Just another existential crisis

"Mr. Vincent," they said, "We do not understand what to do in your class."

Statements like this take me aback--only because I believe that I clearly communicate what can be done. What are big ideas that occur in Romeo and Juliet? Is it not clear that love is in conflict with hate--and that love wins?

As a new teacher, I continue to pass through a purification process. Each day I am forced to think not of what I want or need, but what the students want or need. This requires me to shed my personal expectations of school so that I can empathize with the students. How can I best teach them? What do they understand? What should I do during my successive 65-minute performances? However, this does lead to a more befuddling but important question: what is teaching?

Several times a week I have the same mini-crisis: What does it mean to be a teacher? On occasion, I have soothed these existential nerves by looking to:

  1. The teacher evaluation that is published by the state,
  2. Common core standards,
  3. Answers provided by theorists (currently Harold Bloom, Neil Postman, and Danah Boyd),
  4. Even my own answers (crazy, I know, solving my own problems).
And then the moment passes. It is time for 4th period. I am too tired to continue thinking about that. A student comes in for help. Something happens to interrupt this thought.

. . . But, are these not the most important questions to answer: How do I teach? How can they best learn?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Systematic Cooking and the evolution of phones

Image
I don't mind eating the same thing repeatedly. Egg sandwiches in the morning. Roast beef sandwiches for lunch. Bagel Bites for dinner. All have been eating phases that I have gone through. Now that we are settling into our surroundings a little more here in Orange County, we felt a little more comfortable to just take it easy on the weekends. So, we cooked. I decided that I wanted to make a lasagna (and Noel made a great chili at the same time), which meant finding the top rated recipe on allrecipes.com. Badda bing badda boom-- 'I got me a whole lot of lasagna'. Thus, I get to have lots of lasagna all week long and and all I have to do to cook is stick it in the microwave. In some respects it is like the widow and her miraculous lamp. And on to the evolution of phones. The iconic figure of Zack Morris using his gigantic mobile phone during class sticks out in my mind as the essence of cool. Swing forward to 2001 and you will find Derek Zoolander, the top male m...
Read more

Busy, busy, busy

Image
Memories and thoughts disappear if not stored, recorded, written, or memorialized somehow. Of course, this immediately makes me think of pre-literate societies and what it must have been like to have only a few recorded memories, thoughts, pictures, or keepsakes not yet even 50 years ago. Now, every moment of every day is recorded, synched, uploaded, stored, and searchable to myself (or others). What then is to be done? Shirk the norms? Embrace the present culture? Moderate between the two? And yet, I have digressed . . . Yesterday's trip down memory lane truly allowed me to see the types of thoughts that were retained and more importantly the frequency. What seemed regular and consistent in 2006 and early in China, understandably diminished once marrying Noël, moving back to the States, further diminishing once beginning at PCA, and almost disappearing in Long Beach, and continuing through early Yakima and teaching, until now. What types of memories were retained? Well, I have ...
Read more

Snake

Image
It will have been fifteen years ago this year that I got my first cell phone. It was a Nokia something that had interchangeable faceplates. The phone-brick called people, received calls, and had games buried deep within the OS. My favorite was a this little gem: snake. The game was occasionally played but never mastered. Well, because you always died. The snake would eat too many apples, get too long, become unwieldy, and then you would run into yourself. My score never topped 200 and it didn't even matter. Scores on games on my phone didn't matter, because it was irrelevant to life. The phone barely mattered because I would rarely use it. I had other things to worry about. About this same time, in high school I start playing console games. I can thank Mike Stork for subsidizing the purchase of my first--a N64. That summer Mike gave me to do work around his property. It kept me busy and allowed me to save, and when I had enough money, I purchased the golden goose egg of the...
Read more