Teacher Induction (08-17-06)
by Carla Loecke
My dad briefly attended a one-room schoolhouse in the small farming community where he grew up in Northeast Iowa. The schoolhouse stood empty for several years, but about the time I turned seven or eight, somebody decided to knock it down, resulting in an auction of its antique contents. I didn't get to go to the auction, but the artifacts that my dad brought home inspired many daydreamed scenarios of the dusty, echoing room they once occupied. The relics were three old-fashioned wooden desks, complete with holes for inkwells and benches that folded up, and from that point on they resided in the basement of our suburban home. It was my first classroom.
My sister, neighbor, and I spent many hot, hazy summer days in the coolness of the basement, resurrecting purple dittos from my mom's pile of school paraphernalia and sitting at those desks. I imagined that I wanted to be a real teacher, a job that I assumed meant passing out dittos to students and being strict, the essence of our game. The only impediment I saw between me and my future teaching career was more schooling. When my head was sufficiently filled up with all of the facts that teachers knew, I would be ready.
Needless to say, the basement classroom of my youth has yet to make an appearance in my adult life. Thankfully, I should say, the classroom as I continue to discover it, is much more alive than I ever imagined it could be. It is nothing less than a living, viable organism, and it takes much more than purple dittos and strict discipline to keep it satisfied. Which is what leads me to the topic of my research: What does it take to keep this thing alive? What are the parts, and what do they hunger for? And then, how do I provide for them? These are the questions that define my daily interactions with students, the school, myself, and the world.
At the suggestion of a teacher friend, I decided to read a book by the progressive educator and thinker Herbert Kohl. The book is a collection of essays entitled "I Won't Learn From You" and Other Thoughts on Creative Maladjustment, published by The New Press. The five reflections cover topics ranging from democracy and cultural equity in public education to creating a culture of hope in the classroom. His suggestions are simple, yet somehow subversive. He calls for teachers to look critically at the systems of which we are a part, and work to change them as necessary. Rather than blaming students for their failure to adjust and succeed in school, he asserts, we should blame the system for being irrelevant. We don’t need to abandon it, but can and should work with it. Kohl advocates for classroom-level solutions such as "hopemongering", or cultivating hope in students, and creative maladjustment, or learning how to break rules when they aren’t responsive to student needs. Kohl has what I would call a humane and natural approach to life in the classroom, a place that he sees teeming with energy, brilliance, creativity, and diversity. This is the classroom I, too, want to greet each morning, and so over the past couple of months I have adopted some of Kohl's ideas and tried to be mindful of a simple slogan I stole from the Christians: What would Herbert Kohl do?
In general, the first thing I have determined that Herbert Kohl would do would be to listen. He has an uncanny way of pointing out the obvious in a situation where all parties involved are floundering for answers by simply stopping, taking stock of the situation, and listening. I was one of those people, barking about trivialities and getting nowhere, when I thought of Kohl and attempted to follow the path I imagined he would take. Here's what happened: I have a student who cannot be still. His body constantly wants to move, and as a result he rocks back in his chair. Chair rocking, in my opinion, makes for lazy attitudes, not to mention it's dangerous and can break the furniture. And so I would go around in circles with this student about his habit, attempting to foil it through a variety of consequences and reprimands. But here we were, three months of school left, and nothing had altered in the behavior. Not only that, but our months of going round and round had created a power struggle between his posture and my authority. Taking a lesson from Kohl, I resolved to stop the nonsense. I considered the situation and decided to strike up a deal. I would allow this student to sit in a different chair, the chair he obviously preferred, which rolled and made a sort of slight rocking motion. In exchange, he agreed to return the rolling chair to its original location at the end of each day, and store his regular chair on top of his desk.
For a student who likewise has a hard time picking up after himself, organizing his belongings, and taking responsibility for himself in general, the deal has succeeded on several levels. Since the day we made the deal he has consistently held up his end of the bargain, and I no longer think twice about his rocking ways. In this example I learned, in a very simple way, to be open to what Kohl refers to as "creative maladjustment," his term that speaks to the sometimes necessary action of circumventing imposed rules to get at what’s really important. What would Herbert Kohl do? Sometimes he would break his own stupid rules.
Creative maladjustment is a concept that permeates much of Kohl's writing in this text, and it gets to the core of what he thinks about the current state of public education in America: it is flawed, and needs people who are willing to deviate. Of particular grief is the cultural and economic bias he sees implicit in the curriculum, organization, and environments of many schools. This is not a neat topic. What teacher, after all, wants to admit that perhaps they, too, create an exclusive environment in their classrooms? I, for one, do not. How can I deny, though, that through my lack of experience and real, deep understanding of these issues that it's possible? While I desperately want to be aware of the biases espoused by the educational and other systems with which I am associated, I become frustrated because the clarity I crave is not there. My own background and personal experience do not resonate with the cultural, linguistic, and economic barriers that so many people face. So while I must recognize my own deficiency, I also feel the strong desire to do what I can to overcome it.
Following Kohl's practical examples, I have recently been able to face the reality of my white, middle-class upbringing and make myself vulnerable to the scary questions I want to address. One of the students in my class is from South America, and throughout the year I have sensed his disinterest, lack of motivation, and failure to thrive in our school environment. Recognizing this, I have tried to reach out to him in various ways, have talked several times with his parents, and have even tried to get help from fellow teachers. Nothing seemed to inspire him, and the ironic thing about my tactics were that the more I tried to help him, the more I was moving away from him. Thankfully, this changed. I had the opportunity to spend some one-on-one time with him after school, and with Kohl in my mind I talked with him about his past, his hopes for the future, and the problems with the present state of school as he saw them. It was a remarkable interaction not because of the information that passed between us, but because of the time we spent. He knew I was listening to him and taking him seriously, and that was the first step. I wasn't trying to help him or get him to do something, I only wanted to know about his experiences, both good and bad. And I wasn’t trying to defend the system, myself or others. Instead I wanted him to know only that I was listening and acknowledging his feelings, and was committed to working on his behalf. What would Herbert Kohl do? He would allow his students to engage with him in honest conversation to build solid relationships based on mutual trust and respect.
I have tremendous respect for Herbert Kohl. He is passionate and profound, yet simple and down to earth. He is full of a hope that will make its way into classrooms not through politics or pundits, but through the intuition of teachers and the relationships and skills we build with our students. The classroom he advocates for is the one I hope all kids of the future will end up creating in their basements: complex, warm, dynamic places of learning.
