Allen's Updated Chapter

INTRO:

On the 10th of September, two life-changing events occurred in my life. First I timidly walked down the hallway into my first classroom as a student teacher. Second, I was abruptly thrown into a new bustling world of professionals: teachers, principals, specialists, librarians, parents, and of course children. Walking down that hallway, wondering which open door would be the gate to my new existence, I was terrified of thought of exposing myself in front of all these people. I remember thinking to myself, “How ironic? I spent 12 years of my life in a relatively similar setting, yet I feel as though I’m a newborn, being forced to depart from the fetal comfort of the life I was so used to.
On that first day of school Amy, my delegated cooperating teacher, paced vigorously back and forth from one end of the room to the other, making last minute adjustments for the arrival of her new first grade class. I stood uncomfortably in the back of the room, being careful not to disturb her frenetic yet strangely meditative motions of preparation. I watched Amy as she fixed pencil holders, straightened chairs, and picked up loose pieces of garbage. I was transfixed at her every movement, my eyes silently imploring her to say something, anything to give me a sign that this was not all just a bad dream.
At 8:30am, I heard the faint voices of the students in the far distance. I paid close attention to the change in volume. Was it getting louder? If so, then it surely meant that the kids were on their way to shake up and change my life forever. Of course the voices got louder. The crescendo blasted into a discordant mix of 5 and 6 year olds confidently sauntering in through the door while Amy directed them to find their name tags on the carpet and to sit down. Most walked around me without taking notice of my presence – except for Didi. Didi noticed. She walked right up to me, staring at me with her wide inquisitive eyes. She stole a grin as I knelt down to her eye level.
“Are you the teacher?” she asked softly.
“No,” I replied. “I’m Amy’s student teacher.”
“What’s a student teacher?” she asked, biting the left side of her lower lip. I had no idea what to say. I wanted to say, “Beats the heck out of me, kid. I was hoping you could tell me.” Instead I said that I was here to help Amy out. Her baffled facial expression turned into a welcoming smile. She lunged at me, swinging her arms around my neck while squeaking, “Yey!”
I sarcastically thought to myself, “If only teaching was all about hugs, smiles, and friendships, if only it was all about the love.”
I addressed this idealistic “what-if” on my last day of student teaching in Amy’s classroom. I had just finished reading Dr. Seuss’s Lorax when Didi burst into tears. “I don’t want you to go! Why do you have to go?” I wanted to burst into tears as well and to scream, “I don’t want to go! Why do I have to go?” I went over and put my hand on her shoulder. I remembered my previous sarcastic remark about the purpose of teaching and realized that yes -- indeed, teaching was all about the relationships, the hugs, smiles, the love. I came away with this most important insight: that no matter how intense and trying student teaching may be, the goal is to create the friendship with my students, to begin to understand each other as human beings, to learn and grow together.
So now you’re thinking, “Ok, I’ve had enough wishy washy monologue about a cute, maybe even believable story about a student teacher’s first day at school. I smiled and even at times chuckled. Yes, my heart has warmed to your encounter with Didi. But come on, cut the idealistic crap and tell me how student teaching really is. What should I look out for? How do I make my own student teaching life easier?”
For what it’s worth, this chapter is not meant to make life easier. If you want an easy life, then you might need to read a different book, perhaps one that’s called, “How to make my Life Easier.” Perhaps it might shed some light on different occupations that don’t require as much work as being a teacher. Being a teacher is immeasurably trying because being a teacher is analogous to being a learner; and learning anything new is always difficult. So what’s the catch? Why would anyone want to spend her life learning in a sea of difficulty and struggle to keep learning? To answer the question, think back to a time in school when you had to figure out a really tough math problem, say a trigonometric equation, cursing to yourself how much you hated math and wondering how in the world this would ever be relevant in your life. Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere and into everywhere, miraculously, by forces unknown to your untamed spirit of frustration, the correct answer disembarks on the landing pad of your conscious. Your self esteem quadruples in value, and even if for a short while, you prove to yourself that you and your brilliant cranial powers did it all on your own. You experience a momentary lapse of true happiness in which you understand that the struggle was worth the purity of this feeling of refulgence.
In the same way, we as teachers struggle to learn about our students and ourselves; we dig, and search, and muscle our way through the depth of the child to understand how he learns, what he already knows, and how to best teach him. And then finally, after this great effort, the child’s eyes widen, he smiles, and understands the concept or idea you worked so hard to teach. And he says, “Oh yeah, I get it now!” And both you and the student are sitting there in front of each other, both equally shocked by your accomplishments that you achieved together. And this is exactly the reason why the difficult road for a teacher is worth it: to jump into endless pockets and lapses of happiness in which you and your students have together achieved the greatest satisfaction in the world: conscious awareness of personal accomplishment.
In my year of student teaching I experienced what Dan Lortie calls, “Apprenticeship of Observation,” a phenomenon whereby student teachers begin their practicum at cooperating schools having spent years as schoolchildren observing the practices of their own teachers (Borg, 274). As a consequence, they arrive at their student teaching placements with certain preconceived notions about teaching. I had fallen victim to this phenomenon. Based on my own schooling with segregated classrooms for children with special needs, I derived the notion that there were two types of kids: normal kids like myself, and “retarded” kids like those I observed in self-contained classrooms. In contrast to the segregated environment in my own schooling, both of my student teaching placements fostered a fully inclusive environment where children with special needs learned in the same classroom as everyone else. Due to the dissonance between my segregated childhood classrooms and my inclusive student teaching classrooms, I was challenged to accept the idea that many students with special needs could and should learn in the general classroom setting. I fed off of my childhood experience to make negative assumptions about students’ inabilities to learn. Ironically, it was I who learned how ignorant I really was when these children proved me wrong: they rose up to the challenges of a demanding school curriculum and succeeded.
I would like to share a few of these incidents of success to show that a student teacher’s own childhood schooling experience can have a potentially detrimental effect on his own students unless he does everything in his power to understand the child in terms of that child; not in terms of the student teacher’s past.


What was my struggle and what did I learn?

To avoid passing judgments or assumptions on a child’s ability to learn. That teachers are not judges. They are inquirers. An[CJO1] elementary child and a grown up teacher have a very important thing in common: both are curious about the world around them (*come back to this). The teacher is the channel, the circuit through which a child learns; the child is the teacher’s channel to find out how to teach the child. Therefore, a teacher’s greatest tool is the power to access the student’s untapped ability and potential to grow socially, intellectually, and spiritually, to seek out his passions while developing a solid understanding of moral values [*also add something about how kids’ minds are very fragile because they inquire about the world naturally while their moral beliefs are still in development; and therefore it is very important for teachers to carefully nudge, not insert or force them into moral understanding (analogy: use the egg example, how when we worked with eggs, they were so fragile, we understood that they have to be taken care of in a certain way, that any drastic moves could damage their development….). I learned that a successful way to do this is to find out as much as I can about children before making unfounded decisions, especially about their abilities to learn or understand. Hence, the teacher becomes an inquirer, an investigator: the teacher inquires about the child, to the child, which in turn allows the child to inquire about the world around him.
However, as I learned from my own student teaching experience, if a teacher makes an assumption about the child before a heavy inquiry about his learning habits, motivations, and even personal family life, then the student has suffered a blow to his chances of developing that fragile mind to its full potential because the teacher has already decided that a student is (or is not) capable of performing a cognitive or physical task.
Of course there are some things that are obvious that child might not be able to do (example), but in a fully inclusive classroom, the fact that I was able to do so much with kids after passing judgment on their ability proves that every child should be perceived as fully capable, that it’s the teacher’s responsibility to find out, to inquire about the child’s ability to learn. And this is where the challenge came in, learning to ask the right questions, to do everything in my power to get the student to succeed.
In light of this challenge, I had numerous self-defeating occasions where I felt that I could have let a child down based on my ignorant assumptions about a child’s ability. However, as the following anecdotal accounts will show, I then realized my poor judgment only after the student proved me wrong. After an entire year of struggling to keep an open mind toward all students, I understood the importance of unending inquiry into the child.
But again, I only learned the ways of inquiry through my own mistakes. Every mistake I made, namely my naïve assumptions about a particular child, was corrected by that child. In other words, the students were my teachers, making me a better teacher. That made both of us teachers and learners – inquirers.

In my student teaching year, I really came to understand how childhood experiences shape the way we think as adults. The way that I ignorantly judged special needs children in my student teaching placements was a sobering reflection of the way I perceived such children in my own childhood.
I have vague memories of the inclusive nature of my 1st grade classroom at a progressive Montessori school. For better or for worse, because of tough financial times, my parents pulled me out and sent me to a public school to start 2nd grade. On my first day, I saw something I had never seen before: a classroom with kids who looked and sounded very interesting to a second grader. I saw a few children in wheelchairs. Some of these children sounded like they were crying, moaning, or angrily screaming. The room was a perfect square, made up of four off-white walls, which were entertained by a single Van Gogh painting across from the open doorway. I stood in that doorway, innocently staring at the kids making various discordant noises. I wondered why these children looked and sounded so different than all the other kids at the school. Later that day I asked one of my classmates about these strange folks. He was a two-year veteran at the school; he boasted about his high status as the most popular 2nd grader on campus. It seemed natural to me that he was the go-to-guy for questions. He confidently answered, “Oh, those are the retards.”
Ah yes, I thought to myself; of course, the retards. I was quite familiar with this term, as I often used this word as a name-calling weapon to insult my classmates or friends. From that day on, whenever I called someone or was called a “retard,” I immediately associated this negative insult with the children in that room; the resource room. I would think of the contorted bodies, the moans and groans, the saliva dripping out of their mouths. These were images that stuck in my head through my student teaching placement.
Of course, as I grew up I understood the devastating potential of name-calling, yet as first year Masters Student, the idea of having a fully inclusive classroom of kids with and without special needs seemed bizarre. In my second placement at CPE I, according to my student teaching supervisor, 40% of the students in class had IEPs. All students learned in one classroom.

First Experience: Show how my previous childhood experience led to my narrow-mindedness

My cooperating teacher, Sandra[CJO2] , asked me to help a 9 year-old boy, Dave, to write a short report on a book he was reading. Dave had a lot of trouble staying focused and at times could not control his body movements. On the first day working with him, we sat next to each other and I asked him to give me the summary of the book. He mumbled something incomprehensible as he repeatedly picked up his book and dropped it on the table. His head rolled from side to side as he refused to talk about the book. He kept asking over and over again, “Why do we have to do this? When is this over? I don’t want to talk about this book. This book is boring.” I too, was becoming frustrated. Frustration transpired to a desire to blame. However, I did not blame myself for my failed efforts. Instead, I silently cursed the people who decided to keep him full-time in a general education classroom. I thought to myself, surely he would benefit from a special education classroom. I decided that I would be useless to him, that he needed special education help. In my own naïve assessment of Dave’s ability to provide a summary of a book, I decided that he needed “special education.” I did not know what that meant. However, I remembered the image of the resource room I saw in 2nd grade. That image was enough for me to banish him to that room.
I did not realize the grave mistake I made until complaining to Sandra about Dave’s refusal to work with me. She helped me devise a plan for Dave: for every page that Dave read, he was to take a post-it and write the characters on the page and the events that occurred. This way, Dave was able to stay focused and orally explain to me page by page what the book was about. After oral explanations, we moved on to physically writing the report. Eventually, Dave had not only completed the entire book on his own, but he complemented it with a well written essay.
How could this be? I was sure that Dave was incapable of getting through a whole book, let alone writing an expository essay. I realized my grave mistake, mentally giving up on his ability and assuming that he needed special education. I realized that I gave up on Dave by underestimating his ability to complete, summarize, and write about the book. As I reflected on this experience in my weekly journal, the memory of my ignorant judgment on a kid I barely knew made me sick to my stomach.
This experience led me to rethink my prior views and beliefs about segregating certain children from others based on their disabilities. I began to think about my expectations of students and how much they were truly capable of accomplishing. I realized that I was making judgments on these children based on labels, insufficiently few behaviors, and naïve assumptions about their learning abilities.

Second Experience with Gerald:

My revelation with Dave was a good benchmark to kick off my new endeavors of treating all students as fully capable kids with limitless potential, until my encounter with Gerald.
Gerald rarely partook in class discussions. Instead he preferred to sneak away and occupy himself with various objects. This was a kid who was a skilled magician, performing disappearing acts without anyone seeming to notice; a guerilla fighter, using his clandestine skill to evaporate from view, using knowledge of classroom space and materials to satisfy his immediate desires of isolated activity. He would find a comfortable corner, low enough to the floor to escape Sandra’s radar, often choosing to sit under a table. He seemed to take a liking with sharp objects such as toothpicks, scissors, and Exacto knives. He constantly mumbled to himself and seldom made eye contact with others. When most students were engaged in academic activities, Gerald was drawing graphic pictures of colorful monsters mutilating humans (I later asked him about the monsters; he told me about his avid obsession with comic books.). During journal recording time he rarely wrote more than one sentence. His attention span for academic assignments (journal writing, math problems, essay composition) seemed to be fleeting. During math lessons, I would split him up into small groups, but the moment I left, he would dissolve into thin air to play with his sharp objects while softly talking to himself underneath the table or in a dimmed corner.
I spent a lot of time observing Gerald’s behavior. From my vague memories of psychology classes in college, I decided that Gerald fit someone who might pop up in an Abnormal Psychology class, and therefore needed some special psychological help and surely would benefit from a resource room. I decided that Gerald was not capable of performing most of the in-class activities and assignments. I began to resent the school’s open-classroom ways, allowing kids like Gerald to travel from grade to grade spending most of his time in corners or underneath tables.
I developed a hidebound view of Gerald: he was not capable of paying attention in class, probably because he had an attention disorder, a spectrum disorder, or some other kind of deficit. My cop-out was biologically based and I gave up on him. I reassured myself that Dave would never grow in such an open classroom.
My bleeding heart hardened as I shifted my attention to other, more “normal” kids – until May 15th. On May 15th, Gerald was scheduled to make an oral presentation to the class about what he learned in math from the beginning of the school year. We all gathered in a big circle on the rug and Sandra called off the order of presenters. Gerald was to go third.
“And remember,” Sandra reminded. “Do not read from your notes. You have already studied them.” I happened to be sitting next to Gerald when she made the announcement. Within moments of Sandra’s announcement, he was gone.
I did not think that Sandra realized that he had disappeared, as she didn’t gesture or comment on his absence. I stepped out of the classroom and found him curled up in a cove between two walls and in front of a classroom door. I sat down across from him, stretched out my legs and propped myself on my elbow. Gerald looked terrified. He stared through his note-paper, which he was instructed not read from. His eyes were wide, cold, and motionless. I watched him for a few seconds, hoping he would acknowledge my presence in some way. He did not. So I told him a personal story:

I was making a presentation just like this one in front 200 people – I suddenly broke down, my hands and voice began to tremble, and I even dropped my note paper. But then I regained my confidence after realizing that my audience was really interested in what I had to say.

Then I prayed for something positive to happen. The story was a long-shot to regain Gerald’s own confidence because throughout the second semester he expressed his hatred for math as a subject. I looked over his note sheet. His talking points were vague and did not really express what he learned in math. It conveyed that his strength was multiplication. So I made a quick assessment of his multiplication skills and indeed he was able to provide answers to problems such as 7x4, 8x6, and so on. Then I softly said, “First of all, between you and me, I understand that you don’t like math. Personally I wasn’t a big fan in 5th grade myself.
“But,” I conceded, “We have to find a way to present what you have learned.” First of all, I assured him that he could read straight off from the paper, no matter what Sandra demanded; that there was absolutely nothing wrong with reading word for word and that I still did it all the time at Teachers College during presentations. For the first time in several minutes, his eyes thawed out and he gave me a quick glance of relief. Nevertheless, I could tell that he was terrified. I had never seen him so focused on anything before. All this time I thought he was incapable of focusing. I thought that his behavior and aloofness were just part of who he was. But here was this kid who was looking me in the eyes, completely concentrated and silently imploring me to help him through this hell called public speaking. Granted, I would have like him to focus on an object other than his fear. But still, I realized that we could use this concentration to get him through the presentation.
We spent several minutes adding some examples of how he could show the ways he learned multiplication and how he could use it outside of school. All of the answers were 100% from his mouth. I simply extracted the motivation from him and asked open-ended questions. I also told him to practice reading it a few times, to pretend that I was his audience. He seemed comforted by that. After about 15 minutes, we walked back into the classroom. As I sat down on my stool, I turned around only to see Gerald attempting to make another escape into the hallway. I ran over and put my arm around his shoulder, asking him to come back. He mutely refused. I physically gave him a little nudge, and with some resistance, finally got him through the door. The whole class was focused on another girl finishing her presentation.
“Ok Gerald, you’re up,” Sandra said. Realizing the gravity of the situation, Gerald turned around and jetted for the door. Once again I ran after him, put my hand on his shoulder, he stopped, turned around and stood still, terrified of the apparent doom to come. I gently whispered into his ear that he would not have to stand in front of the class, that he could sit on the big chair right next to me and if anything would go wrong, he could just stop and I would take over for him. He came back to the rug and uncomfortably sat down. Everyone was now watching him. He stiffly sat in his chair staring at his note paper. Several seconds of silence passed. I prayed that he would begin soon and I prayed for him to succeed. Then he began. He read his notes verbatim. His voice was slightly monotone but steady. He was done in one minute. I immediately began to applaud. Sandra and a few other students chimed in. Sandra warmly smiled and congratulated him. I told him that he did it! It was brilliant! Then Tiana, his fellow classmate smiled and exclaimed, “Gerald! It’s ok to breathe now.” He looked at her in a playfully astonished way and said, “Wow, I was holding my breath the whole time!” I wanted to keep praising him because he accomplished something that some adults will never even attempt to do out of the same fear he had.
After this beautiful incident, I changed my thoughts about Gerald’s need for a resource room. In fact, in my eyes, he was the smartest kid in the world; that he succeeded in everything just then. I realized that he was capable of concentrating; that he was capable of presenting; that he was capable of math.
Reflecting back on this situation, I imagined myself as a teacher with my own classroom, assuming that Gerald couldn’t t do this, that, and the other. From this experience I learned that one of the roles of a teacher, besides unconditional love and respect for students, is to observe a child’s behavior and to make educated assumptions, and then to test these assumptions. For example, I observed that Gerald was focused on his fear. This sustained attention, though brought about from emotional pain, was sufficient to allow me to coach him through the process.

Mark Twain, a rhetorical mastermind of unequivocal teachings and wisdom, said that education consists mainly in what we have unlearned. As student teachers we must apply this process of unlearning to ourselves as we experiment not only with developing our own teaching styles, but also the light in which we choose to see our students. We must be careful in passing judgment or making any assumptions about the reasons for particular actions that students take. Moreover, it is our job as teachers to find out the reasons. As we open a new chapter of our lives as student teachers, we are initially ignorant of the lives of these students, inside and outside of the classroom. We have no prior knowledge about their learning styles; about their home life, about their personal struggles they might face with parents or with peers. At the outset I knew nothing about Dave’s or Gerald’s emotional or psychological stabilities.
By way of Apprenticeship of Observation, I had used my childhood experience with special education as a basis for making naïve, unfounded judgments on their academic abilities and on their personal character. As role models and superheroes to children, we owe it to ourselves to be critical of our preconceived notions of what’s right or wrong about them. We owe it to our students to unlearn the notions that might interfere with their potential to succeed.

Third Experience with Manny

I truly realized the dangers of unfounded assumptions with Manny, a 5th grader in my second student teaching placement. One day, during quiet reading time, he was drawing a picture on a white piece of paper while his reading book lay closed on his desk. I asked him why he wasn’t reading. Avoiding eye contact, Manny frowned and mumbled, “Because I hate reading.” I was taken back and had no idea how to respond. So I decided to demand that he pick up the book and read anyway because “This is quiet reading time.” I knew he wouldn’t listen, but it was all I could think to say. I walked away from Manny thinking how terribly sad it was that this poor kid hates to read. I spent several days contemplating ways in which I could help Manny learn to fall in love with reading. Once in a while I approached him to suggest books that might interest him. However, no matter what I suggested, he refused.
I felt stuck and helpless. I gave up trying to get him to enjoy the process of reading. Then one day I noticed that he was intently focused on a picture book, which seemed like something that a 2nd or 3rd grader would read. And that’s when it hit me. Maybe Manny refuses to read not because he hates it, but because he can’t yet read at that particular level. Indeed, after conferring with him on the fictional novel he was reading, I realized that the book was simply too difficult for him. He didn’t hate reading. He needed appropriate literature for his personal reading level.
I learned an important lesson from Manny. As a teacher, I would be doing any child a huge injustice if I made naïve and uneducated assumptions based on his immediate behaviors. A teacher, therefore, must always seek to find out why a child says what he says because the motivation for a child’s actions may not be directly apparent. For example, his dislike for reading was a sign for help, that maybe he felt nervous or anxious or self-defeated because his book was too difficult for him. His behavior screamed, “Help! Find me a book that can I actually work with!” This situation is an example of my unlearning to be close-minded and learning to seek out the deepest motivations for students’ actions based on observations and open-mindedness. I began to develop a style for observation: whenever I observed a child doing or saying anything, I would make a list of “maybes.” After creating this list, I would really understand that there were countless reasons for a child’s behavior. And every “maybe” on my list could be addressed by careful observation and open-ended inquiry about a child’s behavior, motivations, and current knowledge. Only then can we, as teachers, tap into the way that children learn.

As I muscled my way through these experiences with kids, I began to notice an emerging pattern of my own personal feelings toward them. I began to feel a personal connection with them after struggling to accept them as fully capable individuals, after they individually exposed my dangerous ignorance about them. This feeling of connectedness was only possible after I had subdued my own ego, which clearly dictated my narrow-minded assumptions about Dave, Gerald, and Manny. As Alison Li poignantly asserts in her chapter, “It is hard to really take a step away from what you are doing and really critique yourself with an objective lens…” (Alison’s Chapter)
My advice to other student teachers, therefore, would be to take a long hard look at one’s past and to understand that our past in many ways determines the choices we make in the present. In my opinion, it is very important to reflect back on one’s own process of emotional, social, and spiritual growth, especially in one’s own classroom experience as a child. As my story shows, I grew up isolating myself from those who I perceived more different than I. This isolation was the result of my initial refusal to accept the idea that all students can learn in one classroom.
To use Mara Sapon-Shevin’s words, I grew up fearing difference. In her book, Because We Can Change the World, she writes, “Our isolation from people who were ‘different’ often kept us from learning about other groups…We were not well informed about difference, so it became something fearful. Often, if we asked a question about why someone was different, we were shushed, yelled at, or made to feel stupid” (Sapon-Shevin, 19). In my case, I was told that different people were “retards,” and I accepted them as a segregated group of people who belong in their own isolated setting.
Ironically, my assessment of children with special needs as an 8-year-old came back to isolate me with my experience with Dave, Gerald, and Manny: I initially chose to segregate them as different, as needing special help, only to see them rise above my absentminded premonitions about their abilities. Their success slapped me in the face, as if to say, ‘“Now who’s the retard, hmm?” Their subliminal message was clear: “Come and help us seek out our potential and help us understand that we can accomplish anything.”

Throughout my 26 year-old-career as a human being, one with a soul, with emotion, with ability to reason, and with the comfort to allow my own heart to idealistically bleed for the love and fraternity between individuals, I am convinced that education, whether defined by a scientist, a student teacher, a professor, a novel, article, sentence, phrase or a single word, is love. That’s it. Define it as you please, but in my opinion, teaching and learning in a classroom exist in a harmonious state of perfection when there is an emotional bond between the students and teachers.
Rabbi Simon Jacobson, a disciple of a great thinker and philosopher, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (Also known as the Lubavicher Rebbe), writes a short parable on the connection between education and love:

A young child once asked a rabbi why man was created with two eyes instead of one, like the nose and the mouth.

‘With the left eye, you should look at yourself, to see how you can improve yourself. And with the right eye, you should look at others lovingly, always seeking out their best qualities.’

As a toddler I felt this connection with my own teacher for the first time in my life on my first day of school. I was 6 years old as I stared at the classroom from the doorway of a Montessori school in San Francisco. This was an environment quite similar to the classrooms in my student teaching placements, yet different from my 2nd through 12th grade experience in California’s public schools. It was so different that all my first year, I didn’t even know that I was going to school. But on that first day, I had a panoramic view of the gargantuan classroom. It was the size of a school gym – at least to a 6-year-old. There was a carpet where we played games, learned to read and write, learned math, and held discussions about different social and personal issues. We called our teacher, Shelly, by her first name. As far as I knew, she didn’t have a last name. She was Shelly – Shelly with red hair, an infectious smile, and a soft soothing voice. The desks were dispersed around the room. In fact, they weren’t desks; they were tables of different sizes and shapes.
The first book I picked up was a book on volcanoes. I remember being fascinated by the pictures of the hot lava. Shelly came up to me as I was flipping the pages and said, “You know what that is? That’s hot lava. It comes from the volcano. Look at the picture; do you think it’s flowing fast or slow?”
“Slow,” I responded.
“Why do you think that is?”
“Because it’s not moving?” I timidly answered.
Shelly gave a warm chuckle and explained to me that in fact “lava flows quite slowly so that you could run away from it if you needed to.” This was the first piece of information I ever learned in school – that there are mountains called volcanoes, that they spew out hot lava, and that the lava is so nice and friendly because it lets you run away from it.
We were also taught Japanese once a week. I was taught to paint on poster-sized paper; I had weekly chores watering the towering green Ficus plant named Sonja and cleaning up the bird cage that was home to a green obnoxious parrot named Phil.
The scutwork was fun and interesting and all, but what about that volcano? I wanted to learn more. I couldn’t get the image of standing next to hot lava, knowing that it would burn my arms and legs off but knowing that I could easily get away from it. I had dreams of walking next to a stream of it, throwing things into it and seeing what would happen. I wanted volcano! I wanted lava! Give me volcano! Give me lava!
I was pleasantly surprised to find out that besides being a nice person, Shelly was also a mind reader[CJO3] . One day Shelly asked me if I cared to build a volcano. “Uh yeah, hello, duh, of course, like what do you think? Of course I want to build a volcano,” I thought to myself. I presented a laconic but sincere nod of approval, stealing a happy smile from my hero, the mind reader. She provided all the artistic resources and sent me off to work with an older child who had allegedly built many volcanoes in his short 2nd grade career. I also learned how to bake sugar cookies (which became the long term cause of my matured sweet tooth) and carrot cake. When it was my turn to build stuff, I built five story houses out of Legos, proudly claiming that my creation wasn’t really a house but rather a space ship that would furtively transform into a house for obvious functional reasons: to avoid being identified by the evil Mega-Tron and to hold lots of people and animals while flying through space (That same year I learned about space by pure accident as I stumbled upon a book about the 9 planets. I remember the pictures of Pluto, the small planet way out there in space. I remember pictures of glaciers and icicles. To this day I’m convinced that Pluto looks exactly like I saw it in first grade.).
During my student teaching year, I spent many-a-moment reminiscing about my short stint at the Montessori school, thinking how similar it was to my cooperating schools. I remembered being asked a lot of questions, being constantly challenged to figure out problems on my own. I always wondered why Shelly loved to ask so many questions. Not that I really minded – I loved answering them. “She’s just nosy,” I would conclude, “But so darn nice!”
Because of economic reasons, my parents had to pull me out of Montessori in second grade and my romantic flight of conversations, questions, cooking, and Lego-building were crushed by my new public school, by the lectures, rote note-taking and drilling, by putrid school lunches, and by an authoritative woman claiming to be my teacher, who irritated me from the first day for being bossy and mean. Her name was Ms. Something or other; I don’t really remember.
I had a rough transition from warm Montessori love to cold and isolated feelings of being just another pupil in seemingly endless rows of desks. The classroom looked like a blueprint for a massive multiplication table, 5 rows by 6 columns. All energy flowed from and to the front of the classroom, where Ms. So and so lectured on various subjects.
An anecdotal account of Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) in my first week of class will illuminate my rough transition. The “silent” part of the title was enforced by methods that in my opinion were draconian and flat out damaging. If we dared to make a peep in class, the teacher would call our name out and then announce the future punishment. Usually it would involve sitting on one side of the room while the rest of the children got to watch a movie. The television was set up so that its backside was facing the unfortunate student(s), who’s only view, less the back of the TV set, was the faces of the happy children as their eyes were glued to the screen. I found myself seeing their elated smiles several time that year, listening to the jolly music of some cartoon.
These consequences produced two distinct emotions: one was that I felt even more compelled to dissent by goofing off the next day; and two, I began to resent the teacher. She gave me no reason to enjoy reading. Instruction on how and why to read was almost non-existent. The classroom was equipped with a small library of children’s books, but I was never encouraged to pick the books that I might have enjoyed, nor did the teacher ever show enthusiasm or interest when she conferred with me. I don’t remember reading about anything fascinating that year. I do remember approaching the small library, expecting to find at least one book about volcanoes or space – frowning when I never did.
I wanted Shelly almost as badly as I missed my mom when she first dropped me off at nursery school several years before. I wanted Shelly’s nosy and sometimes annoying questions, similar to the ones I learned to ask in my own second student teaching placement like, “What’s going on here? Can you tell me more? Why do you think that is?” If only I were old enough to tell my mom that day, “Listen, you’re making a big mistake, you see. Shelly is asking me these questions because she wants me to learn by figuring it out on my own, that Shelly gave me all these different cooking, building, and art projects so that I would explore different modes of learning. I wanted to tell my mom that Shelly was a learner too; that’s why she asked the questions, see? I wanted to tell my mom that I understood that I was learning math when measuring my pillow as I sewed with a real thimble and a real needle; that I was engaged in scientific inquiry when observing Philip, the obnoxious yet lovable green parrot. But in fact, I could not tell my mom all of this because I didn’t understand, at least not consciously.
However, standing in front of the tiny library without a book on volcanoes or space, I understood one thing: I wanted out. So when my mom picked me up at the end of the day, I expressed to her everything I felt: I cried and cried and cried. I didn’t say a word. I was sure that parents all have special internal translators that transcribe their child’s wail to a coherent string of syntactic and semantic expressions of concern. And yes! I was concerned, damn it! I was 7 years old, and I was concerned! Shelly would be too if she had seen this disaster. She would have empathized with me because Shelly was a saint.
My second grade teacher, on the other hand, was seen as a tyrannical monster, and my untainted little pure soul quickly learned to adapt to her. It only gave me pleasure to try to defeat her after every one of her punishments by rebelling again the next day. I remember that I did not have any positive feelings about reading that year. In fact, SSR was my least favorite classroom activity. The majority of my esteemed second-grade colleagues agreed.
As I moved along from elementary school to middle school to high school, so did the rows of desks, the teacher-centered lectures, and general disdain for most of my teachers. Shelly’s Garden of Eden was slowly but surely forgotten as my conception of schooling solidified into a series of dark memories of evil teachers, rote lectures, and almost non existent praise for any academic achievement; not to mention the segregated classrooms for children with special needs.
In short, my experience in schooling taught me that students learn by being lectured and that their intelligence is measured by implementation of tests. This is how I remembered my schooling, and this was what I expected to see in my student teaching classrooms.
However, I saw something quite different. In both of my placements, the classrooms looked more like living rooms, with a rug for Morning Meeting, a sofa, plants and class pets, large windows, and clusters of desks rather than rows, just like at the Montessori school. And my memories of Shelly slowly began to creep back into my consciousness.
That was 16 years ago. I was too young to understand the dynamics of a progressive classroom like Montessori. I hadn’t seen anything like it until I became a student teacher. That year I recalled the hot lava, the homey layout of Shelly’s classroom, the copious amounts of literature, the vast array of interesting projects that tapped into multiple intelligences, and Shelly’s dedication to engage in inquiry in order to understand how her students learn. And most of all, I remembered the love.
As I reflected in my journal entries about my struggles with making unfounded assumptions and judgments about students’ abilities, I began to develop an uncanny affection for all the students in class, even though it was not always reciprocated in the way that I would have liked. I began to remember the similar affection I had for Shelly and the same she must have had for me.
Who says time machines can’t be built? I found one in both of my student teaching placements. The only difference between now and then is that now I know that crying about my feelings will hardly be decoded by anyone, and therefore I need to write this chapter in order for the reader to understand that student teaching is a lifetime of lessons to be learned from one’s past experiences; to observe the ways that one’s own previous life as a child affects the current child in the current classroom. I wished to share what I learned as a neophyte to the massive and often challenging world of education. I wrote this chapter to share what teaching means to me -- establishing an emotional bridge between myself and every student – the individual student because everything that we as teachers say and do will affect the child’s emotions and capabilities to be thoughtful, moral, and inquisitive human beings. Teaching means to understand that the “class” as a whole is a social group seems fine, but this social group is not a living, breathing entity. The group doesn’t have a beating heart and a limitless brain like a child does. In the end, the group will dissipate. The child will remain, forever remembering your gentle approach and unconditional expression of kindness.
I chose to be a teacher because I wanted, in some strange way, to thank Shelly for remembering me as an individual, for motivating me to get excited about the external world as well as my own internal personal growth.
So what does teaching mean to me? Teaching is learning. It’s about asking those questions, “Why? Tell me more? What can we learn from this?” (Peters, 18, 50, 134-137). Yes, one important objective is to teach many disciplines like social studies, literature, math, language arts and the likes. This is but one goal. There are many; there are limitless goals. Contemplating the purpose of education, Jacobson writes, “There is no choice but to return to an educational philosophy in which we teach children not just the value of a mathematical equation, but the value of their souls” (Jacobson, 38).
To teach a child the value of his or her soul, a teacher must first peak into it. As educators we mustn’t assume that children will simply expose it to us. Rather we must ask them if it would be okay to take a look; and I think that there’s a really great way for teachers to make this happen: by giving them a real soulful, emotional gift – the love and friendship that they all unconditionally deserve.
Therefore, teaching and learning are really a personal connection that you make with your student, and no one else. So let’s stop thinking so linearly or 2 dimensionally and understand that education is multifaceted - limitless in dimensions. Education is about the love. And love is everything.

I was sure that my chapter would end here until I stumbled upon a journal entry that I wrote after taking over a full day in my first placement. I knew I had to include it as the final closure.
Let’s face it; this book is not going to teach anyone how to be a teacher. Only real human interaction with students can make that happen. To be more honest than I ever have in my occasional ramblings in this chapter, my goal of writing it was to make a personal connection with the reader. And so, this is my last attempt at your emotions. My journal entry begins like this:

I was alone with my students from 8:00 to 3:00. I didn’t even have time to contemplate the sheer insanity of a first-semester student teacher taking over a vibrant first grade class all on my own. Things were going smoothly. The day was winding down. About half the children were finished with their social studies project. I asked them to go to the carpet and quietly read while the rest of the class finished up. As more students completed the assignment, the carpet area became a place for loud noise. My meek calls for silence stopped working. I tried to raise my voice; turn off the lights; do funny penguin dances; I even sang a Beatles song in a falsetto-opera tone. Nothing worked. I was spent, angry, and embattled. Then the pinnacle of frustration, the angel of madness blessed me with the following sight: two girls skipped to opposite corners of the room as I suddenly felt a strange sensation that I was stuck in a bad dream, where in the bad dream I was further stuck inside a boxing ring. The girls screamed and began to furiously run toward each other. Within moments, they slammed into each other and fell to the floor. It all happened so quickly and I was not sure if I should call an ambulance for possible physical injuries to the students or for my own mental breakdown. Both girls began to roll around the carpet, laughing hysterically at their awesome bumper-kid abilities. I scornfully thought to myself that they wouldn’t be laughing if they knew that I was uncontrollably losing my mind.
What followed was strange magic and something I will never forget. Both my hands desperately swung into the air and I told everyone to stop what they were doing and to immediately go to their regular rug spots. They noisily complied. Though they were all in their correct spots, the noise level only grew and so did my frustration. Then I sternly raised my voice and darkened my tone:
“You know what, guys? I’m going to be really honest.” Most of the children’s heads sprung up in response to my comment. I waited for a few seconds with a reproachful facial expression. Then I continued:
“Because I am an honest person, I don’t lie. And this is going to be one of those times that I’m going to be very very honest. You are my very first class.”
Now I had all their attention. Many students smiled, saying, “Really?” I could see that most students took this honesty personally.
“Yes,” I said, “Really. I came in here on the first day not knowing what to expect, and then I saw you, and how wonderful you were, being so good, paying attention to directions, being so quiet when you knew it was time to be quiet. It made me so happy when I saw all these brilliant kids reading and writing so well. I thought to myself, ‘Wow! What a great way to start a teaching career.’ And today, in the last hour, I’m pretty disappointed because you were not paying attention, and you were being so loud, and you were not listening to me.”
I paused for dramatic effect – then I continued: “You have to understand that your learning is more important to me than anything else in the world because if you learn, then that means you get to go into second grade, just like I have to learn from you to become a teacher next year.”
The students were slightly shocked. A few simultaneously asked, “You mean you’re not a teacher?”
“Nope, not yet, but I will be next year.”
Then I received a barrage of questions about where I’d be teaching. I didn’t even need to have them raise hands. We were all having a well-coordinated and immensely moving discussion. They wanted me to stay here. I said I hoped to stay. They asked if they could write letters. “Of course you can write letters,” I said. “You can write thousands of letters and I will read every single one.”
“What if you go teach in Chicago?”
“No, don’t worry, I’m going to teach right here in New York. And if I don’t teach at this school then I promise I’ll visit all the time. I promise you that we’ll see each other again.”

The kids seemed satisfied. I was mystified. Just about all of them were smiling. Didi was crying. She would cry one more time on the last day of class after my reading of The Lorax while lunging into my arms, begging me to stay.
I don’t know exactly what had happened that day except that we were 5 minutes late for library. Luckily for us, the librarian didn’t mind our unexpected tardiness. I didn’t mind either; whatever happened in those last few minutes of class was pure magic – I asked them if I could take a peak into their souls. They said yes. So I did.


Critical Thinking Questions:

- Consider the fact as a student teacher or classroom teacher you begin the school year with a group of children of whom you have limited knowledge. What could be some ways you might assess a child’s learning strategies as well as social-emotional location to cater your instruction to the individual child?

- As student teachers, we might often struggle to determine our precarious roles in the classroom at any given moment. For example, one might wonder when it’s time to be a lecturer and when it’s time to be listener. Is it best to ask a student an open-ended question, or perhaps it’s better to provide the student with the specific information?
Consider your daily interactions with students and be conscious of your role as a teacher/student teacher. Ask yourself, “When should I be a lecturer? When should I be a facilitator? When should I be a listener? When should I intervene with a child’s individual work? When should I leave the child alone and walk away? (Here’s a hint: The more you know about the child’s personality and learning style, the easier it will be to answer these questions).
Moreover, when you are observing the cooperating teacher, take note of her role on a moment-to-moment basis (physically take notes with a pen and paper).


Citations


Borg, M. (2004). Key Concepts in ELT: The Apprenticeship of Observation. ELT Journal
58(3). 274-276.

Jacobson, Simon (1995). Toward a Meaningful Life. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

Peters, Dorothy (2000). Taking Cues from Kids. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann

Sapon-Shevin, Mara (1999). Because We Can Change the World. Needham Heights,
Massachusetts: Allyn and Bacon.