Let's Pretend the People Around You are Real
Reflections on the danger of having runaway ideals
A single person could never compile a comprehensive list of the potential mistakes a teacher can make. So I won't try here.
Instead I will focus on one error that many teachers make: teaching to an idea of a student, rather than to the actual human beings in the room.
There are a few common variations on this theme.
i. "These Idiots..."
It's a variety of the old "these kids today" mentality and it's common enough that literary and cinematic tropes based on this character are sad clichés.
Sadly, the stereotype exists for a reason. Aging teachers and college professors develop false memories of themselves as students and can only see the students sitting at the desks in their classroom as post-apocalyptic denizens of a fallen society.
It's not only the old who drive through this late-career rut, however.
A lot of freshly-minted PhDs begin their careers having immediately dug themselves into such a fox hole. This is especially true when the reality of their academic employment lies in the hinterlands, far distant from the bright city lights where important research agendas are being pursued by the brilliant scholars that torment the imaginations of the Young and the Disillusioned.
Both of these types fall into the trap of assuming all their students are mouth-breathers, Philistines, or political heathen.
ii. Those Who Believe That Children Are the Future
And their very soul depends on teaching them well and letting them lead the way.
I of course appreciate the optimism inherent in this attitude. And as a teacher, I try to stay focused on the Imago Dei inside all my students too.
But there's a trap along this path as well.
Teaching as if everyone in the room is a very hungry caterpillar, eager to soak up knowledge so they can change the world has two problems in fact.
First, you will very quickly be beaten down by the fact that some people don't care that much, and simply being young doesn't make a person immune from selfish apathy and laziness. There is an knee-jerk impulse in many educators to always take the kids’ side. This type likes to dismiss any criticism perceived to be aimed at anything “young” as a harmful over-reaction by ill-intentioned oldsters. It’s a kind of mirror-image of the “These Idiots” type above.
As a teacher in the humanities, I eventually, mercifully, came to grips with the fact that almost everyone in my classes is forced to be there. I do what I can in the face of this natural apathy and many people end up appreciating the experience, much to their own surprise.
But hoping that they will eventually join Greta Thunberg on the front lines of history is not one of my aspirations. And if it were, I would soon burn out and, frankly, occupy a premature place at the table with the old bittermen referenced above.
Second, and more damning, we should recognize the enormous ego just below the surface of this aspiration. If I were primarily motivated by spurring my students on to a life of righteous activism I must be: a). astonishingly confident in my own opinions and ideological perspectives; and b). astonishingly confident in general. In short, I must really think I'm the shit if I imagine a room full of students standing on their desks as I leave a room.
iii. I Have a System and it is Based on All the Best Research
No part of our mechanical age has been more mechanized than the profession of teaching. Please don't take this as a swipe at teachers. As individuals, that group is like everyone else. Some better some worse.
But something about the profession encourages a dehumanization of the bodies in the classroom. This is a complicated issue, far beyond my ability to articulate, but let me just say that a big chunk of the blame can probably be attributed to the outsized influence of standardized testing and it's evil twin, assessment.
(In my imagination, I see assessment gurus driving around town in big, red Cadillacs bearing license plates that read "ASSMAN").
The result of submitting to a regime that centers assessment over actual education has been the creation of a Byzantine bureaucracy which requires the assessment of assessment. Education is now a simulacrum of education and our system has exorcised learning and replaced it with schooling.
And any bureaucracy spawns countless cottage industries that develop, package, and sell products to serve the machine.
Many of these products take the form of teaching practices and technologies and they all have their committed partisans. But it's important to remember that these practices and these products are serving the machine, not the human beings who are actually in front of you in a classroom.
It is overwhelmingly likely that your prized pedagogical practice was researched and developed by faculty and grad students at institutions in the "R1" and "R2" universe, their data derived from students who are not yours. It's worth considering that the sexy new trend in teaching may not work with your students at non-selective schools. Of course some of the new practices do work very well, but only once you adapt them to the people you actually serve. But this process can only happen if you allow yourself to see the people you actually serve, not the people you wish were there.
I generally try to live according to a value prized by Matthew Arnold; to see the world as it actually is.
This is more difficult than it sounds as it requires including your own ideologies and worldviews in the critical field of vision you cast your eyes on. Asking the simple, yet tortuous questions "why do I think what I think?" and "are my assumptions really correct?" is a practice that can help one live up to the goal. It calls for a loosening of my commitments, ideological, personal, and professional.
It's often painful, but if it helps me see the people in front of me as they actually are, for better and worse, it's probably worth it.
In the comments below, I’d love to hear how you engage with the people in your orbit when they don’t neatly map onto your ideal version of a person.
As a priest, it’s especially important not to think god is going to give me the congregation I see in my mind vs. the real people in front of me with their hurts, challenges, idiosyncrasies, and oddities. It was the same as a teacher and hard learned. In both settings, I may want to communicate the sublimities of divine mysteries to eagerly awaiting minds, but in reality, people often just need to know how the gospel can encourage them this week. When I taught, it was in a school with a very specific model of teaching required, which was largely good (classical/dialectic), but even that did not connect with every student, and should be seen as provisional in some ways. I love this piece, Danny, more than anything because it recognizes that humans are complex and irreducible to a method, no matter how sophisticated or data-proven. We always defy such expectations and I’m happy that we do.
This is a great piece. Insightful, clear, and succinct. Unfortunately, I’ve seen myself in all three of these categories, sometimes all in the same week. It’s a good reminder that the humans in the room are someone’s 10-year-old babies and that they are just kids: prone to impulsive behavior, laziness, and apathy. I can’t inspire them every single time with every lesson.