Personal Renaissance

Today was a good day, and I have so much to say. My students think my class is hard; they say I never give them a break, ask hard problems, assign too much homework, etc. But several students have told me lately they will have me next year, and they hear my class is fun. Even some of my worst, most disrespectful students from last term say hi to me now when they see me in the halls or outside of school. I take these as signs that I have laid the right foundations.

I believe that teaching is a great profession, in part because so few jobs on the planet are so intrinsically correlated to the personal virtues of the practitioner. A great lawyer, for instance, can be just as petty as he or she may please, and still do good work. But a great teacher is, almost by prerequisite, a fantastic human being who truly cares about the common cause of humanity. A flawed character is rarely such a hindrance, plainer for all to see, than in the classroom.

Some of my classmates are feelers, naturally open-hearted. They tend to build relationships relatively easily and know their students well. They feel sorry and consequently have a hard time enforcing rules. I have the opposite problem. Due to my personality, my tendency is to gravitate toward rules and principles, perhaps at the expense of feelings. In the past, it has been difficult for me to love my students in anything more than an abstract sense of moral duty. Yet I believe in balance between principle and feeling, and recently I have felt myself starting to melt. I missed them last weekend!

Like all forms of love, loving my students is more vulnerable, yet ultimately a truer, more rewarding, position. I like to think this is part of my natural evolution as a teacher, but I also credit the development in no small part to the unique beauty of “Gretchen.” She is the one who hugs me for coming to her basketball games. When my mother came to visit, she was the one to smile the biggest and lead the cheers, “Give it up for the mom!”

So today, I told a white lie. (This is pretty unusual for me.) Gretchen came by my classroom after school to copy down the homework assignment and casually asked me if I liked her “performance” for the Black History program. In truth, I thought it was a pretty pedestrian “interpretative dance”—or whatever you call it. Gretchen does many things well, but dancing apparently is not one of them. More importantly, I am glad she had the confidence to try such a thing in front of the whole school, and I want her to feel good it. So I said, perhaps a little lamely, “Yeah!” and I smiled.

I also love T-Rex. She is probably my most brilliant student. When I was gone on Monday, she was the only one who actually sat down and cracked the secret code I assigned them to work on. But she also has attitude. She constantly says provocative things like how much she hates my class, how she’s going to drop out of school, etc. Actually, I think she loves my class, because she always does the assignments, she answers all my questions, and whenever I slip in the slightest way, T-Rex is the first to get on my case, telling me, “I used to think you were the only one around here who had their act together.” The other students know she is brilliant, and she rubs their noses in it. Sometimes she is right; the rest of the class is just being foolish. But she really just shows no respect. I guess there must be some reason why she has this attitude. Perhaps it is simple attention-getting. I wish I knew how to get through to her. I am not very good at talking to kids and figuring out what they are really thinking. I just talk sternly and tell them they are out of line. I pulled her out in the hall to do just that today, and when we went back inside, she put her head down sulkingly. But this is why I know she loves my class: She can’t stay mad at me for very long. After about ten minutes or so, she was participating again.

Even my ideas are starting to flow better. Take tonight. I got the idea to teach a “Homo Faber” (mankind the creator) unit later this spring about the sometimes tragic consequences of mankind’s creations. (Well, it’s not exactly a brand new idea to me, but it is coming together in my mind better than it did before.) We will examine the o-ring data for the Space Shuttle Challenger. And we will spend an entire block watching my favorite movie, Koyanasqaatsi. Fun! At least some of them might be provoked. You never know unless you try. That is one my new mottos, as a teacher.

I have all kinds of ideas tonight. I want to talk to my students tomorrow about the Black History program we had today. In that hour-plus program, there was precious little “history,” let alone substance of any kind. It was really more of a celebration than anything. But one student gave a speech about black men in prison that really awakens a passion in me. The disparities between men and women, among African Africans, are staggering. There are something like five times more black women than men in graduate and professional degree programs. You don’t even have to look that far. My “A” students are all girls. My PASSING students are almost all girls. Never mind the incarceration rates. Successful black women complain that there simply aren’t enough good, educated black men to go around. This is a perfect-storm convergence of race, class, and gender. There is a profound sickness here, a crisis of epidemic proportions that simply is not getting enough attention.

Lately, in Dr. Mullins class, we have been talking about what makes a good (high school) principal. On Saturday, our guest speaker, Dean of the School of Education at Ole Miss, told us the number one quality of a good principal is “courage,” which he illustrated as the fortitude to suspend your star quarterback on the eve of a big game. Later, Dr. Mullins polled the class and wrote up on the whiteboard board all the essential qualities of a principal we could think of. I never really considered it before, but I am seriously mulling it over now: “Principal Corps”—or something like it—that is. Because I identify myself as pretty strong in a lot of those characteristics we listed, so much so that I began to wonder if I would actually make a better principal than a classroom teacher. One certainly has the opportunity to affect a bigger change in that position. Certainly, there would be drawbacks, namely the increased responsibility and all that entails, the constantly having to resolve conflicts, and losing the intrinsic rewards of direct classroom interaction with students. But leadership has its own rewards. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to come back as principal of the school I teach at now. I think I might have heard a call last weekend. Maybe. I have plenty of time to think it over.