The End(s) of Teaching
I shared this reflection on Facebook about an hour after I turned in my grades for the spring semester, and a few people suggested I share it more broadly. Thanks for the nudge.
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After twenty years of turning in grades, first by hand and carbon paper, now electronically without even a request for hard copy, I can announce with mixed emotions that I just turned in the last set of grades I will ever turn in at North Dakota State University (NDSU). Maybe anywhere. And if that isn’t cause for reflection, I don’t know what is.
Teaching has been hard for me. I’m an introvert, so every new group of students scared the crap out of me. As a young teacher, I knew I wasn’t supposed to be my students’ friend but I didn’t know how to be their dad, boss, or task master, either. The first time I really came down hard on a young man for not doing his work, he started crying and told me he had just been diagnosed with cancer. I decided to just love my students and trust that they were doing the best they could under the circumstances, even if that wasn’t very good. I learned to create a student-centered experience in most of my classes, which kept me off the stage and kept their work in the center. That often meant students didn’t really get what was up until week 12, then the light bulb would go off. Three-quarters resistance, one quarter joy: it took me a long time to learn to trust my own process.
I really sucked for a while. I was teaching first year composition and upper division writing almost exclusively to non majors whom I struggled to connect with. My sardonic humor was lost on them — I didn’t even think I was funny, and then I just stopped trying to humor anyone. I wanted them to write and think and care, but I just couldn’t quite get them there. Sure, there were some bright spots, but those were dark years and I didn’t have the guts to ask for help. I’ve probably been observed 4 times in 20 years at NDSU and that was a huge mistake on my part. Do what I say, future (and current) teachers, not what I do: be a community, be there for each other, acknowledge that teaching is hard, and celebrate the successes.
I figured some of this out the last 5 years. I started reading Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach, every fall. I started teaching from some sort of secular combination of heart / soul / mind that made a lot more sense to me and my students. I started leading with William Stafford and the importance of holding on to a meaningful thread in your life. I did less critique and more invention, audaciously challenging my students to change the world because I had figured out that in some small ways I was doing that, so why not them? I asked them to call for their avatar to descend, to be some better version of themselves, on and offline, and they took up the challenge. Thank you, students.
I’m stepping away from teaching in the classroom but looking forward to working with students at Lakehead University, one-on-one, figuring out what experiences will pull together the threads of their life and learning. I may have figured out that my calling is to create opportunities for others to thrive, and in doing that, I thrive too, what Donna Haraway calls “becoming with.” I admire those who can figure their lives out in shorter increments than 20 years, but I am thankful that NDSU and all the great teacher-students I have shared this space with since the fall of 1997 have given me the room to fail-not-fail, to explore and grow, to launch me into my second half.
