Here's My Future (4)

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Here's My Future (4)

In Here’s My Future I’m talking about my transfer from a traditional school after seven years to an integrated, more alternative school and all the changes that this change brings for my profession.

A student recently told me something that I found astounding, not because it was a revolutionary insight, but because a 7th grader expressed it, showing an emotional depth and openness that most adults couldn’t even imagine having. We talked about some exercise and then he said: “I’ve always thought if you’re bad at something, you’ll always be bad at it. But now I see that you can actually get better! You don’t have to stay bad.” Having a kid realize that change, especially personal change, is possible, is more gratifying than you can imagine. This is still representative for my experiences at this school.

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The Unmaking of a Teacher

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The Unmaking of a Teacher

I was sitting in a teacher’s room yesterday when a young teacher came in. He just had a lesson for his teacher’s training in which his supervisor observed him. The way this works is that you plan a lesson, meticulously, then you give the lesson and afterwards there is a discussion if you did well. The trainee teacher was optimistic at the beginning of this talk, obviously satisfied with the lesson. At the end of the talk, after about fifteen minutes where I partially eavesdropped on it in the teacher’s room, he had his head in his hands, slumped in his chair, defeated by the criticism he had to hear. Granted, I didn’t see his lesson and I don’t know him very well. Maybe he sucks as a teacher, maybe his plan was awful, maybe he is really delusional about his teaching abilities. But something about that progress from enthusiasm to slump stayed with me.

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