Thoughts on Teaching and English and Being Me

...another Advanced Comp paper that also could serve as a blog post...

From kindergarten through tenth grade, I was home schooled. I never set foot inside a public school classroom, never even saw the inside of a classroom expect what I saw in movies and television shows. I entered community college my junior year, eager to learn, with no idea about what I wanted to do with my life. All I knew is that I was good at working with kids, and that there were avenues opening for me in special education. And I loved to learn.

My first quarter at Whatcom Community College, I took beginning composition. My teacher was a feminist (the first real one I’d ever encountered) and a liberal who was not shy about sharing her disbelief in any sort of organized religion. My first essay was an in-class essay about the controversial Eminem song, “Lose Yourself.” I took the opportunity to write about a biblical view of family, which I was currently studying with my mom, and held my breath as I turned the essay in to her. She gave me an A. The next topic, yet another controversial issue, yet another deviant paper. And another A. I got bolder and began speaking up in class. I found others who had similar beliefs but had been reluctant to express them for lack of support. And my teacher and I became good friends. In fact, a year and a half later she wrote multiple glowing recommendations of this once-timid ex-homeschooler who found her voice in English 101.

I sometimes think about what might have happened if I had not been in that teacher’s class that quarter. Would I have chosen English as my future field? In one of my talks with her, we discussed why she chose teaching English. She was bright and could have gone into many fields. But she chose this one because of the flexibility it offered.

Two quarters later, after taking an English lit class that exposed me to literature I never knew existed and made me fall in love with poetry, I took the next course in the composition series. This time my teacher was an even more politically liberal environmentalist who loved Joyce James and Kate Chopin and Quincy Troupe. And, to my surprise, he loved my papers where I would contradict him or reinterpret things from a biblical viewpoint. Another solid A. And my desire to teach English grew stronger. Sam Roper, my teacher for English 102, told the class one day, “I chose to teach English because I can really teach about anything, I can say almost anything, and I get to hear you guys talk about it as well.”

This appealed to me, as I felt like I wanted to teach, but I also wanted freedom to improvise. I wanted to talk about important things, to explore things about the world that are truly worth exploring, to make people think. So I chose. I decided that I would be an English major. People were pressuring me to teach somehow, I knew I loved studying English, and I hoped it would provide me the opportunity to teach what I love and what I see as important.

But the further I get into this whole thing, the more complicated teaching seems to me. It’s not just talking about what you love and getting students involved in talking about it too, it’s the daily in-and-out of grading papers and coming up with lesson plans and figuring out what to do about students who just really don’t care. That’s the part that bothers me the most: how will I deal with students who aren’t interested in learning at all? I’ve always been a self-motivated learner, seeking out things which interest me, writing for the pure pleasure of organizing my thoughts on paper, reading for the pure pleasure of finding new things and meeting new friends. I don’t understand people who don’t care about learning. I really don’t understand people who don’t care about grades. As much as I try not to, I find that I am obsessive about my grades. I even go to the point of seeing my grades as a reflection of myself as a person, an attitude that I know is not healthy or right. But I still strive for the best grade I can get. The grade-less classroom appealed to me briefly, but I don’t think that I could operate like that. I don’t think I could handle not having a grade to strive toward. Because as eager as I am to learn, I get worn out. Midway through the semester, I find my grades dropping, and I force myself to go to class and to turn in assignments because otherwise I’ll fail the class and lose my scholarship and drop out of school and end up in a trailer park working two fast food jobs. Yes, some days I have to actually picture myself in a McDonalds uniform just to get myself to class.

But not all classes. Some classes I would love to just sit in on if there were no grade pressures. If I didn’t have to take general education classes in order to graduate, I’d do things like take Isaiah with Dr. Boyd just because it’s amazing book taught by a brilliant man and I would learn so much. I go to classes and learn about the Bible and about foreign languages and about other cultures and about music and about history and about literature and about theories, and I’d love it. But I wouldn’t turn things in to the teachers. I’d write to sort my thoughts out, to remember things I thought were beautiful, and to tell others what I’d been learning. But I wouldn’t have this sort of education. I wouldn’t sit through my fourth speech class ever just because my other three didn’t transfer. I wouldn’t try to listen to a boring teacher read almost verbatim from the book I read the night before about things I already have studied. I wouldn’t go to a math class and do unit multipliers and interest formulas and other things I did in middle school. Yes, middle school. Because I’ve always been liked at math, and I’ve always enjoyed balancing my education by having a mixture of things I’m studying at once. Math homework had been a welcome break from reading, and reading has been a relief from studying politics, which has been a diversion from solving equations. If I didn’t have to graduate but could still go to college, I would be better rounded than I am.

But I am abnormal in this way. So many other students don’t have this sort of enjoyment of diversity in learning. If there were no requirements, too many people would leave college having not learned anything. They would focus on one specific thing, they wouldn’t try to think through and synthesize their learning, and they would just waste their years as a student goofing off.

So as a teacher, I want to be able to give students flexibility in learning, to let them explore what they enjoy, but I also want them to actually learn. I’m not into making students do mindless busy work, but I also want them to learn. This is what I see as my biggest struggle when I start teaching. How do I give kids a love for learning through fun and interesting assignments, rather than make them hate it because of an overload of work that is entirely meaningless to them? How do I get them to be students who don’t turn things in merely because of the grade, but because they are actually interested in or even passionate about what they’re doing? I don’t know how, because I don’t even know how to get myself to do this. I want to get back to when I first fell in love with English, back to my junior year when I discovered writing to persuade people, or back to my freshman year when I began learning about the whole realm of great literature available, or even back to my grade school days when I passionately declared to my mother, “Oh, I just love diagramming sentences!” I want to be able to get people to one of those places. I want them to fall in love with books and authors and writing and the joy of connecting two ideas. I want to teach what I’m passionate about in order to make others passionate as well. But, mostly, I want to point people to be more like Jesus through all of this. That is why I’m here.