With the exception of two other colleagues, I am the oldest teacher at my high school. Following the considered advice of one of my students, I call them my "homies." The three of us eye each other in the halls, definitely craggier than the rest of the staff, and have learned to expertly fist bump when we pass close enough by one another -- which cracks the kids up.
It took my students almost seven weeks before they asked me how old I was. We were learning about the Executive Branch, and I mentioned that I'd been appointed to the Justice Department during the Reagan Administration. Those who had heard of Reagan were shocked. You should know that when students talk to each other in class, they presume a teacher's deafness; there is no self-editing. So, one student promptly asked another: "How old is she?!" I answered right away: 51. Which absolutely blew them out of the water. They couldn't imagine themselves ever being that old, and they hadn't imagined I was, either. I became an immediate and perplexing curiosity. First, they suggested I prove it which, unless you travel with the paperwork and are prepared for the question, is sometimes difficult to do. Then they began comparing me with their grandparents, which was distressing for me.
I wonder a good deal about how much I should share with my students. As a trial lawyer, I was trained to speak up and speak out. My opinions were my stock in trade, and if I didn't present them openly and with confidence I would lose the war. Prosecutors, as I've mentioned, have a strong sense of right and wrong -- we have to be very certain where we stand, because the charges we file against others, the things we say about others, and the penalties we cause to be imposed upon others would otherwise be impossible to countenance. As a prosecutor, I identified first and foremost with the victim, if there was one; after that, I identified with my responsibility as an Officer of the Court and an Assistant U.S. Attorney. Often my opinions and arguments would startle and incense defense attorneys, but it was my job to unbalance them. It was my job to make my case and stake my territory. It was not my job to be liked by defense attorneys or defendants or even judges, although being disliked was initially hard for my 27-year-old self.
High school teachers (and law professors) have to develop the opposite skill. While they need to teach certain universal values -- those of tolerance, mutual respect, giving back to the community-- they are otherwise meant to keep their opinions to themselves. High school teachers frequently find themselves in loco parentis; not legally, but practically speaking as mini-emergencies rise and fall during the course of a school day. Unlike parents, however, high school teachers aren't supposed resolve mini emergencies by pronouncing a "moral" when all is once again calm. Instead, I've noticed my colleagues switch to the gently interrogative form: What did you think about what happened? What would you do differently? What would you do the same? How do you feel? And regardless of the answers received, the teachers nod, perhaps ask a further clarifying question, maybe intone one of the universal values we're allowed to discuss.
I am very bad at this. Last week, during final exams, one of my more voluble students turned 18. She loves adults, wants their conversation and treasures their validation. She approached me in the hall, where I was standing with our remarkable principal. The student announced that after exams that day she was heading out for her first tattoo, which would be a large scrolled message across her upper back: "I Define Me." Our principal did just what she should have done: she asked the student a few neutral, conversational questions about her tattoo plans, and then walked away. I didn't ask a single one of my questions, which were anything but conversational.
Several days later, I saw this same student in the halls and asked her how her tattoo adventure had gone. She answered that she hadn't gotten one, explaining that her mother had been opposed. At which point I said all the things I'm not supposed to say. Like: "Why do you want to get a tattoo?" "Why do you need a tattoo to 'define yourself?'" "Why would you want to mark your beautiful skin?" And here's the worst: "What would happen if you decided you hated it two years from now, and you were stuck with it?" On the upside, she hardly heard me, focused as she was on the upcoming long weekend from school. The downside, of course, was that I hadn't controlled my opinion-sharing.
I believe I understand why I'm not supposed to offer too many opinions to a high school student. I'm an adult, and adult opinions are unfairly persuasive. I'm not my student's parent, which makes my opinions even more unfairly persuasive. I'm not my student's parent, which means it's none of my business whether or not she gets a tattoo. I'm a teacher, and my job is to guide students through their own process of discovery rather than to "end run" the process by forcing a lesson.
The lawyer in me, though, doesn't really buy into these reasons for not saying what I think to my students. I have a lawyer's dread of wasted time and inefficient investigation. I have a lawyer's lack of finesse with finer emotions, and a lawyer's impatience with someone else's bad argument. I just like to cut to the chase, which is the opposite of how one encourages an adolescent to think clearly and logically for herself.
Generally, I compromise. I'll let my students thrash around a concept, conflict or ideal. I'll ask those neutral, conversational, guiding questions that the other teachers seem so fluent in. Then, when I can't bear it any longer, I just say what I think. At the beginning of the year, when I first did this, class discussion pretty much ended. We'd move onto the next topic in my lesson plan. Eventually, however, my kids started throwing my opinions right back at me. Which is a lawyer's dream. And, of course, a teacher's.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Bells and Whistles
The biggest challenge I have faced this year in adapting to life as a high school teacher is, without doubt, accessing and using classroom technology. I hadn't meant to write about this tonight, but it has taken me an hour to remember how to log into my blog account and restart the process of recording my first-year experiences. The daily "tech" time sink has been my constant companion this semester, and serves as a significant reminder of how "old" my old profession was and how "new" teaching is.
When I got out of law school, I clerked for a federal judge in San Francisco. At that time, the U.S. District Court was trailblazing the use of Wangs -- which were wrap-around, word processing devices that revolutionized the way legal documents were prepared and disseminated. I liked and understood word processing; any lawyer appreciates a tool that makes it easier to generate paper. Afterwards, as a young prosecutor, I didn't need to master technology any more complicated than this. Most of the time, I did my research using law books in law libraries. If I needed to play wiretap recordings, or prepare and use a flow chart with moving parts, or screen a surveillance tape during a trial, my agents did the courtroom legwork. What I was trained to do, and what I needed to do, was to think fast, argue clearly and persuasively, convince a jury, mollify a judge, and never look surprised by anything that happened inside a courtroom.
Interestingly, it turned out that I pretty much needed these same skills to transition from federal prosecutor to law school professor. Although I had worried that my reliance on the spoken word wouldn't hold the attention of 100 perennially aggrieved law students, my concern was misplaced. Law students expected a lecture; the expected not to be entertained. In fact, criminal procedure was a step up for them in terms of colorful material; it's a lot more interesting to hear a speech about physically coerced confessions than to hear one about the law of eminent domain.
From the moment I stepped into my high school Civics classroom this past August, however, it was clear that my students' technology entitlement far outstripped my virtuosity at word processing. Sixteen and seventeen-year-old kids -- at least the ones I teach -- live their technology. They walk into my room with a cell phone in one hand, and an Ipod in the other. The graffiti on their backpacks and the logos on their clothing glorify cyber creatures and games I can't even pronounce. They're used to constant, often passive, entertainment. They're used to learning in vivid technicolor. I've watched them this year, and I'm pretty sure: unless I'm recounting some tale of vice and violence from my prosecutorial past, my students can listen to me talk for about five minutes, tops, before their attention travels irretrievably elsewhere. High school teachers have to use bells and whistles, they have to change up their method, media and message every few minutes in order to truly engage their students.
I had heard this, of course, from my new colleagues. They had discussed the importance of my using a staggering variety of "assessments" and "scaffolds" and "graphic organizers" and "do nows" and "literacy maps" and "visual prompts" and "note takers" to hold my students' attention. I didn't know what they were talking about. I knew my content: I knew what the presumption of innocence was, I knew how Congress transitions a "bill" into a "law," I knew how the executive branch was functionally structured. But for the first time in my professional life, I didn't have the vocabulary to explain my content. I was literally and professionally in a foreign country.
So this is what happened. I embarked on the steepest learning curve of my life. I went to every faculty gathering I could: every teacher breakfast, every curriculum meeting, every Back to School night, every brown bag lunch, every department meeting. I treated the experience like a language immersion program. I wrote down every new word and acronym and system I heard faculty talk about, and incredibly patient fellow teachers later defined the terms for me again and again. I brought out my daughter's old laptop, and our overworked tech specialist adapted it for use on the school's wireless internet. Through mortifying -- and public -- trial and error, I learned how to download and convert incompatible media from the internet, I learned what a "firewall" was and how to get around it, I learned how to connect my laptop to speakers and projectors and screens, I learned how to make and use transparencies, I learned how to take attendance on my computer in a seething, bubbling, ever-mobile classroom. In comparative importance to all these new skills I was trying to master, my "content" was almost irrelevant. In fact, pretty much the only old "lawyer" skill I needed to carry with me every day was this one: never looking surprised by anything that happened in the classroom.
What I've realized along the way is a signal difference between being a prosecutor and being a high school teacher. Lawyers have their own language, it's true; but it's just one language. Every lawyer speaks the same way, usually in a prescribed chronology and according to a fixed set of rules -- rules of evidence, court rules, statutes, regulations. Teachers, however, have to master a plethora of languages: content, process, student language, parent language and -- my personal bete noire -- the language of instructional technology.
Fluency is an illusive prospect for a new teacher. I have to say, though, that the rewards of teacher fluency are remarkable. I consider myself at this point to be barely conversational in the language of teaching. As I had felt as a prosecutor when trying cases, I am literally exhausted after an hour and a half in a high school classroom. Here's the thing, though: after you try a criminal case, your jury comes in with its verdict -- win or lose, that's the end of that courtroom experience. Your jury disperses, and you move on to the next case. After you teach a group of high school seniors, however, no one really disperses. Some of them stay after class to talk about college or the fact that your sweater is buttoned wrong or the tyranny of parents or whether you were alive when the Beatles were recording. And even if they don't stay after class, two days later you get to see them again. You get another chance to persuade them that it's worth knowing what you're trying to teach them. And you get to do this for nine whole months. That's a huge privilege, even when some of the kids accuse you of hating on them, or fall asleep in class again, or talk incessantly to their cluster mates instead of listening, or don't turn their homework in, or break your heart by resisting you and your content.
When I got out of law school, I clerked for a federal judge in San Francisco. At that time, the U.S. District Court was trailblazing the use of Wangs -- which were wrap-around, word processing devices that revolutionized the way legal documents were prepared and disseminated. I liked and understood word processing; any lawyer appreciates a tool that makes it easier to generate paper. Afterwards, as a young prosecutor, I didn't need to master technology any more complicated than this. Most of the time, I did my research using law books in law libraries. If I needed to play wiretap recordings, or prepare and use a flow chart with moving parts, or screen a surveillance tape during a trial, my agents did the courtroom legwork. What I was trained to do, and what I needed to do, was to think fast, argue clearly and persuasively, convince a jury, mollify a judge, and never look surprised by anything that happened inside a courtroom.
Interestingly, it turned out that I pretty much needed these same skills to transition from federal prosecutor to law school professor. Although I had worried that my reliance on the spoken word wouldn't hold the attention of 100 perennially aggrieved law students, my concern was misplaced. Law students expected a lecture; the expected not to be entertained. In fact, criminal procedure was a step up for them in terms of colorful material; it's a lot more interesting to hear a speech about physically coerced confessions than to hear one about the law of eminent domain.
From the moment I stepped into my high school Civics classroom this past August, however, it was clear that my students' technology entitlement far outstripped my virtuosity at word processing. Sixteen and seventeen-year-old kids -- at least the ones I teach -- live their technology. They walk into my room with a cell phone in one hand, and an Ipod in the other. The graffiti on their backpacks and the logos on their clothing glorify cyber creatures and games I can't even pronounce. They're used to constant, often passive, entertainment. They're used to learning in vivid technicolor. I've watched them this year, and I'm pretty sure: unless I'm recounting some tale of vice and violence from my prosecutorial past, my students can listen to me talk for about five minutes, tops, before their attention travels irretrievably elsewhere. High school teachers have to use bells and whistles, they have to change up their method, media and message every few minutes in order to truly engage their students.
I had heard this, of course, from my new colleagues. They had discussed the importance of my using a staggering variety of "assessments" and "scaffolds" and "graphic organizers" and "do nows" and "literacy maps" and "visual prompts" and "note takers" to hold my students' attention. I didn't know what they were talking about. I knew my content: I knew what the presumption of innocence was, I knew how Congress transitions a "bill" into a "law," I knew how the executive branch was functionally structured. But for the first time in my professional life, I didn't have the vocabulary to explain my content. I was literally and professionally in a foreign country.
So this is what happened. I embarked on the steepest learning curve of my life. I went to every faculty gathering I could: every teacher breakfast, every curriculum meeting, every Back to School night, every brown bag lunch, every department meeting. I treated the experience like a language immersion program. I wrote down every new word and acronym and system I heard faculty talk about, and incredibly patient fellow teachers later defined the terms for me again and again. I brought out my daughter's old laptop, and our overworked tech specialist adapted it for use on the school's wireless internet. Through mortifying -- and public -- trial and error, I learned how to download and convert incompatible media from the internet, I learned what a "firewall" was and how to get around it, I learned how to connect my laptop to speakers and projectors and screens, I learned how to make and use transparencies, I learned how to take attendance on my computer in a seething, bubbling, ever-mobile classroom. In comparative importance to all these new skills I was trying to master, my "content" was almost irrelevant. In fact, pretty much the only old "lawyer" skill I needed to carry with me every day was this one: never looking surprised by anything that happened in the classroom.
What I've realized along the way is a signal difference between being a prosecutor and being a high school teacher. Lawyers have their own language, it's true; but it's just one language. Every lawyer speaks the same way, usually in a prescribed chronology and according to a fixed set of rules -- rules of evidence, court rules, statutes, regulations. Teachers, however, have to master a plethora of languages: content, process, student language, parent language and -- my personal bete noire -- the language of instructional technology.
Fluency is an illusive prospect for a new teacher. I have to say, though, that the rewards of teacher fluency are remarkable. I consider myself at this point to be barely conversational in the language of teaching. As I had felt as a prosecutor when trying cases, I am literally exhausted after an hour and a half in a high school classroom. Here's the thing, though: after you try a criminal case, your jury comes in with its verdict -- win or lose, that's the end of that courtroom experience. Your jury disperses, and you move on to the next case. After you teach a group of high school seniors, however, no one really disperses. Some of them stay after class to talk about college or the fact that your sweater is buttoned wrong or the tyranny of parents or whether you were alive when the Beatles were recording. And even if they don't stay after class, two days later you get to see them again. You get another chance to persuade them that it's worth knowing what you're trying to teach them. And you get to do this for nine whole months. That's a huge privilege, even when some of the kids accuse you of hating on them, or fall asleep in class again, or talk incessantly to their cluster mates instead of listening, or don't turn their homework in, or break your heart by resisting you and your content.
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