My Next Career

Five months ago I started a new job. Five months is long enough to now have some actual opinions and thoughts about how things are going. But before I write about those, it feels important for me to at least recognize that something big has shifted in my life.

For 25 years I was a teacher. I taught English in Yemen for 2 years, I was a teaching Naturalist at Brandywine Creek State Park in Delaware for a year, I taught severely emotionally disturbed teens in Delaware for 4 months, I taught Outdoor Education in Massachusetts for a year, I taught preschool in Montana for 3 years, I taught teens at an in-patient psych ward in Montana for a summer, I taught carpentry, construction, backpacking, and rock-climbing skills in Montana for 5 summers, I taught Special Education in Upstate New York for 3 years, I taught English and Global Studies Upstate for 3 years, I taught fifth and sixth graders in Connecticut for 7 years, and then back to preschool in Ithaca for a year.

In retrospect, I can say that I was a good teacher.  I was patient.  I was dedicated to my students. I kept myself informed on many topics. I communicated well with parents. I was a good colleague. I taught by example. I was willing to follow tangents if they were interesting and productive. I listened to my kids. I helped them see that testing is a game adults make kids play, and test scores are NOT a valid yardstick with which to measure a child. In the end, it was a great run.  The highlight for me was getting to have my daughter, Isabel, in my class for a year. It was a pretty great year.

But after all of that, I have nothing tangible to show for it.  There is not one thing I can point to and say with certainty, “I did that.” The successes are invisible, as are the failures. I have the kind words of parents in the end-of-the-year cards they sometimes give to teachers, but they are not concrete, either.  If I reread them, I can feel good, but still I cannot hold in my hand one thing I have created as a teacher.

For 25 years, that was okay with me. It was a job full of rewards and I truly loved it. For the last ten years there was not one day where I said to myself, ‘I would rather not be a teacher today.’ I know that is hard to believe, but it is true.

As we moved to Ithaca 18 months ago I started to play with the idea of getting out of teaching and into something else.  I was not sure quite what I wanted to do, but I could tell that teaching was nearing the end of its rewarding life.  I was starting to feel a bit run down from having to always care so much.  As a teacher, I could feel the weight and power my words and attitudes had. When you are a teacher there is no room for casual remarks or jokes at the expense of a student.  There is no room for tuning out while a student tells you about something they find important. You have to care—all the time. And, in the end, I knew I was getting tired of caring so much all the time.  I wanted to be able to let my guard down, to tune out of boring conversations, to poke a little fun without worrying if someone was strong enough to take it.

In the end, I feel like I did a lot more good than harm as a teacher and I did not want to skew the balance of that equation by remaining in the classroom too long.  There is nothing worse than a bitter teacher.

So, now I am a writer! And I am loving it. I am working for Cornell Engineering in the Marketing and Communications Department and mostly what I get to do is find fascinating people and write about them. My boss took a real gamble and hired me with no professional experience. And because she did, I get to learn all sorts of amazing science, I get to talk to geniuses, and then I get to close my door, not care at all about anyone for hours, and write words. After a while, the words show up out in the world, on websites and in magazines. There is a finished product I can point to and other people can judge. It is so different for me—and so good—to be able to share something I have done for work.

It is good to have specific tasks, to have deadlines, and to get concrete feedback in the moment on how I am doing. As a teacher the feedback is clear as you watch your kids.  You know if they are bored, if they are confused, if they are getting it. But that feedback has as much to do with their internal states as it does with your teaching. The other feedback you get as a teacher is test scores, administrator evaluations, and that inner-voice that lets you know how you are doing.  None of these is a truly objective measure of your ability as a teacher.

As a writer, my bosses and editors can tell me if something is unclear, too long, too informal, wrong on the facts, or just plain NOT what they were looking for. And then I can go back and make it more clear, shorter, more formal, correct, or more like what they were looking for. And I can do this by myself, in a room, without having to take anyone’s feelings into account. I feel remarkably free in this new job. After 25 years without direct, in-the-moment criticism of my work, I find it refreshing and very helpful to get feedback right away.

Another thing I love about my job is that I have an audience. If most teachers are honest, part of the thrill of teaching is being on stage every day. You have a captive audience for your brilliance, your jokes, and your special insights. But it is a small audience, and it is also there when you are having a bad day. As a writer, my larger audience only gets to see my edited work after it goes through several drafts and several critics. The crappy stuff doesn’t make it onto the website or into the magazine. I get a real thrill out of seeing my name in the by-line.

Another huge benefit of changing careers at the age of 48 is that I get to learn all sorts of new things. And, as an ex-teacher, I know the value of learning new things.  It keeps a brain young and makes me happier.  I feel pushed and challenged and excited about work.

So, I am happy to report that I loved being a teacher for 25 years, and I am also very happy to report that I love being a writer.

Steubenville

I just watched a twelve-and-a-half minute video from YouTube and it made me angrier than I have been in a long time.  It was of a high school boy making tasteless jokes about the girl who was raped repeatedly at a party he was at in Steubenville, Ohio.  The case made the news and has started a national dialogue about teenagers and alcohol and rape.  The boy in the video clearly does not understand how horrific the experience was and will be for the victim.  He is a teenage boy callous in the way that many teenage boys are—in the way that I probably was as a teenage boy at an all-boy school, playing on the football team.  His main refrain, “She is so dead,” is delivered each time with a laugh and something approaching admiration, (though for who or what I cannot say.)

My high school days are long past and I no longer make rape jokes or call people “faggot,” but I certainly used to when I was 16.  This is not something I am proud of.  I am sure my parents and teachers would have characterized me as a good kid, and I WAS a good kid.  But I also laughed at jokes about rape.  At sixteen I did not have enough experience of the world to understand just how awful a thing rape is. 

And there were not enough adults in my life helping me to understand. 

Now I am 47 and I am the father of a 13-year old daughter.  She is not yet drinking alcohol or going to parties where boys are drunk and adult supervision is lax or non-existent.  But she will be at some point in the not-too-distant future.  And watching that video just now has scared the shit out of me.  It made me commit to opening a discussion with my daughter, no matter how uncomfortable it might make us both.  I need her to know just how shitty boys can be sometimes.  A little bit of naiveté can, in this domain, wreak lifelong damage.

Much of the national reaction to this case has tacitly apportioned some of the blame to the victim for getting so very drunk at a party with football players.  Of course I don’t want my daughter to get that drunk as a teenager (or ever, really).  But I also don’t want her to feel like any girl or woman EVER has the blame for getting raped.  I want her to see the “What was she wearing? Why was she so drunk?  Why was she at that bar at 2 am?” line of questioning for the bullshit it is.  Blaming the victim of a rape in any way serves only to relieve men and boys of the responsibility to control their own actions.

Just as the massacre of 26 children and teachers in Newtown has pushed the discussions of gun control and mental illness to a new, harder-to-ignore, level I hope this case in Steubenville will push the discussion of rape out into the open and get us as a nation to look more closely at how we talk (or don’t talk) about dignity and respect and rape with our middle school and high schools sons and daughters.

Excellent commentary on the reaction to the Steubenville case by blogger Lauren Nelson

Good article by Kim Simon on teaching our boys to be kind.

Finding Change

 

            There is a screwtop plastic jar in my kitchen.  It is slowly filling with crusty pennies and sticky nickels and dirty dimes.  An occasional quarter makes it in, but that is rare.  The jar itself is something I bought near Faneuil Hall in Boston when I had my class there for a sleepover trip a couple of years ago.  I am not allowed to take such a trip without bringing something home for my daughter, and this jar was her present from that particular trip.

            The jar is the size and shape of the mason jars people use for canning, but this jar has a twist.  The lid has a slot for coins and a digital display screen that shows a running total of how much money is inside.  Right now the total reads $8.24.

            The reason many of the coins in the jar are dirty is they are all coins we have found out in the world.  Many were on the ground near parking meters, some were under vending machines, and a few were on the floor of the supermarket near the CoinStar machine.  They have all been found since June 18, 2009.  That was the day I walked by a few pennies on the ground and then wondered exactly how much money I was leaving laying around in a year.  I vowed to pick up every coin I would ordinarily have passed by for a full year and add them up.

            I told Erica and Isabel about my plan and enlisted their help.  I also made what now appears to be a foolish bet with Erica.  In those early, overly-optimistic days I thought we might be able to collect as much as $50.00 in a year.  She thought fifty dollars was a wildly high guess.  We bet a backrub.  If I had slowed down even just a little I could have done the math and realized that a total of fifty dollars would require an average daily find of fifteen cents.  It has been about one hundred days and we are averaging only 8.2 cents a day. 

            So, it looks like I will owe my lovely wife a backrub come next June.  But in the meantime and much to my surprise this exercise is teaching me something valuable.  And it doesn’t really have anything to do with coins. 

 

            Finding all this lost change requires focused attention on the world around me and a willingness to change course in response to what I observe.  I am finding these very same skills really valuable to my teaching.  This year is going well in my classroom and, (even though it may sound ridiculous), I partially attribute this success to my newfound hobby of coin collecting.  In order to find change, I have to remind myself to look—to pay attention.  Often I just walk without anything in mind but the destination.  But now that I am looking for change, I have to remember to actually look for change.  I have to exercise mental discipline.

            The same is true in my daily classroom interactions with my students.  In other years I have been so focused on the destination—the skill to be learned, the project to be completed, the work to be done—that I have blown right through some ripe opportunities to connect with my kids.  Once I started shifting my focus from the horizon to my more immediate environment, I found a lot more coins.  And once I lowered my gaze from the goal and focused more on the immediate messages my students were sending with their questions and their body language, the more I have felt able to really give them what they are needing.

            I am giving more of myself to each interaction with my students and the payoff has been enormous.  I am noticing more and learning more about them.  I imagine they are feeling more seen, more recognized, and better cared for.  There is a feeling in the room that hasn’t always been here in the past.

            Don’t get me wrong—I have never been an uncaring, strictly-business sort of teacher.  I like where I teach partly because of the administrative and parental expectation that I get to know my students well.  What has made this year different is that I have gotten to know my students well AND I have realized that every interaction is a chance to get to know them even better.  Every interaction every day is a chance to find something new about my students.  I am no longer, (at least so far this year), leaving money on the ground.  Once I began to see the value in those small moments, those minor revelations, and those tentative questions from my students it became clear to me just how immensely valuable all those pennies and nickels and dimes are in building real and authentic relationships with my kids.  And that is worth far more than fifty dollars.

The Things We Carry

Lately I have been reading a stunning book called Kafka On The Shore, by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. Deep into the book there is a sort-of ghost soldier from World War Two who says, “Symbols are important. We happen to have these rifles and soldiers’ uniforms, so we play the part of sentries. That’s our role. Symbols guide us to the roles we play.”

This is not an original thought, but as I read the words during a break in a weeklong teaching conference it struck me with a force that surprised me. It provoked a cascade of realizations that I have been chewing on for a few days now.

Immediately, I thought of Daryl Bem and his self-perception theory. Bem posits that we develop our attitudes by observing our own behavior and concluding what attitudes must have caused them. One of the ways we learn about ourselves is by looking at what we do. It is almost as if we create an identity in retrospect. We say things to ourselves like, “I am teaching at a school with a strong commitment to the social curriculum, therefore teaching children to care must be important to me.”

I find Bem’s theory surprising because it runs counter to my assumption that a person is a set of semi-fixed ideas, beliefs, preferences, predilections, and attitudes whose actions flow from who s/he is. Rather, it says that our actions come first and they tell us important information about who we are. They help define us to ourselves.

The main character of Murakami’s novel, Kafka Tamura, has placed aside everything he has been carrying before he meets the soldiers, so he comes to them empty-handed. He has nothing but the clothes on his back, and even they are entirely non-descript. One of the soldiers asks Kafka if he has anything like their guns or their uniforms and he says, “No, I don’t have anything. Just memories.”

Kafka’s answer reminded me of another fairly amazing book—Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. When soldiers deploy they can take only a limited amount of stuff with them. What a soldier chose to carry to Vietnam told much about his priorities. And when a soldier died, it was those things he carried that got sent to his next of kin as what was left of a man. It is clear, though, that “the things they carry” is also a metaphor for the effects their time in Vietnam has had on the men. The memories, pride, shame, images, feelings, and nightmares they came home with are also things they carry. O’Brien’s soldiers are defined by what they carry—just like Murakami’s soldiers.

Because I was having these thoughts at a conference on teaching, my mind made a connection to my students. It became clear to me that the things we remember are the things we carry. And they are what give us some defining information about who we are. This is true for me, and it is true for my students. If our clearest, most alive memories are of being seen or valued or loved, then we must be valuable, lovable people. But if the memories we carry are degrading or belittling, that tells us something else about ourselves entirely.

It was an important reminder that each of my students comes to me with his or her own set of things they are carrying. And when these students think about who they are, they consult the things they are carrying—their memories—for clues to their identities.

As a teacher, I can help my students by giving them opportunities to recall times when they have been successful or when they have done something they are proud of. Teaching in multiple age classrooms gives me a golden opportunity. I have my students for two full years before they hit the age of twelve. While helping them access moments they are proud of from their pasts, I can structure my room and my assignments to maximize the chances that my students will feel seen, acknowledged, and valued.

It was a valuable reminder for me of the potential my job has for affecting children in a real, positive, and lasting way. Of course, the opposite is also true. If I choose to teach using ridicule and sarcasm, then the things my students carry with them from my class can do real and lasting harm. The challenge I am taking away from this Responsive Classroom conference is to be conscious, deliberate, and positive all year. In this way, I have the chance to help create some of what they will carry, look at, and use to define themselves.