Day: July 29, 2011

Things I Know 197 of 365: There are two kinds of angry in the classroom

To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.

– Steve Prefontaine

Recently, I’ve started reading Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

I don’t know that I like Murakami, but I’m enjoying his book. I’m a social animal and he is not. He speaks highly of his comfort being away from people. While I enjoy my times of solitude, I feed on social interaction like some weird Buffy villain.

Something Murakami writes, with which I agree, is the following:

When I’m criticized unjustly (from my viewpoint at least), or when someone I’m sure will understand me doesn’t, I go running for a little longer than usual. By running longer, it’s like I can physically exhaust that portion of my discontent. It also makes me realize again how weak I am, how limited my abilities are. I become aware, physically, of these low points.

John Spencer has been writing a wonderful series of posts for new teachers – a collection of truths he wish he’d known or someone had told him before he entered the classroom.

He crowd sourced ideas online before embarking on this journey and the question of what I wish I’d known has been ruminating with me since he asked it.

My answer at the time and one of my answers now is embodied in Murakami’s words.

It was a doctrine of my classroom for years before Chris gave it words when we were in a discussion one day.

There is a difference between teacher angry and real angry. Teacher angry is what you let them see. It is the verbal kick in the butt that shows you care. It comes from a place of personal control akin to a parent telling a child they aren’t angry, they are just disappointed.

Real angry comes from the part of your brain the Vulcans work to control and repress. It is the moment when what you want to say is “For the fortieth time, stop interrupting, you little shit!”

These moments are exceedingly rare. They are born of exhaustion, confusion and periodic realizations that you are a last front between an ignorant and an informed citizenry. These are the intermittent terrors of the first through 30th years in the classroom.

The best teachers I have ever known never gave wind of their anger. I have taught alongside those for whom I would make a voracious case for canonization.

The good teachers know the line between teacher angry and real angry. They leave the room when the darker parts of their humanity well up within them in moments of great frustration.

The others see no line. Teacher angry and real angry are interchangeable in their classrooms. I’ve only seen a few of them, but they’ve tarnished the shine of what it means to be a teacher each time I’ve encountered them.

Each time I’ve encountered them, I’ve taken it as a sign that I must pick up the load they gave up carrying.

When I started running in college, I took none of this with me when I went out on the trail. I carried other injustices, other moments that showed me the world was not as beautiful as I imagine it to be. I would run, as Murakami writes, to “exhaust that portion of my discontent.”

Now that I’m entangled in the lives of the children I’ve served, I find myself carrying the injustices inflicted on them. It’s not always teachers. Mostly, though, it is one adult or another from their lives.

I will always do all I can to make up for those who have let them down. Still, when I run, I often find myself pushing myself because of what the world is not and what I would like it to be.

Things I Know 196 of 365: I made something

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

– Carl Jung

I didn’t figure this would make me as excited as it has. I mean, I’m the guy who goes on an on about having students do authentic things in class, ask them to create real and meaningful stuff as part as their learning.

That’s me.

That’s something I believe.

Still, when it came time for me to create something, to then connect that creation to various channels of public consumption, I didn’t figure on my excitement about the process and its results.

In projects past, I’ve worked alongside my students to experience as many of the steps as possible with them so that I might have an understanding of what I’m asking them to do and what that might entail.

Still, being the teacher has gotten in the way in those processes. Turns out, when the temptation is to say, “I can’t help you right now, I’m building my own,” I tend to favor actually putting down what I’m doing and helping students find solutions for themselves.

The closest to creating I’d done as a classroom teacher was unit, project and lesson plans. Again, those were not the ends. They were the means to helping others create.

While all creation is in some ways a means to helping others create, the creations of a teacher planning teaching take on a different tint of inspirational tone than the artist whose work is destined for the gallery, museum or mantle.

And so, I created.

Where before there was story reliant on transmission by word-of-mouth alone, I made something more readily consumable and polished.

As part of my work at The Freedom Writers Foundation this summer, part of my duties are to support and leverage the network of more than 200 teachers from every state, several Canadian provinces, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Taiwan.

I realize I don’t write about it much, but these are remarkable teachers with whom I am proud to be associated. They teach in private, public, and parochial schools. They work with students behind bars, after school and on any number of non-traditional paths. They range from the novice to the recently-retired.

For my money, they represent one of the richest mosaics of American education you’re likely to find.

As part of my time here, I wanted to work to find a way to help communicate the stories and identities of these teachers to one another and to the outside world.

I’ve long said one of the reasons it’s so easy and popular to beat up on the teaching profession came from the almost complete and utter failure on the part of teachers to tell their individual stories.

A few weeks ago, I set out to find a sustainable way to capture the stories from around North America and then share them with the world.

Yes, writing them out is fine, but I also wanted to something more personal, more intimate.

And so, last week, I set to work creating the Freedom Writer TeacherCast as a regular way to record and share the wonderfully diverse array of experiences of these teachers from all walks of life.

Once I’d begun, the lessons I attempted to impart to students setting out on similar projects came flooding back. Get more material than you need. Find the human story. Story, reflection, story, reflection and so on. Edit forever. When you think you’re done, edit some more.

Episode 1 launched Tuesday. We became subscribable on iTunes today.

It’s no Moth or This American Life. Still, I’m proud of it. It reminded me of what I can do and gave me a laundry list of all the things I want to do better next time.

If there’s room in your summer and you can fit it in between relaxing and family vacations, take some time to create something new that could not have existed without you. I was most fulfilled with the project in those moments toward the end when I could see what I wanted it to become, but was faced with a million tiny adjustments that stood between me and that ideal.

Go, create something. When you’re done, I’d love to see it.