Teaching

by Littlebit on This and That

The wonderful thing about learning theories and recipes is that at a certain point after you have drunk 27,000 cups of coffee, your Innate Creativity kicks in and what happens is that you begin to disassemble the parts of the theories and recipes and reassemble them into your own style of homemade ice-cream-and-bacon casserole. I think in scientific and New Age circles they call this particular phenomenon "insight."

I had a recent insight about my profession, which is a large car resembling major world religions, such as the Ferrari, to which you profess undying devotion. I am a teacher of wriggling masses of Middle Age students who bring me bribes of Oreos so they can hand in their essays a couple of minutes late. By fax. If they are absent. Or, if they are bodily in school, then technically they may shuffle and staple their essays the first 90 seconds of class and hand it in. Actually, I had several insights involving my profession, one of which was to trade it in for an actual cream and black Honda because the insurance for a Ferrari ran into the range of six times my annual gross income.

Last year apart from spending very little time washing and waxing my Honda, unlike my neighbors who spend an extraordinary amount of their early evenings after work washing, waxing, and hands-akimbo-appraising the former activities' results, I earned a couple of pieces of paper which tell the world that I am a Person Knowledgeable about Teaching. Yes, Now I Am Really, Truly a Teacher, Agent Scully, and I have The Files to prove it. Although, just between you and me, what I learned about teaching is a bunch of methods, theories and recipes which I recognize do not mean anything until I apply my own meaning to them. Which is the reason why I spent this last summer horizontal on a lawn chair meditating on teaching and chugging Long Island Iced Teas. Here are my insights. And I warn you, I have been teaching for a little over half a decade (doesn't that sound impressive? it's called "choice of words," which is a writing trick lawyers think only they know how to use), plus I have Pieces of Paper Saying I Am A Teacher, so there.

Insight Number One deals with Methodology, which as we all know is best understood by sitting in a traffic jam in Bangkok and spending the long boring minutes picking your nose. A lot of the Teaching Methods in the monographs, which is a book written by a person who didn't learn how to share drool-soaked cookies in kindergarten, call for something called social learning. (They are so shrill. They beat Mariah Carey; you should hear them shrilly calling, "Social Learning! Social Learning!")

Social learning is when you somehow manage to herd children into small groups and bribe them with chocolate bars to "learn together." This latter phrase is a mysterious event which is rumored to happen within the dynamics of small herds of children. The insight I gained from this idea of social learning is: Don't Do It Unless you Are An Alien With a 360-degree Visual Range. You see, the example in the monograph by Seymour Butts, Ph.D., concerns children from the mandatory-naptime-and-gosh-dinosaurs-are-swell age to the my-partner-is-a-girl-EEUUWW age. Dr. Butts might think these children can roll around on the reading rug and talk about character and motivation in Jurassic Park (I am big. I want to eat you.), and everything is fine, they are learning in a social context. But hey, I teach Middle Age kids. They have long since shed their mail and armor and stopped jousting in soccer fields, but THINK about it. Remember the Middle Ages? Here's my candid, professional insight regarding social learning on the reading rug for Middle Age children: if you Just Do It, the suckers are going to breed.

Insights like this do not happen quite often in the summer, when most thoughts take long, all-expenses-paid vacations in Tahiti and leave you with inexplicable urges to reach for books by Robert Ludlum (shiver) and the latest lawyer novel (In the event of gastric discomfort, there is an airsick bag located in the seat pocket in front of you.) Insights like these happen mostly in the fall, or early winter, or at any time in the ten months you are teaching school, and you have just ended a class saying, "In your journal, write 150 to 200 words comparing the views of people who like Leonardo DiCrapio in "Romeo and Juliet" and the views of Shirley Jackson in "The Lottery"…due tomorrow." and, after a minute of silence while the young brains of our future absorb the information, you hear their full, Whitmanesque-ishly modulated voices break into meaningful sounds:
"Do we have to write it in our journal?"
"Paper? Is it on paper?"
Eureka.