It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it. I use the dry-erase board. No matter how carefully I distance my hands from the pen's felt tip as I write, or from the eraser as I wipe the board clean, at the end of the day my fingers are covered in an inky grime that turns the sink black when I finally wash my hands. Teaching is about getting your hands dirty. The strongest and most valuable moments in my teaching are often the messiest, as they involved a whirlwind of activity and places which call my attention. However, these are the moments in which the most honest-to-God teaching takes place.
Sometimes my weakest moments in the classroom are when we hold whole-class “discussions,” such as when we analyze John Donne's metaphysical conceits and his sonnets broken up into discrete arguments. The text is Donne's “Holy Sonnet 10,” a poem in which the speaker challenges death itself. “Death be not proud,” it famously starts, “though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful.” I thought I did everything right. I had them anticipate his poem through their own experience (e.g. “How many of you know someone who died?”); I even activated some schemas by having them discuss a thematically related painting (Sir Thomas Aston at the Deathbed of His Wife). Both of these went well. I taught them the Italian sonnet rhyme scheme and had them discuss the pros and cons of poetry that follows a strict structure. This went well, too, because they anticipated what I intended: by being familiar with a poem's structure, its meanings become more accessible to the reader. When we went to actually trek through the quatrains to see the Italian sonnet style in action, however, I could feel their enthusiasm alchemize to lead and sink lower and lower on their shoulders and eyelids. By the end of the activity, leaving the poem behind for good seemed about on par with candy at an end-of-the-year party.
In the same lesson, ironically, we shifted gears completely and the students did a writing workshop for a creative writing assignment they have been working on. I set the students to move forward on their own, critiquing each other's writing in a loosely structured format (“praise/question/suggestion”), while I moved around the room and addressed specific needs.
I have never felt so needed in so many places at the same time. Many of the students had incredibly deep questions that demonstrated an amazing understanding and concern for the task at hand. Many of my students who need the most love and attention to be successful in the classroom had worked their selves ragged in the name of the assignment, producing amazing work. I wanted to be everywhere at once. I wanted to spend the entire period with the same students at the same time to give them the help and the attention that they deserved. In the same instant I wanted to be hovering over the students who could not stay on task to save their lives. That comes with the territory.
These were the moments where I felt the most connected to student needs and student learning. It was the messiest, because of all the activity happening at the same time, and all the specific needs that need to have been addressed at the same time. Yet these were the moments in which I could attend to students individually and help move them significantly forward. Real learning took place here. It's ok that at the end of the days I got my hands dirty with the work. Tomorrow I'm ready to do it again.
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