What works inspire you?

(I took the prompt  from the end of class of what do I do well as a teacher to write this.  But Sara, your prompt is to address inspiration, I'll try that next.)

As an educator there are some things I do well but what I want to talk about is what I don’t  do well, wasn’t good at and why.  I wasn’t good at being fully responsible for implementing the rules of the school. And I don’t say this with pride. Its important for the health of the school community for everyone to agree to cooperate.  I wanted to cooperate. Each year, some new problem in student management arises,  and a solution is implemented.  Like many strategies composed during the school year based on an incident these rules are often short sighted responses to bigger problems.  One decision unconnected to the purpose of the school leads to another unconnected decision. And the solutions which  chips away at the act  of teaching and the purpose of schooling bend the school’s life in a direction it never was meant to go.

For me the illustration was a  rule requiring  teachers to leave their rooms when the  passing bell rang and stand in the halls to monitor the behavior of the students as they passed to the next class.  There had been fights , or complaints and one day the principal stood in a faculty meeting and stated, with single mindedness the solution was to require everyone to be in the halls during the passing of classes.  The idea was reasonable on the surface,  the halls should be safe, students shouldn’t experience harassment or physical bullying at any time and certainly not on their way to class.  And teachers, because they know the students, can conduct the monitoring needed very effectively.  And at first I tried to do it.  But I found I just couldn’t always be there.  I wanted to obey the new ruling, I wasn’t a iconoclast who rebelled against any rule,   But there were a precious four minutes between classes, and I needed the time to scan the lesson book for the notes I’d made about the next class, to clean up group three’s mess, to find my glasses or my notes now buried under period one and two’s work, to grab the work for the next period and be ready to greet students, to talk with a student over something from yesterday, to collect work for a student, to record something about the class I needed to remember, to make a list of things to do, to adjust the lesson based on this immediate class’s response to it. to compose myself after a particularly energetic group. Please add your own list here.

 I could hear the voices of some of my colleagues in the hall.  They had to notice my absence, or sporadic attendance to the duty.    I wanted to ask them how they did it, walked out there right after class and back in when the bell rang. But the answer was simple, you take class time at the beginning to organize for the period.  You end the period early so you can organize for the next.  There were others who never got out to the duty for reasons I can only assume are similar to mine. The thing is with each of these rules we move farther away from addressing the big picture: perhaps in this case creating and sustaining a learning community which fosters student responsibility,  inclusion as well as academic growth.  Please add your own list here.

The reality is schools often don’t have an over arching purpose in spite of  hallway banners and  posters declaring otherwise. Decisions regarding  school life don’t tend to spin around a central vision. What research and successful schools can offer isn’t implemented  in a way to stay the course till real gains are made in students behavior and progress.  Schools on limited human resources, tight  budgets and sometimes a clear lack of imagination or skill make a series of decisions which lead us farther away from the reason we show up for work.  And in all honesty with myself that is why my heart wasn’t in it.  If I’m known for having few discipline problems in my classes  its not because I don’t have them or that I don’t screw up.  It’s because I know it will take till December to get  the students, and me,  in the groove of cooperation, maybe January, and  I just have to stay the course with them talking with them and  their parents as I go. Stepping out of my room was entering a zone of school life I had no philosophical control over. Why are we monitoring student behavior instead of addressing the reasons for it?  No really why is that?  Please add your ideas here.

What I try to do well happens in the classroom, what I don’t do well in spite of trying, happens in the hall. I don’t say this with pride, but with a belief that schools are wasting the opportunity to become better and asking me to comply with that.