Teach with Your Heart, But Don't Lose It

Reliable studies indicate that somewhere between 40 and 50 per cent of new teachers will leave the profession after only five years, and one of the reasons for this is the rather broad term burnout. I suppose that word covers the roughly 423 reasons I felt compelled to give up teaching forever (I thought) after 15 years as a professor at a liberal-arts college.

Roughly two years after that decision I found in Parker Palmer’s book The Courage to Teach a fairly accurate description – much better than “burnout” – of what happened to me there. Palmer believes most teachers choose the profession for reasons of the heart, but after a few years they begin to lose heart. That sounds right to me, and my next few posts will address some reasons for this process, especially the problem of taking our work too personally.

I hope what I say will help new teachers keep their hearts a little longer, and help experienced ones understand why their hearts may be beginning to feel heavy and hardened.

Sometimes it happens that a student who is clearly a good, decent, kind, lovable human being writes a paper with little support or focus and plenty of lousy sentences and a small sprinkling of major grammatical errors. I have to give the paper a low grade, but I want to tell the student not to take it personally, it’s not about her, it’s just, you know, we have these standards that have been around for a few centuries and you’re not quite meeting them right now, so here’s a D, even though you’re certainly not a D person.

The student is likely to respond with a weak smile and leave the classroom to melt into the bedlam of the hall. But how can she not be thinking, “I wrote that essay. I used my own personal brain and my personal imagination and used the words and syntactical structures that are accessible to a person such as I. How can I not take this D personally?”

Should the student have the nerve to ask me that question, I’d be tempted to respond, “Now you know how I feel all the time!” Teachers frequently take student responses personally, especially, I’d think, English teachers, especially when they’re teaching literature.

Take me, for example. Well before I grew up to be an English major, one of my personal hobbies was reading great books. Not that I knew they were great, or would have known why they were great if I did – I just knew they spoke to me, taught me stuff, made me feel as if my reading them was transforming me into a better human being. When I was very young, I became friends with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Great Expectations and William Faulkner’s Light in August.

I was a college dropout and a reluctant member of the United States Air Force when I read and fell in love with Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5.

 I do not use “became friends” and “fell in love” loosely. Before I knew how to analyze or interpret literature (and by extension, I guess, appreciate it), I pal’d around with Huck on the Mississippi and laughed at his observations; I pulled for and was embarrassed by Pip and his awkward and misguided reaching for respectability; I feared Boo Radley, and was much relieved to find him not only harmless but courageous.

By the time I read Catch-22, I was amazed that Heller could write something so absurd, convoluted and outrageous while still mirroring exactly what I was experiencing in the Air Force; and by the time I got to Vonnegut, my cold and distant father had passed away, and Vonnegut became my mentor, my literary dad. He seemed to speak directly into my ear and in so doing helped turn me into the frustrated subversive I am today. Thanks, Kurt!

Obviously, all of these works, and many more after them, have been integrated into my being. Put another way, they are the materials from which I’ve constructed a soul.  They have shaped my values and my language and become the lens through which I observe and interpret my fellow human beings.

And now, as a teacher of AP Literature, I have the honor to introduce these beloved literary friends to my beloved students.

Have you ever had two close friends who were so different you were afraid to introduce one to the other, afraid even to see them try to coexist in the same room? Have you ever had one close friend express contempt for another close friend? If so, you know what it’s like for me all the time!

So when students don’t like the books I’ve chosen or refuse to read them or resort to the Anti-Christ (Spark Notes), how can I not take that personally and eventually tell one old friend (Don DeLillo’s White Noise, for example), “Sorry, Bud. I gotta shelve you for a while. These people don’t like you, and I can not handle the rejection!”

We’re sneaking up on the problem here. We’re good teachers when we care so much that we make ourselves vulnerable to painful rejections, causing us to back off and care less and thus become less effective teachers because we are less of who we genuinely are.

May's Emotional Confusion

This is one of those “Is-it-just-me” pieces, so as soon as you see the answer is “yes,” you’re excused to graze and ruminate in more nutritious pastures. It’s a gloomy meditation on PAYDE (Post-Academic-Year Depression and Exaltation). Sadly, because this condition only manifests itself after school is over, you don’t get paid for getting PAYDE.

Even if you didn’t have to spend the last week of school packing up dozens of boxes with books and other materials from a lifetime of teaching and saying goodbye to your favorite classroom and lugging it all across campus to a new, cold, alien and still soulless place, you may be feeling a little depleted, enervated, emptied-out now that the book is closed on another year.

There’s a rather rowdy war going on inside me right now – but, hey, what’s new? I’m bubbling with gratitude for the long awaited rest after great labor. When the sun starts to set, I can’t keep a smile from my face as I picture the plotless day I’ll mostly enjoy tomorrow. I won’t be getting up at 4:57 a.m., that’s for sure. I won’t suffer from after-lunch fatigue, exacerbated by the funky, erratic and unpredictable nature students take on for the day’s final two hours. And tomorrow evening will not be muddied by anxiety over things I really should be doing.

But at the same time, I also miss my students and my relationship with them. I miss the moments – moments of pointless fun, moments of pure revelation and insight, and moments of joyous learning. I certainly need a rest from the whole thing, but that doesn’t keep me from being sad about the disappearance of these moments from my life. 

I also feel regret, more than a twinge, and I feel this way, to some degree, every May. I feel as if I just blew a big opportunity. I did not do well enough the one thing I do well. I was in a game I should have won, but I lost. At this point, everyone could rush forward and shout, “No, Master! You did not fail! You were wonderful. You couldn’t have done better,” but I’d know better. I have a ready list. I have this year’s catalogue of shame, all the unanswered questions and ignored student issues and failures to enforce rules and lack of patience and grades too lightly given.  

I wonder if teaching is the only profession in which its practitioners inevitably fail, inevitably feel they must be reborn again in the fall (“fall” being a metonymy for “the first week of August,” when many of us pack up our Scarlet Letter lunchboxes and head back to the mines in utter darkness). This leads to the happy and unsatisfying combination of the opportunity for redemption and the awareness of failure. There will always be next year . . . except when there won’t be.

And for me, there has long been an intimation of mortality in the annual May farewells. I found this sentiment pretty well articulated in Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, a novel that will not feel quite as earthshaking in a couple of years as it does to many reviewers now. These words come from a fictional legendary shortstop: “It always saddens me to leave the field. Even fielding the final out of the World Series, deep in the truest part of me, felt like death.”

When our students leave each year, the vast majority of them die for us in that we will never see them or hear from them again. And when they leave, our gift of teaching seems to evaporate. It goes dormant. It hibernates for the summer. And I’m not the only teacher who has seriously wondered if he will still have it when school resumes in August.

Then there are those farewell luncheons in which we recognize and applaud our retiring colleagues. I find this so extraordinarily sad I must find a quick exit from the proceedings. I feel panicky at the notion that there won’t be another batch in August, another chance to get it right, to be needed in that way particular to teachers, to make up for the errors of the past, to finally, at long last, be whole in our calling.

      Is it just me?

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.

Continuing to Wait for Marzano

February 2012, leading up to the observation: With my observation now inevitable (I pictured my 2^nd-grade self in line for a smallpox vaccination, counting the kids in front of me, knowing there was no escape), I began to reflect on how many years I’ve spent proving myself to myself and to my students.

On my first day as an intern at Raa Middle School in 1976, I dreaded the possibility of failure and of the negative feedback that comes immediately – almost simultaneously with the incompetent act – for every teacher. Naïve, dreamy, idealistic – belly churning with nerves --, I tried as hard as I could to be an effective teacher. I wanted my students to learn something that day and, okay, I admit it, I also wanted them to like me. I also not only wanted to be an effective teacher, I wanted to be perceived as one, i.e., I wanted my effectiveness to recognized and rewarded.

(And, looking back, I’m really sorry, and I apologize to all of those students who, if they lived, would now be over 50 years old, for starting the class by playing Cat Stevens’ version of “Morning Has Broken.” I meant well!)

The same was true for my first day as a Freshman Comp teacher the following fall, and then again for my inaugural day as a college professor facing a Writing for Science Majors class at 8 a.m. in September of 1981.

I don’t know what other teachers are like, but every day of my teaching career, someone has been in my class watching me critically, making a list and checking it twice, causing me to fret and wince over every blunder and, when the class is over, to count the freaking hours until I can get back to that class and make right the sins of yesterday.

Like John Proctor in The Crucible, the magistrate that judged me sat in my heart; there were also typically 25 more external magistrates sitting in my class.

And now, being driven by my inner pedagogical demons for over 35 years -- driven, I humbly acknowledge, to a small truckload of teaching awards bestowed upon me at every stop along the way -- must I now endure an actual iPad-bearing judge with the power to articulate for the world my competency level as gauged by a Marzanometer? And with the power, in theory, to impact my salary and my job security?

Having driven myself fairly mad with these ruminations, I was led to ponder the unfairness of this ordeal on another count. My experience has led me to believe that to be an effective teacher requires a great deal of time and labor. There is no reason to recount here the hundreds of information bits swirling around in a teacher’s brain from the moment s/he flicks the classroom lights on at an ungodly hour in the morning when even newspaper deliverers are sleeping, to the depleted afternoon when s/he wobbles back out to the car, a bundle of student manuscripts nestled in the book bag.

The daily teaching experience is, as a friend of mine said, like racing into a house on fire, looking for people to save. Even young teachers who still have short-term memory can become disoriented, sign the wrong form, hit the wrong key, give the wrong grade, call the wrong name.

For teachers driven to do their best daily, who are trying with all their might to be highly effective, this is a very demanding and sometimes overwhelming job.  

So. Add to this another layer of bureaucracy to one already Everest high; add many more urgent Marzano-related messages and meetings and workshops; add pre-observation and post-observation conferences, and the forms required for each; add the hours foolish teachers like me will spend on that one class that will be observed, at the expense of the other classes and of that aforementioned bundle of student manuscripts.

It isn’t fair, I thought, to make me a less effective teacher by forcing me to prove that I’m a highly effective one.

Waiting for Marzano

In case you are a seasoned teacher and haven’t undergone your Marzanoscopy yet, maybe I can help by providing you with a timeline of what it was like for me in the days and weeks leading up to the procedure, followed by a play-by-play of the Thing Itself, then a reflection on the entire journey.

I may also include a checklist which should be especially helpful now that we know teaching can be both assessed and perfected through the use of weights and measures.

I hope readers will not be put off by what appears to be whining and complaining. I have tried to be honest about the whole thing, and not worry over whether I’m pleasing any particular audience in the process. So, if it is whining, it’s at least genuine and heartfelt whining. This is what it actually felt like to me, a 35-year veteran of teaching.  

Furthermore, in case what follows is so off-putting that readers can’t get themselves to finish it, I’ll give you a brief version of my conclusion: The process is absurd and wasteful, but not without benefits – benefits I seriously doubt were ever intended by Marzano and his fellow rubricifiers.

August 2011: During preplanning, I hear ominous references to a new evaluation process and to something called iObservation and to something else called Marzano, which turned out to be someone’s name. I tune most of these out because I am too preoccupied with something called Skyward, a program that would soon be taking hours away from my efforts to be a highly effective teacher (HET). Also, I always like to look forward to the new academic year, and I don’t want to be brought down by this intrusive junk.

October 2011: We are alerted during a Wednesday in-service about upcoming workshops to help prepare us for the Marzanofication of the evaluation process. Some would be for rookies (may God spread his mercy upon them), others for out-the-door old-timers like me. I mentally hit delete on the dates for the rookies and go into denial about the others because I have too many papers to grade and I’m still not sure how to change grades on Skyward.

November 2011: As pre-evaluation workshops begin to proliferate, Marzanophobia (or Misomarzano) sets in. I learn there is an especially long meeting on the horizon, a Marzanopalooza, for old-timers, and I immediately set out to learn the most critical information about it, i.e., is it mandatory?

December 2011: I write a snarky blog entry in which I imagine Marzano raking in the dough from this obnoxious system and roasting his chestnuts over an open fire. I also quickly make a mental list of 39 things teachers do that aren’t part of Marzano’s list of indicators, not even his Super Marzanio list of 60, and wonder if it’s okay to stop doing all of these things in order to better my chances of becoming HET.

January 2012: Finally, I’m knocked out of my denial when, at either an in-service or a PLP, I’m handed a date for my pre-observation meeting with a list of requirements for said meeting and a list of the indicators my observer will be iBalling. I guess I will need to fashion a lesson that allows me to allow her to check “YES” on those babies. Now the worrying and fretting can begin in earnest.