family education

It's the day before thanksgiving and many families will gather together for a huge meal and to acknowledge the gratefulness that they feel for having one another in their lives. (For me, Thanksgiving come in Oct, when Canadians celebrate it. But we do eat our share of turkey at friends' in Nov). It seems a good time to think a little bit about what our families teach us and also the extent to which our families may have laid the ground work for our interest in learning and for becoming educators.

I find it remarkable that in families, the positive example of life-long learning has very little to do with the actually achieved levels of official education. For example, my paternal grandmother did not attend any high school, since she was needed on the farm and to care for her invalid mother. Her "school" learning was therefore minimal. She did not necessarily know a lot about traditional subjects like science or math. But she was a clever, involved, enthusiastic person who had a vast knowledge that she loved to share with her family. Regarding anything about farming, gardening, pie-making, local history, regional politics, the church and its history, and so forth, and she was a walking encyclopedia.

This grandmother's style was not so much about book learning. But my maternal grandfather, who also left school very young, at age 15, to become an electrical apprentice, was always reading. He was a highly self-schooled man, who made it his business to learn about history, government, geography, and was very well-traveled (all 50 states and all 10 provinces) with his motor home as his means. He really knew a lot about the US and Canada and was always eager to talk about his knowledge.

I go back to these two grandparents, because I have them to thank for the children they brought up, who in turn brought me up. My dad and mom modeled learning for me.
They both were the first in their families to attend college and did so at the best university in Canada. My dad has gotten 3 masters degrees and is now continuing with a doctorate as he approaches his 60th year. My house was one where reading the afternoon away was normal and encouraged. My dad is the king on non-fiction and my mom the queen of mysteries. (They have their different interests!) But I know that my book-a-day reading habit in the summers of my early teen years did not happen by accident. Now I wouldn't say that reading alone makes you an avid learner, but it certainly helps. For me, I know that my love of reading led me to other great loves: my husband who shares the passion (an English prof), my education through the PhD level, and to my choice now to become a high school English teacher.

I am proud to say that my boys are following suit. The only time they played gently and nicely with one another yesterday was when we made a point of finding all the "Thomas the Tank Engine" books in the house (there were 11), piled them on the living room rug and proceeded to go through and read most of them. James at 3 years old and 9 months "pretends" to read the books to his brother, and Liam, age 19 months, asks excitedly "Name? Name? Name?" at every character and object he sees.

We've observed that for both me and my husband, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree with our career choices. He teaches college English as did mom, and I have pursued music, as did my mother. bell hooks includes an autobiographical essay in Teaching Community, called "Progressive Learning, A Family Value." I will quote her here: "Irrespective of class or educational level, families that support children and adults who are seeking to educate themselves provide a positive foundation." The family is the first community that a child has, and if this community is not supportive of a child's learning, that may have problems their whole lives through in their educational journey.

I don't want to push my children (that is a topic for another day), so for now I will just try to show my enthusiasm for their learning, engage them whenever I can, model reading like crazy, and enjoy their growing minds. I think that this is one of the family traditions that I am most thankful for this thanksgiving season.

teaching/family balance

I just had a conversation with my sister, who teaches grade 2 French immersion (that's NO English all day long) in Maple, Ont, north of Toronto. We were talking a bit about the burn out she sees on the part of her colleagues with families. She has no children and as it is, she finds that she is exhausted at the end of the long days. She often is at school from 7 am (to beat the terrible Toronto traffic) until 8 pm (again to avoid traffic, but also to work on preperation, which she is not given much time to do during the teaching day). She wonders how teachers go from school to daycare or babysitters to get their children and then have a decent family life in the evening. Unfortunately, it is not just the teaching profession that impinges on family life in this way, by severely taxing the energies and just simply the hours available to parent. Professional life in general seems anti-thetical to good home life. What's frustrating is that I feel that it doesn't HAVE to be that way. Couldn't we re-conceive what we value most and re-shape the way we do business accordingly? They sure do it differently in France, with more holidays and parental leave, etc.

I wonder too how it will work out if and when I am lucky enough to find a full-time teaching job. Substituting might be a good beginning for me, since my kids will only be 3 and 5 when I get my licence. I would love to hear from teachers with families about how they make it all work. Do the demands placed on teachers in my area (the Willamette Valley) make teaching a profession that holds reasonable expectations for maintaining a good family life too?

Barbara Kingsolver, in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Kingsolver writes about the rise of school gardens. I actually copied out several paragraphs verbatim from her book, only to lose it. But here is the curriculum in a nutshell:
kindergarten: flowers for learning colors and planting popcorn
gr. 2: garden for hummingbirds, bees and butterflies to learn about pollination
gr. 3: pizza garden to teach plant kingdom
gr. 4: herb garden laid out like those of Colonial Virginia

Response to bell hooks, Teaching Community, ch. 2. "Time Out"

As someone who has only just begun to think in earnest about teaching high school and who would love to begin TOMORROW, it is hard to imagine a time when I will be feeling worn out by it. But, I have experienced low points in my college teaching career too, and know that unfortunately, some burn out teaching high school might be inevitable. Given this, I suppose it is what one DOES with those feelings of burn out that matter the most. Most of us will not have the ability to take time off, or have what they have as tenured profs, a sabbatical. But we will have every summer, and I can imagine that those summer times will be need to be sacred, no-stressors, in order to regroup and rejuvenate and ready oneself for the year ahead.

bell hooks writes about burn out. She was so burnt out that she took a 2-year unpaid leave of absence from her tenured professorship, and then at the end of it, resigned. This is how she knew she was burnt out:

"The classroom is one of the most dynamic work settings precisely because we are given such a short amount of time to do so much. To perform with excellence and grace teachers must be totally present in the moment, totally concentrated and focused. When we are not fully present, when our minds are elsewhere, our teaching is diminished. I knew it was time for me to take a break from the classroom when my mind was always someplace else. And in the last stages of burnout, I knew I needed to be someplace else because I just simply did not want to get up, get dressed, and go to work. I dreaded the classroom. the most negative consequence of this type of burnout is manifest when teachers begin to abhor and hate students. This happens."

Now, this is a woman teacher scholar writing who has taught for twenty years, and whose very specialty is teaching itself. What worries me is that if bell hooks can suffer such burn out, then we all certainly can. None of us are (or will be) such amazing teachers that we are exempt. Why? Because like parenthood, teaching is one of the toughest jobs on earth. It's a vocation for many. bell hooks quotes a writer whom I intent to look into further, named Parker Palmer, and his book The Courage to Teach. Palmer writes:

"As good teachers weave the fabric that joins them with students and subjects, the heart is the loom on which the threads are tried, the tension is held, the shuttle flies, and the fabric is stretched tight. small wonder, then, that teaching tugs at the heart, opens the heart, even breaks the heart--and the more one loves teaching, the more heartbreaking it can be. The courage to teach is the courage to keep one's heart open in those very moments when the heart is asked to hold more than it is able so that teacher and students and subject can be woven into the fabric of community that learning, and living require."

As I spend more time in the MAT classroom, more time reading about pedagogy, thinking about hands-on aspects like classroom management and more abstract aspects like equality in the classroom, and I imagine myself as a high school teacher come fall of '10, I am constantly reminded that teaching is emotionally and intellectually consuming work. And that is what makes it meaningful to me. Teaching really matters. But it will not be an easy road, or a restful one!

Response to bell hooks, Teaching to Trangress intro, ch. 1 "Engaged Pedagogy"

bell hooks talks about how being in the classroom as a student and viewing teachers unlike the one she would like to become was formative for her. It's unfortuante that many of us have examples of teachers we felt were poor, unfair, cruel, or otherwise informing our ideals of what it means to be a teacher. Usually, however, there are many positive memories of teachers from our pasts that counter the negative ones; there must be, because otherwise, why would we ever dream of entering the teaching profession ourselves?

Like Gatto and Smith, hooks believes that the classroom should be a community, and that vice versa, the community can also be a classroom. But perhaps a key difference with Gatto and Smith is the idea of explicit activism and subversion as integral to the classroom. hooks speaks at some length about feminist classrooms being the ones that first demonstrated for her a pedagogy where critican thinking was truly expected and celebrated, and a place where "pedagogical practices were interrogated". On a personal note, as a soon-to-be instructor in the Women's Studies Program at OSU, I have seen that they take their pedagogy very seriously, offering both a beginning of the year all-day workship on teaching for all of us involved in the dept. from grad students to tenured professors, as well as a weekly lunch hour informal session that serves as a forum for Women's Studies teachers to air their challanges and successes. (I hope to be able to join in next term when I am teaching).

hooks brings up the idea of teaching as a performance. I have always thought of it somewhat this way myself. As a teacher you stand up and "profess" in a manner that should be engaging. You may not always feel as dynamic, intelligent, friendly or enthusiastic as you are supposed to be up there at the front of the classroom. But there is a magical performative aspect where once you begin, on a good day, things fall into place and you can get a teaching "buzz"! The time grows its own energy, and there is a crackle in the air. But, there are also those days when it simply does not come together, whether because of fatigue on your part, that of the students, poor class morale, difficult material, or numerous other issues. hooks writes:

"Teaching is a performative act. and it is that aspect of our work that offers the space for change, invention, spontaneous shifts, that can serve as a catalyst drawing out the unique elements in each classroom. To embrace the performative aspect of teaching we are compelled to engage "audiences," to consider issues of reciprocity. Teachers are not performers in the tranditional sense of the word in that our work is not meant to be a spectacle. Yet it is meant to serve as a catalyst that calls everyone to become more and more engaged, to become active participants in learning." (11)

hooks also discusses the idea that a teacher must be actively committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes his or her own well-being in order to achieve a progressive, holistic, engaged pedagogy. I am still sorting out exactly what she means by this term and hope that it will become clearer with more reading. For now, I understand self-actualization as resisting a separation between mind and body, of resisting the notion of compartmentalization of intellect. Further, the holistic model of learning can only take place when a teacher is also open to growth, and this necessitates a certain vulnerability. We cannot expect our students to take risks if we as teachers are unwilling. She writes "most professors must pratice being bulnerable in the classroom, being wholly present in mind, body and spirit."

I am not positive that I have been vulnerable in the classroom along hooks' lines. Perhaps in admitting when I don't know something, or make a mistake, or not allowing myself to become defensive if challenged, are ways that I have. But vulnerability involves trust, and it goes both ways for teachers and student alike that if vulnerability is shown, the next step has to involve compassion and respect. That vulnerability, say, when a student admits that they didn't do the reading, needs to
be recognized and compassionatley dealt with, because if a teacher then humiliates a student, that student will only foster a resentment. But if such an admission can be kindly but firmly dealt with, say, with the teacher expressing disappointment and encouragement to do better next time round, the student may appreciate the kindness and feel a sincere desire to improve.