music: Paul Simon- Surprise
The past two weeks at school have been a torrent that surpassed even the biblical rains washing Boston clean of an unnatural winter. Things are picking up steam in preparation for the end of the school year, but most of the recent crunch has been due to my workload redoubling. The student teacher that I have had the fortune of working with this year finished her practicum, leaving me with the work that, in the end, is why the city of Boston pays me the big bucks.
I’ve never heard of a second-year teacher taking a student teacher. At first when I was asked if I would serve as a mentor teacher I declined because I was worried that I would have nothing to offer anyone as a mentor. I am still stumbling through the finer points of this profession, still splashing around just enough to keep my head above water most days. But I was asked again, and agreed. Don’t think of it as mentoring, I was told, think of it as co-teaching. Whatever. On the simplest level I was thankful to have someone in the building to talk with about curriculum. That was last summer, when this school year was largely theoretical.
The first semester of an internship is somewhat excruciating in that there is a lot of observing and note-taking and not a lot of front-of-room action. It’s difficult to be forced to crawl when you’re ready to walk. It was only two years ago that I was the one taking notes in the back of the room, getting restless, waiting to log enough observation hours to be allowed to actually do something. But now I was the one being watched, I was the subject of the observations and notes, and the target of all sorts of meta-reflective questions about pedagogy, grading systems, behavior management plans, and the like. I found something incredible in being a mentor here: in forcing me to be explicit about my decisions, thoughts, and resultant actions, it was actually helping me do a better job. Mentoring became less a matter of me disseminating the answers, and more a matter of me prompting the right questions. I believe that teaching is less about forcing conformity and more about fostering mental freedom, and as such of course mentoring another educator-to-be would not be about creating a clone of Missa Toss. So much of what comes out in the classroom is rooted in personality and style, and it’s ridiculous to try to bend someone to mimic my quirkiness. Instead, it’s better to guide another to find and embrace their own quirkiness, while helping them through some of the trickier obstacles in their formative months as educators.
Darwin teaches us how information is transmitted and refined over aeons by processes of biological evolution. Genes are effective in their mission, but they require a scope that tries any mortal’s patience and lifespan. Instead, Dawkins proposes, that cultural artifacts are subject to many of the same laws governing biological evolution, but with one significant difference: cultural evolution occurs at a greatly accellerated rate, and between people who are not biologically realted. And if you are the one who does the transmitting of information, you send a small piece of you with the information. If Darwin says you live on through your children, Dawkins would extend that to your students. And student teachers.
At camp we had a saying: the counselor from whom you learned the most as a leadership trainee was the one that “made” you. It was a big thing to have an LT acknowledge that you “made” them. Here was cultural evolution at its grandest, and at its most flattering. Last week I attended a congratulatory reception for this year’s batch of student teachers, and for a brief moment found myself in the company of my just-graduated student teacher on one side and my own mentor teacher from two years previous on the other. I think that in any line of work there is a cultural bloodline, but it is especially pronounced when you are in the business of promoting self-actualization. So now I’ve been apprentice, and I have taken an apprentice. It was not always smooth or easy, but in the end everything came together. The process of education has come full circle, and now I’m beginning to fully understand that beautifully paradoxical term “student teacher.”. I think my student teacher and I both benefitted incredibly this year. Now that her time with me is over, I am reeling. From the newly inherited workload, yes, but also from the somewhat knowledge that I’ve added my own link to the intellectual chain. And that’s really what this whole teaching business is all about.
Posted by davidtaus at May 15, 2006 09:46 PM | TrackBack