teach

Student success, my reward

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Social Q's column, NYT, 4.24.2011

This weekend Eli and I will finally do some baking and thank-you-note writing for the high school teachers who wrote him the recommendation letters that helped him apply and get accepted to colleges. The baking (chocolate beet cupcakes?) is a way to recognize their labor with ours. In his notes, Eli can let them know he has decided to attend UVM out of the various schools he was accepted to.

Perhaps it’s that time of year, but I’ve been wondering about the outcome of some recommendation letters I wrote for students over the winter for internships, etc. or the personal statements I helped them revise last summer and fall for grad school applications.

On Sunday, the Social Q’s column in the New York Times published a query by a college student confused about the protocol of thanking her professor for a letter he wrote. (See photo of clipping above.) Must she thank him a second time, after learning that she got the internship? Philip Galanes, the etiquette expert, replied, “Your professor will be pleased to hear that you got the gig… [because] your success is part of his professional reward.”

Dear Students, it’s true. We teachers are invested in your futures, just as physicians are invested in their patients’ health, and parents in their children’s well being and independence. It’s not that we are so self-effacing that we have no lives of our own — of course we have lives — but you’re like our garden. And because the processes of growth, despite all our knowledge of them, still seem so magical and the signs often imperceptible (children, like plants, seem to grow and develop overnight in the dark), it really is thrilling to see evidence that you are flourishing.

Yesterday, after a delay of almost a year, I got an email from a student who told me the outcome of his MD/PhD program applications. Together we had worked on his personal statement, he writing and I responding. He told me he has been accepted to a desirable program. Having worked with him on that personal statement, I know what this means to him.

What it means to me? I have an ego, too: In the collective work of educating young people, my individual contribution matters.

School love

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Today I walked over to one of the undergraduate teaching labs to drop off my comments on drafts for students who are learning, section by section, to write an IMRaD paper on the research they are doing on a polymerase.

The lab is in the basement, and one walks down an open staircase to get to it. As I descended, I looked over the railing at the students’ belongings — backpacks, water bottles, jackets, bike helmets — strewn on the benches outside the lab. Around and down I went, and on all sides of the stairwell outside the lab were these signs of school.

My heart felt full. I imagined this same bounty of backpacks and jackets outside other schoolrooms with students of other ages. Kindergarten cubbies, the hallway outside the Grace’s 5th grade class or Eli and Lydia’s high school homerooms, the undergraduate microbiology lab. What those backpacks mean is this: We are a community of learners, this is our gear, and we need this stuff to do what we do.  And then I thought about how great it is to be a teacher, to have a responsibility to these students.

This feeling is inchoate; I cannot quite nail it down in words. The descent down the staircase, the view of backpack after backpack after backpack, and, finally, a glimpse through the windows into the lab of all the white-coated young people at the benches, working and talking, made me buoyant. School is more than a place; it’s an idea, one that students and teachers carve out of otherwise pressured and complex lives.

For a few minutes, I was so happy to be reminded by the backpacks of my good fortune — my luck! — to be working at this place and participating in an idea I believe may be the very best one we’ve got: we are human, and therefore we learn.

The way I do the things I do

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On drafts, I prefer to handwrite my margin comments and type my summary comments. Writing by hand is (a) faster for me and (b) friendlier for the author, leaving traces of a reader. I have neat handwriting, and I don’t savage a page with my own scribbles, so this works well.

a glossary of sorts

Many of my comments are particular to the content: “These are your objectives, but what problem with this protein — a research one — is at the heart of what you plan to do?” Then there are the moves I make over and over in everyone’s draft, pointing out some aspects of style that could be improved, and I want to leave the responsibility for alteration or correction to the author. They are, quite simply, the ones shown here, and I define them on some spare scrap at the beginning of the hard copy of a draft.

Sure, I have a good vocabulary, feel for style (not just my own), and knowledge of grammar, and I could go the extra step and make all these changes. My hope, though, is that these marks will bring choices or errors to the attention of the author and that s/he will puzzle them out, alone or in a conversation with me.

Technological distractions

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For a couple of years, I’ve been sampling wireless presenter tools (“clickers”) without buying. Colleagues have loaned me theirs. The writing program officer also keeps a couple on hand, and I’ve been a heavy borrower.

a tool, not a toy: the Logitech R400

Recently, after trying and loving the Logitech R400, I made a commitment and bought one. And on its inaugural day, I felt so prepared, so completely supplied with technological accessories — laptop, power cord, VGA adapter, USB drive, wireless presenter — that I forgot to pack my bag with something I need even more than I do the digital: a juice box.

Read about my want of a quick carbohydrate, and how it almost brought down my lecture, here.

Too much hand holding

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The first time my new skating teacher grabbed my hand and held it, I liked it.

We were attempting backward crossovers, and his holding of my leading hand made me feel secure, as though, if I fell, he would prevent me from landing hard on my tailbone.

“And, to be honest,” as I told Jimmy about it later, “It just felt good. It doesn’t happen often in adult life that a stronger adult offers a real hand at a moment of risk.”

Plus, have I mentioned he’s cute? That made the initial hand holding nice, too.

This morning in lessons we were attempting to put moves together: crossovers and turns. For a while we’ve been isolating and practicing various moves. Literally, each week we’ve been skating in circles and doing the same things over and over.

As Fred demonstrated what he wanted us to do — skate forward crossovers, glide, turn, and skate backward crossovers — I thought to myself, This is when I fall. Interestingly, that little voice inside me was pretty matter-of-fact. I knew it would be difficult and that I would stumble.

I skated into the turn, turned, and fell. I got up. The next time I tried, Fred grabbed my leading hand and completely interrupted my concentration. Never mind whether I fell or not, I simply couldn’t skate with any basic competence as his gloved fingers gripped mine. Later he said, “Swinging your arms too far was making you spin, not just turn.” Well, his holding my hand stopped my inadvertent spinning, but it also made me forget the coordination of my four limbs! It was as if my concentration had digressed to what to do with that one hand. I couldn’t keep the big picture in mind.

Near the end of the lesson, we practiced slaloms for a while and then Fred showed us the 3-turn. I feel pretty comfortable with the slaloms, and I did them over and over as he worked 1:1 with another student. He skated over to me, watched, said “good” a few times, and grabbed my hand as a way of directing the shape of my arm. I completely lost my internal rhythm and felt, suddenly, remedial.

Is it okay to say to your teacher, whom you generally like, “Stop taking over my moves”?

Different students need different levels of hand holding, I know. It may be better — this is what I believe — to offer less of it. And if we see a student who is struggling, and we have the urge to step in, perhaps we should first ask: “May I help you with that?” And then, and only then, offer a hand.
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Photograph of Grace (in blue jeans) and me (in tan cords) taken with ToonCamera for the iPhone.

Origins of my $8 table

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I like order. While I am no perfectionist, and I recognize that we live in a chaotic universe, I feel more at peace when t-shirts are folded and put away neatly and tasks are on lists.

my January laundry table

Where there is no order, I enjoy imposing it. I see a mess, and my imagination starts selecting, categorizing, and straightening. When I am in a colleague’s unruly office, I must resist the temptation to say, “I could help you with this.” (What a time suck that would be.)

I like the revision part of writing as much as I like the generation part. The mental activity is not unlike cleaning out a closet. Creativity is not all right brain. Could anything ever get made without the desire to bring coherence to a wash of ideas, experience, sensations, stuff? The left brain brings shape to raw material and finds what my friend Jan calls the spine of a piece.

I often think about one creative activity when doing another: writing when gardening, for example.  Recently, I organized the laundry corner of the basement, quickly made a rudimentary table, and thought about teaching while doing both. And I didn’t just think about teaching while my hands were busy; I thought about my wonderful junior high shop teacher, Richard Bayrouty, who died in December, and the benefits of real hands-on learning.

In 1977, when I entered 7th grade, there was a policy shift in my hometown’s school system that girls could take industrial arts, or “shop,” as an elective. If I remember correctly, before 1977 all girls took home economics (cooking, sewing, laundry) and all boys took shop. That year, the policy loosened, and suddenly there was cross-registration. Boys who wanted to make and eat cookies took “home ec” with Ms. T. Girls who knew how to sew, cook, wash, and iron, as I did, took shop. My friend Lynn-Marie, who recently wrote to me that she never “caught on to home ec” and “never really liked to cook,” and I were the only two girls that year in Mr. Bayrouty’s class.

He had the best classroom. Continue reading →

More than the end

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Lately, I have been thinking about endings because students are rehearsing and making presentations, ones that begin strong, build purposefully, and then break off awkwardly. At best, presentations seem to end with a gracious thank you to collaborators. Speakers perhaps wear themselves out, and when they’re done, they’re done.  Tough luck, audience.

Linda Flower (1979) described writer-based prose as an expression of the writer’s thoughts, for the writer, with no other purpose. Such prose is revealed in problems like a chronological process-based structure (first I did this, and then I did that) rather than an idea-driven one.  This kind of prose is not concerned with a reader’s experience; it is a record of the writer’s experience of thought, reading, or action. For my concerns about presentations, Flower’s theory of writer-based prose might be reframed as speaker-based speech. When I experience one of these presentations that simply break off — and, hey, I’ve occasionally made a few of these myself — I think what I’m seeing is an example of a speaker who has said everything she wants to say. Spent, she stops.

Stopping, though, is not concluding. Continue reading →

The band room is not the high school.

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Gwyneth Paltrow was quite fetching on GLEE when she sang the Cee Lo song, “Forget You,” which I had heard many times on the radio.

I had no idea what I was really missing, though, until I went recently to open mike night at Brookline High School. My son Eli’s band, Hippos on Campus, opened my eyes and ears to Cee Lo’s original version.

The audience was mostly made up of high school students; some intrepid parents were there too. Grace was sitting next to me, and in the video you can see a shot of her at 02:14 . Also in the video at 00:48 you can see one of the high school music faculty, Carolyn Castellano, scurrying in front to give a student a megaphone.

Later in the night, from behind the piano, Carolyn reminded her students, “The band room is not the high school.”

I parsed her remark and took it to mean that, within the context of rules and right answers, there also has to be a place for subversiveness in education. Some teachers, like Carolyn, seem to manage this balance well: She drives her students to be ambitious and practiced musicians (Eli is the bass player in her jazz band at the high school), and yet prods them to think, act, and play with originality. Students find it hard to get praise from her, and yet the really serious ones want to work with her because she treats them as though they were musical peers.

It’s hard to teach inside these contraries, and although I value them, I’m not so sure I pull them off in a radical or dramatic way. On the one hand, I have a responsibility to teach the conventions of scientific writing and communicating. On the other hand, I have a responsibility to the student who aims to do work that is authentic and meaningful. In my practice, I seem to be more structured in the classroom as a lecturer and more open to individual work in small groups and 1:1 conferences. Interestingly, this may resemble the division between my public and private self in general, and my public and private teaching self.

I really admire professionals like Carolyn who seem to take public risks in their teaching while still upholding really high standards for their students. Funny, though, when I told Eli my interpretation of the band room/high school remark as slyly subversive, he wondered if Carolyn, whom he knows well, had really intended instead that her students remember to behave once they leave the band room.

Either way, the remark conveys the same dichotomy.
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For a more polished and still angry version of “Fuck You,” watch Cee Lo himself, in a Pepto pink suit, sing it here on a BBC special: Link.

Where I want to be

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Once, on my long path from the parking lot through courtyards and down hallways to my office, I trailed behind an admissions tour group led by a student. I heard him say to the assemblage of parents, prospective students, and tagalong younger siblings, “Our campus isn’t very beautiful. I mean, it’s an urban school.”

Whoa there, I thought. Our campus is amazing. Indeed — domes, arches, windows, low stones walls, high ones, the river over there, surfaces, trees, groundcover, bicycle racks, and silhouettes against the sky — there is always something interesting to look at.

Last Wednesday, after a day filled with 1:1 writing conferences (6 of those) and presentation rehearsals (4 of those), I took a detour back to the parking garage to check out a new outdoor sculpture, Alchemist by Jaume Plensa, that I had noticed from across the street as I hurried back and forth on other days.

W 11.24.2010 ~3:00pm @W20 MIT

And last night, same sculpture, same impulse. Continue reading →

Pleasures and problems of the ideal text

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Writing teachers, when they read drafts, have a hard time resisting the temptation of the ideal text. As we read student work, we may be simultaneously reading — or really, creating — an ideal text in our mind of what that draft could become. No doubt this ideal text is based on our knowledge of other texts we have read and perhaps even written ourselves.

Ideal texts may help us see our students’ work ambitiously, as though all writings hold great potential. Ideal texts may also prevent us from seeing the work for what it is and for what it wants to become, or for what the writer wants it to become. Brannon and Knoblauch (1982) describe how an awareness of ideal texts and the inexperience of students can lead a teacher in a way to “appropriate” her students’ work (158).

The kinds of texts we encounter at school can be more than essays or reports. Oral presentations are texts. Videos. Portfolios. A proposed experiment. In the project labs I am assigned to at MIT as a communications instructor, it seems to me that the engineering and science faculty read or consider their students’ independent design and research projects against some ideal that the faculty themselves conjure in the acts of reviewing and teaching.

This ideal-text creation is largely optimistic, and, at the beginning of the semester, we see only potential. The push is forward. Right around now, though, with only two weeks before the last day of classes, our ideal-text creation machine is seeming a little peaked, which can paradoxically lead to teacherly acts of will and desperation: extra writing conferences, more office hours, and lavish feedback.

There’s another tarnished ideal text we teachers are facing right now and that is this: our own teaching. Perhaps I should drop the communal “we” right here and admit that the tarnished ideal text that I am facing, at this late moment in the semester, is my own teaching.  Way back in September, what I planned to accomplish and even be as a teacher was like a vision. And now I hold the reality of my teaching in my hands like a small pile of stones. Certainly, I have amassed something — I’m a better teacher now than I was 7 years ago when I started, and surely this has happened incrementally, including this semester — and yet the gains are modest-sized.

Oh, I’m not completely self-effacing. Not at all. As much as I’m seeing the shortfall in my work, I see too what I have achieved. In fact, nearing the end of the semester can be a weird time of reconciliation. Somehow, by making an account of what I didn’t accomplish, I force myself to look for what I have been doing: 4 classes and 60 students, and it looks like they’ll all reach the finish line intact and with a few flourishes.

I’m starting to reflect, too, on what my students have achieved, as I’m talking to them in meetings and conferences and as I think of them. I am reminded that they are not only the texts that they produce; they are very smart people to begin with who are growing as thinkers and doers, and teammates and teachers. In class, meetings, and peer reviews, I observe them teaching each other more and more. Often, I feel them teaching me.
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Image, “Brain of the Sistine Chapel,” by tj. blackwell on flickr.