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Feb. 10th, 2004 09:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
heiligekuhI find myself driven to respond to a post of 's, someone I've never met and who's journal I've only barley scratched. But, gahfuckit, I can barley work my head around the central cortex block of strange emotion and solid hrumph that just refuses to leave.
Oh, Apologies.
He's talking about Gifted Education and what a miserable soul fuck it feels like sometimes. In some ways thats' all of education, specifically education reform. My general rule for conferences is to walk about of any session about education reform that starts with a printed outline and PowerPoint. Staff meetings and development that are ostensibly about differentiating instruction and authentic assessment, but punish *teachers* for multitasking. The fuck? Am I not the goddamn textbook model of who you say we're trying to reach? I don't sit and listen.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jodisays has the same set of horror stories, where we're called on the carpet for performing some idle task to eat up the spare processes (cutting papers, summing test scores, tallying errors for item analysis, as if that means we're not intellectually involved in the process. So I take a journal to the meeting, where it looks like I'm taking notes and I write something that I find 10x as interesting and may actually miss some content. But then my behavior fits the model for "attentive" and can escape notice.
These are the days I realize I'm in a middle school and the people I'm teaching with are not that different that taught me. There's that weird age cycle thing, when you're a young teacher for this age range, when you realize that when your students were born you were their age and the department chairs were in the first years of service. And, dear piss christ, do I not want to be in those stockings in 14 years.
Who are the people we're teaching with? Jodi and I both feel our intellect and vitality slip away in meetings like that, but it's happening all the damn time. We feel alive and engaged in strange moments with stranger kids. The adults we work with, by and large, are...something. Something else.
I teach the verbs of a sophisticated language that most of my students will never read and that I can barely speak. Clearly this isn't the main purpose of being in the classroom for the next 20 years. I'm supposed to say it's the kids and connecting with them and helping them become people, a line I fell in love with Jodi for years and years ago. And it's true, as far as it goes. But I still have no working definition of what 'becoming people' means. Certainly I think I'm doing as much good encouraging K__ and E___ to be excited about writing TMNT/Degrassi fic as when A___ finally gets the Law of Sines. But how much can I really impart when I'm here in this fucking stucko block with all of the other sad sacks? Does it matter how much you say you care, when you're still pumping the pig in the cage full of antibiotics?
I think I wanted to start all of this to discusstebello's Hunter/Gather division and how uncomfortable it makes me. Maybe it's that no one likes being called a Gatherer, being told that they're in the Sheep voting block of sad fuckers who don't count. A lot of it's residual animosity towards essentialized binary divisions, where one class can't hope to understand the other and should just shut the fuck up. Are there students who should be anywhere but in a classroom? Certainly. But a vast majority, Hunters and Gatherers alike, can do things within that environment that is truly worth while. Yea, there is a vast body of sedentary and apathetic educators who are far more focused on implementing their program then responding to those kids. But even the Gatherers must have those magic interactions that mean something during the day. Every teacher, no matter how shitty they seem to us as students or colleagues, must be reaching some kids that we're not. Even for my Hunters, those who really could walk out the door tomorrow morning and either learn the Algebra on their own or just not need it, I think there's something important about how you work in a culture, supporting the beauty you find and coping with the shit. And I don't think that's equivalent with stamping all the individuality and fire out of them. I don't think that's an anti-revolutionary stance. Even after the revolution, adolescence will still be shit. Maybe I'll get to be a department chair then. Maybe there will be better stockings by then.
I have no idea where all of that goes. But I find myself excited at the start of a school day and depressed at the end. Maybe that's just the drugs. Or maybe it's because for all the vaunted social nobility of teaching, it's still a job like the Ben Folds song says:
Oh, Apologies.
He's talking about Gifted Education and what a miserable soul fuck it feels like sometimes. In some ways thats' all of education, specifically education reform. My general rule for conferences is to walk about of any session about education reform that starts with a printed outline and PowerPoint. Staff meetings and development that are ostensibly about differentiating instruction and authentic assessment, but punish *teachers* for multitasking. The fuck? Am I not the goddamn textbook model of who you say we're trying to reach? I don't sit and listen.
jodisays has the same set of horror stories, where we're called on the carpet for performing some idle task to eat up the spare processes (cutting papers, summing test scores, tallying errors for item analysis, as if that means we're not intellectually involved in the process. So I take a journal to the meeting, where it looks like I'm taking notes and I write something that I find 10x as interesting and may actually miss some content. But then my behavior fits the model for "attentive" and can escape notice.These are the days I realize I'm in a middle school and the people I'm teaching with are not that different that taught me. There's that weird age cycle thing, when you're a young teacher for this age range, when you realize that when your students were born you were their age and the department chairs were in the first years of service. And, dear piss christ, do I not want to be in those stockings in 14 years.
Who are the people we're teaching with? Jodi and I both feel our intellect and vitality slip away in meetings like that, but it's happening all the damn time. We feel alive and engaged in strange moments with stranger kids. The adults we work with, by and large, are...something. Something else.
I teach the verbs of a sophisticated language that most of my students will never read and that I can barely speak. Clearly this isn't the main purpose of being in the classroom for the next 20 years. I'm supposed to say it's the kids and connecting with them and helping them become people, a line I fell in love with Jodi for years and years ago. And it's true, as far as it goes. But I still have no working definition of what 'becoming people' means. Certainly I think I'm doing as much good encouraging K__ and E___ to be excited about writing TMNT/Degrassi fic as when A___ finally gets the Law of Sines. But how much can I really impart when I'm here in this fucking stucko block with all of the other sad sacks? Does it matter how much you say you care, when you're still pumping the pig in the cage full of antibiotics?
I think I wanted to start all of this to discuss
tebello's Hunter/Gather division and how uncomfortable it makes me. Maybe it's that no one likes being called a Gatherer, being told that they're in the Sheep voting block of sad fuckers who don't count. A lot of it's residual animosity towards essentialized binary divisions, where one class can't hope to understand the other and should just shut the fuck up. Are there students who should be anywhere but in a classroom? Certainly. But a vast majority, Hunters and Gatherers alike, can do things within that environment that is truly worth while. Yea, there is a vast body of sedentary and apathetic educators who are far more focused on implementing their program then responding to those kids. But even the Gatherers must have those magic interactions that mean something during the day. Every teacher, no matter how shitty they seem to us as students or colleagues, must be reaching some kids that we're not. Even for my Hunters, those who really could walk out the door tomorrow morning and either learn the Algebra on their own or just not need it, I think there's something important about how you work in a culture, supporting the beauty you find and coping with the shit. And I don't think that's equivalent with stamping all the individuality and fire out of them. I don't think that's an anti-revolutionary stance. Even after the revolution, adolescence will still be shit. Maybe I'll get to be a department chair then. Maybe there will be better stockings by then.I have no idea where all of that goes. But I find myself excited at the start of a school day and depressed at the end. Maybe that's just the drugs. Or maybe it's because for all the vaunted social nobility of teaching, it's still a job like the Ben Folds song says:
there was no party
and there were no songs
'cause today's just a day
like the day that he started
and no one is left here
that knows his first name
yeah, and life barrels on
like a runaway train
where the passengers change
they don't change anything
you get off
someone else can get on
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Smile!
fucking stucko block
Date: 2004-02-12 07:38 pm (UTC)great post.
-j
hunters and gatherers and elders and shamans and...
Date: 2004-02-12 08:10 pm (UTC)i was drawn into the inner g/t circle in my public school system at the first opportunity. in elementary school this meant one day each week was spent in a different classroom doing more interesting things. this was nice, except it made the social part really hard for someone like me, with tentative social affect. then in middle school it changed, along with classroom changes, into a core of "honors" kids.
when that happened, the social stuff was easier - but certainly more limited - since for the most part we just saw the same people all the time.
now, i would like to be able to relate to all those other kids better... and i do, to some extent, because i have tried harder at that than anything else since leaving high school. the truly disappointing realization is this: teaching that would have worked better for me may well have worked better for a lot of the "regular" kids.
i'm a fast and hungry learner. i'm a perfectionist. yee-haw. *and* i need a systems approach - learning math by rote was the worst part of my education. i just don't learn that way. i need to understand *why* things are the way they are before i can really work with them. i expect a lot of supposedly less intelligent people are the same way. i need logic and set theory and number theory right alongside arithmetic and algebra and geometry... not later, after i've decided that i'm no good at math because i produce lousy results on multiplication time tests.
all those years, it was everyone expecting me to just take math for granted that made it so hard. so maybe getting all the basic stuff down would have taken a few more years. depth of understanding and future capability are worth the trade-off.
i really think it's more about the learning style than the giftedness or the will to learn. it's just tougher to find learning style in kids that aren't already fascinated by learning.
-j