required mcpost: half-baked advice from a half-baked man

first in a straight-to-VHS series of assigned blogs i had to do last month. all hail mr. guest and his 400 word minimum.

five pieces of advice.

1. become dedicated to reinvention

i hate, hate, hate it when people refer to the first year of teaching as a "trial by fire." it's only hot if you stand still, and your an idiot to imagine that you need to stick to whatever guns you'd oiled for your passionate mission. similarly, those who praise the fire have more often than not become pretentiously numb to their own questionably effective pedagogical immobility. you are not a priest, you are not saving the souls of savages, and this sanctifying onus is most likely the dead weight of your ego. everytime you make a decision in or about your classroom, revisit it and revise it without end. each motion of pedagogy is a rough draft, and of course you'll be burned if you pass it off to print. your imperfection will not change, but your attitude towards it will have to. this is how the fire ends: by never standing still in it, by never considering anything you do as finished or totally consistent, by always hunting down what needs to be changed to make your practice better both the first time and the last time you step in that room.

2. schedule rest into your life

there is a huge distinction between the non-real "fire-trial" and the completely real agony that will eventually well up beneath you. there is an agony; but it is not structured externally (re: the mythic fire), rather internally. it comes from the strain of acclimitization and preservation. once you begin to dance the dance of the constant re-creator (and remember - i tragically left this out of the above point - all this creation and all this practice is exclusively focused on the assistance of the student, but what that means is incredibly ideosyncratic), you will sometime realize that it doesn't end. then, somewhere in the middle of fixating on how to cooperate with the non-ending aspects of the dance, you may loose sight of the fact of its beginning. then, in the middle of a timeless and tiresome dance, you will acquire an agony.

the most important thing to do in order to deal with all this mess is to rest (whatever this means for you; for me it meant reading and/or screwing around on wikipedia/nytimes.com). find the most simple and effective way to create a protected time for rejuvination. personally, i found that it was best for me to stay in the school building until i was done with what i had to do for tomorrow (i.e. leaving the building at a point where i could walk in the next morning and teach). this would often keep me in my room until 7pm+, but even if i had 3 hrs to go home, eat, and deflate, the fact that i had nothing weighing on me allowed this time to be restful. experiments in leaving the building early and then doing some work before going to bed proved to be too stressful.

3. your teacher-mood needs to be consistent

despite the agony, despite the exhaustion, despite the asshole students who spent last period fucking around, despite whatever mess you're dealing with outside the school building, you are still Mr. or Mrs. or Miss or Ms. So-and-So, and this is a profoundly de-personalized identity (regardless of whatever quirky accoutermonts you've dressed it in), as it is complelety structured in response to the pedagogical needs of your students. so, whatever your teacher face is - calm, stern, happy, proud, intense, etc. - it needs to more or less stay that way - and only change when it is pedagogically - not personally - appropriate. students (since education is really all about them) react rather violently and personally to the idea that you'd let personal baggage affect them (especially if that baggage comes from a class of other students), and often snap or disengage if they find you "moody." whatever shit has you on the verge of tears or homicide before, during, or after class - when the curtain raises you've got a job to do, and that job requires you to be in character.

4. find someone else

one person can survive as a teacher, but two can succeed. i am unwavering in my assertion that i would not have even thought of doing 90% of what happened last year at jim hill (both inside and outside the class) without the support/criticism/love that i shared with jake roth. we held each other up when the agony was overwhelming, we made sure the other one was eating/bathing/breathing, we bounced idea after idea off of each other, and we were a human presence for each other in the vast shitshow of public education. you can not do alone what you can do with others - and these are things that are done for both you and (at the end of the day, most importantly) your students. so, not only allow yourself to engage in a critical relationship with your own vulneratibility/imperfection as a teacher, find someone else with which to share and refocus this attitude. everyone will benefit.

5. they're kids

this is the bottom line, and it has two faces:

(1) they're human beings. so they're brilliant. and beautiful. and creative. and all those wonderful human things. given their personality and/or background, they may be more or less dependent on people like you for the positive cultivation of their humanness, and/or they may not have had much of a chance to realize/express their humanness. never forget that they're brilliant, and if you don't see it, you either need to (a) wake up, or (b) look somewhere else. more often than not, students not being brilliant is a great indicator that you need to be doing your job better.

(2) they're in a state of radical personal development and identity formation. don't be surprised (surprise is an indication that you've got a flawed/unceccessary expectation system, so fix it) when they do stupid, human things (for that matter, don't be surprise when they do great human things. remember, they're brilliant) - to themselves, to each other, or (most imporantly) to you. of course they're going to curse you out. of course they're going to snap when you reprimand them. of course they're going to treat each other like shit. of course they're going to drink, do drugs, have sex, be in gangs, etc. in many ways, they're in school precisely to gain the personal maturity to deal with all of these things. and they're going to make mistakes, and they're mistakes will often be right in your face. just take it all in stride, and - when you get a chance - remind them that they're brilliant and beautiful and creative and all those wonderful human things.