BEDUC427 Journal - Week 8

Balancing authenticity with emotional presence and empathy.

In our readings we have taken a journey that has humanized teaching for me, grinding up any romantic illusions I may have had. I have really been touched by the Greene article that speaks about subjugating ones ego to truly see the child. We bring all of our experience as adults and educators to the classroom, but it is the student's world that we are entering, cognitively and emotionally. This is very fragile stuff. There is a chapter in The Phantom Tollbooth where Milo and Tock go to a place called 'Point of View'. In this place all the children are born at their adult height and grow down to the ground. They literally and figuratively start life with an adult's point of view. Milo thinks this is nuts. As we enter the classroom, we bring all of our adulthood, with it's trappings of knowing better, bureaucratic nonsense and complexities of adult life, and we need to dial down that perspective and make room for the student's point of view. What is it that they see as important? What is the 'now' of the classroom psyche?

Ayers gives us multiple examples of elevating the students' points of view and the students' points of reference to make the classroom a place that they belong to. By setting our adult world aside when we go through that classroom door we are able to be present for those children. It is a little like being a time traveler where you leave your points of reference behind and decode the new society that you have just entered. Only with the classroom you are a co-creator and guardian of the society.

To create that classroom society, the teacher must see and hear the children and have a vision of how all members might knit together as a group. Not that it will happen as the teacher plans, only that he/she believes it will come together and it is his/her obligation to nurture and guide the community. The teacher needs to be authentically emotionally available to the children. Even thise kids that are hard to like. I observed a 7th grade LA/Social Studies class this winter on 2 different occasions, where prior to entering the class, the teacher told me of Jimmy (fake name) which she could not stand. Sure, he had some behavior issues, but you could not tell that this teacher did not like this boy. She treated him with the same respect and guidance that she gave the other children. She was authentically available to this child, and had subjugated her prejudice against him. That looked like emotional labor to me.

Teachers live in 2 worlds, and I can see how stressful this might be. There are limits to the classroom experience that separates it from the rest of your life. Due to the high personal involvement that teaching requires, it puts your private (highly personal) life at risk. I think it is important to keep that in perspective to keep you in the game. Twenty-eight children, 6 hours a day, the classroom needs to be a place you want to be, the students want to be and their parents want them to be. It is an opportunity to create a world that is better that life. That models the best of how we can be and in doing so, develops children with positive experiences that raise their expectations from life. At the end of the day, when you jump into your car, you still care about those students, but the difference is, you get to put the ego back into your dealings as you re-enter the world of adults and house payments and lawn mowers. If you believe that we all have a child within, we need to tend to the ego of that child as well sometime.

I continue to think about metaphors for teaching, and farming comes to mind. The cyclical nature of it. The high stakes associated with success or failure have a parallel with teaching. Under the right conditions, every seed will germinate, but, as in nature, no two plants are a like, yet they all have a purpose. And then you start again next year, looking at the fertile dirt, planning your rows, and nurturing the seeds.