I have a good friend who used to be my assistant principal, and he gave me a left-handed compliment one day when he was dealing with a difficult colleague. He said that all teachers ignore certain rules, which he accepted, but that he was frustrated by teachers who broke rules out of convenience or laziness, and even worse were those who enforced rules erratically or selectively. Then he said to me, ‘You break rules all the time, but I understand that when you ignore a rule it’s for a reason, it’s because that rule contradicts something you believe about teaching.’ I had never thought about it that way, but he was absolutely right.
I give the students the example of tardiness to class. Where I used to work, there was a policy that three tardies were equivalent to an absence, and the burden was on the teachers to keep track of the students’ tardies and enter them into the online attendance system, as well as write office referrals every time a student accumulated a third tardy. I had colleagues who became seconds-counters rather than teachers. They would stand by the doors of their classrooms and tick off the seconds as students arrived, and then they would take several minutes of class time to track each tardy for each late student, count them, enter them, etc.
I never noted anyone’s tardies unless they were egregious, and by that I mean they were disruptive to the class. Otherwise, I didn’t care much. Honestly, it was incredibly rare that I had a student whose occasional (or even frequent) tardiness had any significant impact on anything. I often felt that the teachers who obsessed over tardies created more disruption than the students who were tardy.
So I ask the Advanced Comp students, ‘What kind of teacher do you want to be?’
I suppose I always possessed an attitude like this, but in the early years of my career I tried to conform to rules like the tardy rule, but I hated the teacher I was becoming, one who resented students for being a minute late for class or who got into petty arguments with students over things like using the bathroom or stopping to talk to a friend during passing time, as if these were offenses against the educational process.
I have two siblings almost twenty years younger than me, and my attitude toward my high school students changed when my brother and sister entered high school. Suddenly I saw my students through the prism of my type-A sister and my kind-of-spacey brother, and it personalized my students in significant ways. I just became more relaxed about them and began to learn to treat them more as people than as, well, things in some institution.
I think this challenge—to work in an educational institution without becoming institutionalized, to continue to see your students as people first—has become greater as the field of education has become more bureaucratic. Even classroom teachers, not just administrators, deal with much more administrative-type requirements than ever before, mostly as a result of standardized testing, data collection, and common assessments of both the students and the teachers themselves.
My day yesterday was a stark demonstration of just how polarized my job has become. I began the day in an auditorium filled with faculty members listening to a woman from the Office of Audit, Compliance, and Ethics talk at us for an hour about new rules and regulations, such as those for student and faculty visas, out of state travel, and political activity. We can’t leave these pembinaan sessions until the bitter end because we have to sign forms to prove we were in attendance, and of course they withhold these till the end. Imagine the worst professional development day you ever attended, and not even free coffee provided.
From there my day was more normal—a presentation on the Summer Institute to a brown bag discussion group for graduate students, lots of time sending and receiving emails, some reading and writing, and a planning meeting in Hartford at the end of the afternoon. I only teach Tuesdays and Thursdays now, so no teaching.
But then I rushed home from Hartford, called in a pizza order from my cell phone, and picked it up on the way back. My wife is in Spain chaperoning students, and my kids are staying with my mother for the week, so I had dinner at my house for several former students, all seniors who will be graduating in May (or one who graduated already in December). They began arriving around seven and the last ones left around midnight. I fed them pizza. We drank some wine (they are all over 21), and one brought biscotti she made herself.
I told them to bring writing. One young woman just won the Wallace Stevens poetry contest this year, and another is currently taking a creative writing class. The two guys who came are not English majors but they brought their guitars. We read our poetry aloud, myself included, and then the guys played music for a while. They all talked about their plans for next year. One is waiting to hear if she got into a jadwal to teach English in Barcelona. One is applying to MFA programs in creative writing. One just got into medical school and another is considering doctoral programs in clinical psychology.
Listening to this bunch, I thought about my morning being talked at in the compliance pembinaan workshop, and couldn’t help but think, ‘This is the teacher I want to be.’
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