A Little About Teaching - 2020/07/29

‘I cannot be a teacher without exposing who I am.’ –Paulo Freire

You see how tall that building is? Everyday is leg day at FTK.

I have just over 30 students that I teach over the course of a week. It's a small group, but they're already my favorites. One of my most consistent prayers since getting here has been that I will love my students and be effective in helping them. Mostly, because I know what it's like to have awesome teachers who were obviously invested in me, and I know what it's like to have those who aren't quite to invested. I get it, I totally do, but especially since I have such small classroom sizes, I want to take as much advantage of it as I can to help them be successful. 

Having been a TA in college and taught for many years in church, I love helping people work through the things that they're struggling with. Having vivid memories of feeling like I had a perpetual wall built up in my mind regarding anything that had to do with math, I relate to the struggle some of my students have had over the years. Where every thing might as will be written, taught, and illustrated in some strange foreign script that everyone else seems to understand. It's hard to feel incompetent, and really disheartening when no amount of effort seems to turn on the light. 

Personally I've been grateful for the influence of loved ones and teachers who have made efforts to help me break through those walls I'd had. No matter how long it took. To be fair, algebra will never be something that comes easily to me, but I'm grateful for that epidemiology professor who was willing to sit down and walk me step by step through those equations until I understood the story they were trying to tell. It was the first time I understood math on a level that I spoke. Stories are my world, and though learning how to calculate death rates might be gruesome, it's still my favorite kind of math because I understood what its purpose was. 

This general principle is something that I'm realizing can be really useful in teaching. If the students don't understand the principle or use behind what's being taught, they will struggle to "get it". And honestly, if there isn't a point behind what I'm teaching, I can't say I blame them for their struggle and disinterest. Even then it might still be a struggle, so then it's not just about teaching the content, but the problem solving skills needed to handle the struggle.

Real life example. One of my cute kindergartners (we'll call her Abby for this story) is really clever, but is behind the other two in our class with her reading. Teaching her is a trial and a delight. 

Part of it is she doesn't realize that the letters will help her know how the word is supposed to sound. A lot like my struggles with math formulas. I didn't trust the formulas to work for me, and I didn't understand what they were supposed to accomplish. It made it very easy to get lost. Her relationship with letters and sound pictures is very similar. So my current goal with her is to help her learn to trust the words to help her out. 

For part of our reading, they have little books they put together at the end of a unit and practice reading. We read about three of these books a class, and I go through it once with each student. With her, we first practiced looking at the words while I read with her. The first time through I read everything for her, with her copying me. But on some of the easier words I'd just stop, and see if she'd continue on without me. For really simple words "I", "me", "we", "what", she did just find, and I would then continue reading with the harder words.

Then we had another breakthrough. The next book I started reading with her, I began sounding it out instead, and when it became obvious she had no idea what I was doing, I broke it down. I asked her to name each letter, the sound it made, then sounding it out, then saying the word. She got a little frustrated with me because I wasn't reading as quickly as she would like, but when she started to see that she really only needed to copy this new step, she got on board. 

We were only on the second book and I knew that I would need to go back to reading quickly so that we'd finish the material on time, so I was about ready to call it a good attempt for the first day. We were on the last page, and I was about to start sounding out the next word for her when another student came to ask me a question. I quickly answered, trying not to disrupt my flow with Abby, when I realized she had was sounding out the next word on her own. Not daring to say anything, I just stopped and watched as she successfully spelled out the word, and then said it all together out loud. Then she looked at me with big happy eyes, and I could see that she'd broken through a wall. 

That was an incredibly powerful moment for a first day of teaching. Even if she still struggled with reading afterwards (which she did, we were back at square one the next day haha), in that moment she knew she could do it. Those little victories can mean everything when you're trying to learn. Every battle won, is a step closer to winning the war. Now that she'd done it once, I knew she could do it again.

In another of my classes, they do a lot of individual work, and then we go over the answers together in class. One of the girls (we'll call her Amy) isn't super confident yet, and so she generally just waits until everyone else is finished and then marks the correct answers as we go over them (these are graded more on completion). I'm not sure if she did this before I came, but I think I do make her a little nervous, and I think she's also afraid of getting the problems wrong. 

So the first thing I did was tell her that I was okay with wrong answers, and all she needed to do was pick the one that made the most sense to her. Then as a class we'd talk about the problems together so everyone understood. Whether she understood what I meant or not, she started filling in answers.

We worked through a couple problems, and I was still trying to figure out what I could do to help Amy. The last thing I wanted her to do was to start just randomly circling things, and I also wanted to boost her confidence. Then a thought came to me. Mulling it over quickly, I weighed possible pros and cons, listened to my gut, then went with it.  

"Okay, everyone who thinks the answer is 'a' raise your hand!"

Evidently this was fairly new to them, because there was a slight pause, then excitedly hands started to go up. Amy's was among them, and I was relieved to see that she had raised it without waiting to see what everyone else was going to say. 

Then we did it for "b". Only one student raised his hand. Then for "c" the last student raised her hand. 

Cheers erupted when I announced "a" was the correct answer and I watched Amy smile shyly to herself as she started working on the next question.  

I was incredibly grateful because this was the kind of exercise that I had hated in school and I wasn't sure how it would go over. It's all great when you're right, but it can be embarrassing to get it wrong and if Amy had been one of the lone students who chose "b" or "c",  that might have done more harm than good. But she had gotten it right, and had hopefully realized that the other kids who had gotten wrong answers were okay. Nothing awful had happened. They had just laughed, and corrected their mistake. No bombs, no scoldings, they had survived. 

And I could say the same for myself. No bombs, no scoldings, I had navigated that class, and we had survived. There had been laughing, there had been teaching, there had been a little bit of ground-rule setting, but most importantly I hoped that trust was building. This was going to be the next year of our lives, and a large part of how it went would depend on the tone I set over the following days and weeks. 

As the bell rang and I watched them dash out and on to their next class, I realized that I was smiling. I was exhausted, my legs were still adjusting to the transition from sitting full time to standing, and I was pretty sure that my hair was all over the place, and I desperately was ready to take my mask off. But I was smiling. And when I got home, I was still smiling. And when I called my family and told them about my work, I was still smiling. And even now as I'm writing this, I'm smiling. Which is a common side effect of answered prayers. So I'm just going to keep praying that I'll be able to love and help my little people, and maybe, just maybe, sometime in the future they'll think back to Shayla Teacher, and they'll start smiling too. 

-Shayla