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.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
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Bravo, Anne! I really appreciate your narrative and the insights about various languages the teacher must master. James Gee would call these discourses and likely concur with everything you're saying. I look forward to your next post!
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