One often wonders how much of one’s perceptions are based
upon immediate response and how much depend upon what one has encountered in
the past. In the classroom, a teacher relies upon experience and usually, the
more experience the teacher has as a teacher, the better he or she is. As
someone who has yet to teach much more than Hebrew (I tutored at age fourteen),
I carry my past self as well as my classmates’ past selves along with me to
assess the situation. I suppose, in this respect, I find myself at a disadvantage.
Using oneself as a stepping-stone to students in an area where I enjoy great
proficiency may inadvertently blind me to my students’ faults.
One of the problems I faced when I was younger, refusing to
read assigned readings or doing as little as possible, has fortunately changed
as I entered college. Unfortunately, I believe this will transpire when I teach high school. Besides telling my past self (who is
unfortunately not very good at listening) that reading schoolwork will enhance
grades, I have yet to figure out how to drive this point home. A lot of students do not care about grades. When I was in my formative years, I
performed as best as I could to coast by on Bs and Cs. As long as I did well, I
gave the minimal amount of effort. After discussing the matter with one of my
friends, I discovered she did the same. This will be a real obstacle to
overcome when I become a teacher and cannot simply impress upon my students, or
my past self, the importance of reading assigned texts.
Part of the problem, one that I struggle to recall in
college and graduate school, involves being imprisoned in one building for
eight hours. In Gatto’s article, he discusses how school is like a prison and
was originally envisioned as a form of punishment, to beat people down and
disrupt their thinking processes. Those who enter homeschooling do not have the
rigid structures as those who enter public or private education, yet they
appear educated all the same (as Gatto argues). However, the main component of
schooling seems to be socialization…an area that my young self found difficulty
with. People seem to forget that while the object of school is to get an
education, one does not learn in a vacuum.
Once people realize that learning does not take place in a
vacuum, they should also realize that people need to have a say in what goes on
in the classroom. Students in particular need to feel like they had a voice—the
classes I liked the best were the ones in which the teacher actively encouraged
us to take a stand and debate among ourselves. My past self in high school was
most engaged when I had to present material in front of the class and appear as
realistic as possible (such as defending an argument). This might be a good method
to carry into teaching—make the teaching have immediate relevance. Make the
students feel part of a community, a community who cares and whose values make
a whole. In my history class, I had to defend Hoover and ascertain whether he
was responsible for the Great Depression. I worked in a group and another group
played the prosecution. In the end, everyone had to vote on it. This, to me,
consists of a democracy. Not only does it demonstrate a democracy at work, it
helps students later put together the pieces and work with this in real life.
Even with these ideologies in mind, I suspect that not
everything I want to put into play will occur the way I want it. Then again, it
is like people say about battle: you can plan all you want, but once the battle
starts, it all goes anyway. Be true to oneself and hope that the past selves
can come together, form a coherent whole, and help the present and future self
out as a student and teacher. That is all anyone can really do.
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