going to do and I shake my head and quietly chuckle, one of those stifled-guffaw chuckles, an involuntary quasi-giggle that doesn’t interrupt the reading.

I’m laughing not because what’s happening in the story is funny, but because these characters are about to do the very kind of thing people like them will do. They’re about to be themselves. So I guess I’m laughing in appreciation at how well Erdrich has made this surprising next move inevitable, or these characters’ inevitable behavior surprising.

I’m also laughing because Nector and Marie have become two old friends of mine, and their antics never fail to amuse me.

I do this sort of thing too often in class. Sometimes, for instance, I laugh out loud at something the students find disturbing, but I’m laughing at what an odd disturbing thing this is or what an odd time for it to happen or at my disbelief that the writer ever thought of such a disturbing event.

But this time when I quietly laugh, I glance up and see one of my students smiling. She’s looking at me, but the smile is not for me, but for the fact that I’m laughing at a line that hasn’t been read yet.

I think she’s smiling at the fact that, while her classmate’s voice drones through the unwanted task of reading aloud in class, I have fallen into the text and come back up laughing – a sort of unplanned, public literary baptism. She’s smiling because she has caught her teacher enjoying his life’s work, even at this late stage, even in this cold classroom at 7:27 a.m., with a gang of tired teenagers trying patiently and respectfully to weather the first of the day’s seven classes.

She’s smiling because she knows I’ve been “going over” this book in class for at least 20 years and you’d think I’d have it memorized by now and I’d be sick of it, but look at this ol’ coot – he can’t even wait for the freaking punch line.

Maybe she thinks I’m losing it, that senility is setting in, that I’m some demented crackpot on a bus laughing at the voices in his head while all the other passengers quite sanely dread going to work.

But I hope she’s smiling because she has caught her teacher whistling while he works, being surprised, again, by the joy his life’s work brings him, and as she smiles at this oddity, she envisions a time in future years when her work will give her a similar joy.

Final Marzano Observation Observations

The Class after Observation Day: That flow state that had kept me present, focused and serene during my observation almost immediately gives way to giddiness, and I want to celebrate, to take a victory lap. I have had many, many exciting, rewarding classes, but having one with an Important Audience raises the stakes a bit. So, after a student presentation, we don’t accomplish much.

Post-Observation Conference: Since I can’t think of anything that went wrong, I don’t dread this at all, and it turns out I have no reason to. My observing supervisor is kind, reassuring, generous, complimentary. She tells me I’m a very good teacher, and I say to myself, “On many days, it sure doesn’t feel like I’m a very good teacher.” She tells me it’s obvious that I love teaching, and I say to myself that the days leading up to that class sure didn’t feel like love -- unless love makes you gloomy, angry, uncomfortable, apprehensive, fidgety, anxious, resentful and imposed upon. No, it felt more like the flu.

 As she went through page after page of forms she had to fill out for this thing, suddenly I felt very sorry for her. Thanks to Marzano and his boys, she spends hours and hours doing this.

Looking back, I’m mostly embarrassed and disappointed that I allowed myself to get so caught up in this thing. My first impulse, after all, was simply to ignore it and go on about my business. Call me a dreamy idealist and a  hopeless romantic, but I’ve always thought of teaching as a vocation, a calling, a cause, a mission, far too important to be disturbed by the whims of a hysterical, uninformed, misled electorate and a herd of legislators who are either too dense to pass my high-school classes or are downright wicked in their crass manipulation of the rhetorical fallacies they would’ve learned there.

I’ve learned, incidentally, that I’m not the only teacher with decades of experience who has gotten worked up over the whole thing and been embarrassed about it when it was over. From now on, I hope we’ll all have more faith in ourselves and our students and just go in there and get it done, maybe even forgetting the dates of our observations. And now, some bullet points, a.k.a, mini-rants:

      * The Marzano craze is a brief aberration and will soon go away. It has to.

* Meanwhile, at my school, the administrators are going out of their way to ease anxiety among the teachers and make this thing as painless as possible. I’m pretty sure it’s not like that everywhere. And I’m pretty sure that in many schools, this mess will increase the tension between teachers and administrators.

* If merit pay ever really gets to be a reality, it will likely increase tension and resentment among teachers. What if I don’t get merit pay and some colleague who doesn’t do jack does get it – not that I know of any such colleagues, I’m just saying. What if I get merit pay when all I have to deal with are highly motivated AP students with involved parents, while Ms. Fessmacher down the hall has a gang of hoodlums who can’t wait to get tossed out of the place? 

* If I were a new teacher this year, I’d probably need to be sedated.

* As I’ve said, I had a terrific class when I was observed, but I’ve also had terrific classes without being observed and I’ve had terrific classes when I was observed by someone not evaluating me. I can’t credit the Marzano plan for making me a better teacher that day.

* As I noted in an earlier posting, almost all teacher observations – if not all of them -- are inauthentic or fictional or atypical because of how an observer’s presence changes the dynamics of the classroom. An observer only sees how a teacher and his class perform when they are being observed. Without a SpyCam (I should’ve never given them this idea!), an observer can never see what a teacher and his class are like. An observer can only see a teacher act highly effectively.

* The Marzonian indicators serve only to increase the staged nature of this ordeal. No. 34, for example, is “Applying consequences for lack of adherence to rules and guidelines.” A desperate teacher may be tempted to talk a student into walking in late, for example, so the teacher can show off her skill at applying the consequences. And what if there are no incorrect answers to probe with students (No. 41)?

* It’s pretty sad that all these bulleted points are perfectly obvious, but the nice people who bought into the Marzano zaniness apparently never considered them.
* For a more eloquent and coherent response to a similar disastrous form of evaluation, check out the link below:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/opinion/sunday/confessions-of-a-bad-teacher.html?pagewanted=all

Letting Someone Watch

Two Days Until Observation:  The voices inside me have a shouting match: One tells me I’m wasting my time fretting over this thing, that I should just do what I’ve always done and I’ll be fine. It tells me this whole thing is just a runny nose, not life-threatening pneumonia.

The other voice warns me to prepare for that most humiliating moment, the one where you are forced to acknowledge what you’ve always feared: You are a fraud. You’ve been doing this wrong all these years. A young teacher, the voice says, has no cause to whine about this, but you do. The real game plan is only now about to be revealed to you when the final horn is only seconds away. The horror! To be corrected or chided or guided now, to have the tragic flaw just now exposed.

One Day Until Observation, 2012: The voice of reason asserts itself. In my classroom, I make sure the board looks right and my copies are made and that I’m prepared for another good class with the help of bright, cooperative students discussing a thought-provoking poem. I glance at my list of targeted Marznovian Indicators and accept that not all those things are going to occur tomorrow, and I refuse to rig some scenario in which they will. Everything is in place. I’m ready for someone else to witness what my students see often. I’m not nervous or anxious, and I wouldn’t really say I’m confident. I just am. Let’s do it.

Observation Day: Class begins before the observer shows up, so I go ahead and make my smooth transition from yesterday without her, telling my students to just relax if I repeat all this verbatim once she steps in the room. The students are in good spirits and, as always in these situations, on my side, but not too obviously so.

Meanwhile, I can see the whole class, from beginning to end, in my head. I know the punch line (or the knockout punch), that thing I have planned at the end which will cause hands to fly up all over the room. I don’t rush it. I know that the moments leading up to it will be good enough – well, actually better than good enough. I begin with group work, something I’m not crazy about, but which will work well with today’s activity. I give them clear instructions, a rationale (hey, it all comes back to the AP Lit exam) and a time limit.

While they work, I take attendance, then stroll around the room, not eavesdropping, but just being present. They don’t need me now; they just need me to trust them to do this right. They all stay on task – all of them – as I knew they would. I hear great comments and questions emanating from the groups, and so does my observer, and I’m gratified. My observer is drawn into one of the groups and I occasionally hear her laughing.

Once the volume of their respective discussions begins to diminish, I ask each group to give me its findings, inviting the rest of the class to jump in if they questions or comments of their own. My aging brain hones in on their insights and I restate them to be sure I’ve heard them right and to be sure the student has said what she intended. I ask follow-up questions when needed and, from time to time, note how this process mimics the early minutes of the poetry timed write on AP exam. We’re thinking it through, brainstorming, finding patterns that, while interesting in their own right, can also be the building blocks of a killer essay.

As the punch line approaches, I’m just a man enjoying his work. I’m doing what I’ve loved doing from the first time I did it. A CAT scan of my inner workings would not have revealed a sense of intrusion or contrivance or artificiality due to the presence of a stranger in the class. I was a man enjoying the sights and sensations as a briskly flowing river took him to a better place. If someone happened to be watching from the shore, why would I care?

With a little more than 10 minutes remaining, my little surprise is projected onto the screen, and the students respond with an appropriately visceral reaction. Just before this, the class had been holding separate parts of the poem in their hands, scrutinizing them, meditating on them, trying to find something on which to construct a theme, then a thesis. The surprise is a minor explosion that, instead of blowing things apart, brings them all together, and, just before the bell sounds, all that had been up in the air, settles into a complete whole back on solid ground.

I thank my beloved kids as they leave. My observer reassures me that things went well. And my next class begins to file through the door.