Morning Pages: July 15, 2002

The joy of teaching, yestserday? today? last week? Usually these moments come at me from behind - I don't necessarily expect them and I'm not always fully aware of them as they happen...but they do happen. This morning I had an email from Matt - he was checking to make sure I was alright because, he said, I'd been unsually quiet over the weekend. Last week, when my computer class met, Summer, who is often a step or two behind the others came up with a dynamite idea for organizing her project. Lekei called me on Satuday to run some ideas past me - she wanted to keep them "secret" from the rest of the class for a bit because she wanted to really "WOW them," she said. Then there was Kelly and Alex and Kristy last spring who took an assignment and ingested it so it became theirs, not mine. These are the moments that keep me hungry for teaching, that keep me learning, that keep me in teaching when otehr possibilities knock on my door.

On the other hand, there are those painful, painful, painful and pathetic times when I swear to myself I'll never teach again and I wonder at what ever made me think in the first place that I could teach. I don't have to think back too far to find one of those experiences. Unfortunately it wasn't a single event or a single assignment. Hell no, it was a whole semester of a graduate class that is typically one of my favorites to teach and typically an experience I would write about in my joy of teaching section. Not this time around though, it was a slow and agonizing death. It was doomed from the start and I failed to acknowledge this. In retrospect I know that I knew - but I kept acting "as if"...as if they were interested in discovering, as if they cared about thinking, as if they thought phonological disorders were the most fascinating thing on earth. I played that game until about midterm. Then I read something Ira Shor wrote. I had turned to him and Paulo Freire for inspirtaiton, seeking ideas and motivation to rescue this class. One day I read that at times, on ehas to realize and accept the fact that sometimes students aren't ready to be empowered. Ira said that sometimes he just gives in and I remember thinking then and there that I was gonig to give in. It had been a hell of a year, with personnel issues in the fall, 9-11, an overload in the spring, the death of my father in February. I was simply too tied, exhausted, to struggle any more. I worried about giving up, didn't like to think of myself as a quitter but I was seirously concerned that if I didn't give in I might not make it tot he end of the semester with any of my classes. These moments, too, while difficult and depressing spark my interest, appeal to my natural curiousity as a teacher and a learner. What makes students resist taking responsibility for their learning? What makes me so adamant that they must? What makes students feel safe enough to take that responsibility? Strangely enough, one of the students in that class came to talk with me after the semester was over. She understood my struggle - at least understood that I was struggling. She shared her insights about the situation. She said as undergraduates stuents work so very hard to get into our graduate program because they know the grades count so much. Once admitted to graduate school, according ot her, they slack off somewhat realizing that As are no longer the main gola. Here they focus on their clinical work, not coursework. While her explanation seemed plausible given what I had observed, it left me sadder than I was before we talked. How could students not see the connection between being independent learners and good clinicians? How could they, as graduate students, be satisfied letting someone else tell them what to think?