Dear Students past, present, and future,
Above anything else, you are the reason I do what I do. For an hour a day for one hundred and eighty days in high school (or for six hours a day for six months if you are one of my preschool students) we are bonded together in a relationship where I hope you have a little more insights and knowledge about yourself and the world leaving my classroom then when you came in. My success is determined by your success, not just in school, but also in life.
As I think back over my years as a student, a student teacher, and now as a teacher I think the one thing that sticks out was my need for perfection within myself.
As a student, I never hand an assignment in without checking and re-checking it for errors. I also tend to write my paper around the great ideas and quotes I had found from “experts” in the field. My last blog for my “Curriculum in It’s Social Context” class was made up of fourteen paragraphs and I used eleven quotes and would have included more if I had found a way for them to fit. As this semester has progressed I have become more comfortable with my experiences becoming the data for my writing. It is in the classroom where I have been able to put shoe leather to the topics that I read about and decide which ones really do work.
I think that this need for perfectionism is the result of having a few teachers who had me scared for my academic future as they were always looked for the elusive “right” answer, not caring about the thought process as much as the answer. I remember once in AP Literature and Composition in high school our assignment was, in pairs, to take a poem and interpret it. My partner and I chose the poem “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes and we used our knowledge of oppression, hope, and the Harlem Renaissance writers to interpret the poem to be about a mother, who had been through the struggle, encouraging her son to keep fighting. We were excited to present it in front of the class, having found this project and the poem to be so interesting when, approximately five minutes into the presentation, our teacher told us that we were wrong, to sit down, and then spent the next twenty minutes lecturing the class on the “true” meaning of the poem for all mankind. It was not only a mortifying experience, but it also taught me that my interpretations were not necessarily the right ones. That teacher did not want to know how we had come to the interpretation that we had, to dialogue about questions we may have had, but rather wanted to tell us what the “right” interpretation was.
As a student teacher, my perfection manifested itself in spending hours preplanning and planning lessons and units, sometimes having up to five pages of notes, questions, and activities to cover in a single class period. What I didn’t do, however, was develop the ability to reflect on what I was learning through teaching, so I had to learn those same lessons again.
While I expected a lot from myself, I was beginning to see that I did not want to scar my students and instead expected much less from them in terms of behavior and academics. Coming from somewhat of a privilege background, I knew these students had the resources at their disposal to be whatever they set their minds to and it took a few months to see that I needed to encourage them to see that too.
I learned that I needed to expect as much from disadvantaged students as I had from my private school student teaching students. While these students were more economically disadvantaged, it did not mean that they were any less intelligent, or that they needed me to hold their hands. I need to keep them accountable, learning skills about time management and academic honesty that they could use beyond the classroom.
As a teacher, my perfectionism had reached such a point, that I did not want anyone to see me as anything less than perfect. I was so concerned my students would have questions I couldn’t answer that I spent hours researching whatever topic we were discussing. I had always seen my teachers as such beacons of knowledge that could answer any question; that is what I wanted to be that for my students. I was petrified that they would find a question that I could not answer and that they would somehow see me as less of a teacher. What I had failed to understand at the time was that these beacons of knowledge had spent so many years teaching the exact same material they probably could not help to anticipate the questions that would be asked and to know the answers.
What I was also unaware of was that having all this knowledge did not encourage my students to want to learn, but rather they looked to me for the answers and that I had alienated them the same way I had felt alienated by my teachers: not having the right answers. I have discovered that students who are afraid of being wrong, will not offer answers to even the simplest of questions and will not ask questions for fear of looking “stupid”. I have taken this knowledge and redefined what the image was that I was projecting to my students. While before it was an image of “perfection” it is now an image of “openness in learning as life long learners.”
Having had the privilege of educating some of you as preschoolers and some of you as high schoolers, you will notice that the image I attempt to convey to you may have varied slightly. As preschoolers I set up the room (with tents, and tunnels, play clothes and a play kitchen) and had you engage in activities that encouraged the “building of imagination” as our main image. If you put blocks in the play dough and told me it was a birthday cake, we sang “Happy Birthday” and blew out the candles. If we were drawing a picture and you told me that a couple purple squiggly lines was a cow, I didn’t tell you that it looked like a mess and that cows weren’t purple, we just talked about cows. The structure of the day allowed time for you to explore the various centers until you found what interested you. Work was your play and being able to ask questions and think outside of the box was what was important.
If I taught you a decade or more down the road, the image I endeavor to communicate to you is one of “life-long learning”. To a lesser extent, I still encouraged you to use your imagination as you asked questions about things we were learning in class and things that you saw on the news that made you curious about the world at large. Imagination will follow you through a career and help you to see outside think more creatively as you help move your company forward. All great CEOs and leaders have the vision to see where they are going and the imagination of how to get there successfully.
What things I could not answer, we explored together. As scientists we think through the questions, developing a hypothesis, designing what an experiment would look like, when possible conducting the experiment, and then looking at the results. In one class when the students wanted to know whether plants could survive without light, we planted lima bean seeds in cups and put some on the windowsill and hid some in a cabinet. Two weeks later we found out that those in the cabinet were paler, but taller than the ones in the windowsill as they stretched looking for sunlight. When the students were curious to know what would happen if the plant was then exposed to light, we put both plants in the windowsill and the pale one became green. I also encouraged each of you to take ownership of your own learning by asking good, thoughtful questions and by finding resources to help you in your search. I am naturally curious about the world and want my students to be the same. I am not ashamed of the fact that I Google things I don’t know; my friends find it funny, but I really want to know and living in an age where we have the information at our finger tips, we need to be learning how to access it and wise ways to use it.
As we move forward I make several promises to you. First, I promise to continuously develop my tools for reflection as your teacher. I never want to become one of those teachers that use the same lesson plan year after year because it is already done. As the interests and curiosities of my students change with each new class, so should I be tweaking my curriculum. I shouldn’t be pulling out worksheets if I have tactile learners and I shouldn’t have students always working in groups if they are not interpersonal learners. I have already begun to journal about our days together- what activities worked, which ones did not; how your class responded to one activity and how engaged each of my student seemed to be in the learning process. As I am required by school policy to follow and include certain things in my curriculum, I am also looking for new and interesting ways to engage students in each topic.
Reflection is not just a valuable tool for me, but also for each of you, too. You come into a classroom and say that you hate something, but why is that? What experiences in your past have set up a dislike for something on the very first day? I encourage you to think back through your educational experiences. Do you hate science because of a poor teacher? Then open yourself up to becoming excited about the subject from a teacher who is excited about the subject. Did you not understand something and then do poorly in the class? Ask questions. I am also going to begin using science journals in class; these will help me understand questions you may have and for you to think through things we are learning in class.
I also promise to seek out best practices and to collaborate with other teachers. Doing so will help me to feel more satisfied in my career by ensuring that you as students learn and that I have done my job well. This may mean that you will see more principles, directors, or fellow teachers in our classroom from time to time. Relax, they are not their to judge you, but rather observe what is going on in our classroom, and make suggestion to me on how I can better communicate, plan, and engage you as learners. I also plan to connect more with teachers that you will continue to have in science and in your grade level so that the curriculum we use will move you easily vertically, ensuring that you have the information that is needed to excel in other science courses, and horizontally, ensuring that you have the reading and writing skills to be successful in the grade you are now. These connections will keep you from compartmentalizing learning and answer the question “Why do I need to know this?”
I am also committed to the idea that I am not training professional students. Whenever possible, and because of the expectations of the school I may not always have control of this, but I will not teach to a test. My job as your teacher is not to fill your mind with pointless information that you can spew forth on a test and then forget about. If this is the case then I have failed you as a teacher and you have wasted your time as my student. Each of you will, hopefully, graduate high school and seek a career that interests you. If you do not see the relevance behind what we are learning, ask. I want to open a dialogue where you can ask questions and talk through what we are learning. This means that I am also committed to making instruction relevant. The lack of connection between the subject being taught and what the you as students already knew, felt, and loved would make the curriculum “formal and symbolic,” having no real lasting impression on you as the student, leading to a lack of motivation and ultimately, and according to John Dewey “the child’s reasoning powers, the faculty of abstraction and generalization, are not adequately developed.” As a preschooler this means you will continue to engage in self-directed play and as a high schooler we will look for ways to make curriculum more relevant, among other things differentiated instruction.
I am continuously growing as a student and as a teacher and hope that my students are too. You may be students today, but tomorrow you will be decision makers; I hope that we have worked through enough controversial subjects that you have the critical thinking skills necessary to make a good decision. My first lesson, or my last lesson to you: Knowledge has the power to change thought patterns and lives. Use it, or lose it.
Jeanne Holladay
