Dreams from the Past

The school year starts next week, and I'm caught in a temporal distortion. Years of internalizing the school calendar are urging that it must now be Autumn. Despite the blazing sun and temperatures in the 100s, I'm ready for indoor work, and misty days, and sweaters and jeans, and baking.

Also, to start a new year. As a teacher.

The end of summer automatically starts me into a planning, preparing mode. But without a classroom and an incoming group of new students, I have nothing to prepare for. At least at that level.

I dreamed this morning that I was teaching again. I was placed in a classroom already a few weeks into the year. The students were unruly, unfocused and so loud I could barely make myself heard. I had no classroom set up, no supplies, no curriculum plans - just, GO!

Teaching is exhilarating and exhausting. It is one person trying to corral the energies of a large group. One voice can easily be drowned out by many. It's sort of a crazy set up really, when you consider that most of those "learners" are actually resistant to being there. Only the effective use of authority and a dazzling body of skills ever allow any teaching to take place, anywhere.

In my dream, I faced the terror of leading a group on the edge of going out of control. Even in my dream, I started employing techniques hard won over the years. I had them all get up and go back out of the classroom, line up silently in the hall and file back in sedately to set the mood for learning. The trick is to have them do it several times. To reject their first so-so attempt where there are still multiple quiet conversations and to use the voice of authority to shuffle them back out into the hall. And wait for silence.

The fear is always outright mutiny. That this surly group will simply refuse. But that never happens. Because, inside they're not really all that surly (mostly). Inside, the majority of the students want to learn. And they want to like you. And most of all, they want you to like them. They have to be there anyway.

So the trick is to get their cooperation and respect. And offer them yours. Then make the learning as relevant as you can. Once you get that great feeling going, that feeling that the majority of the people sitting in front of you are actually interested in what you're doing and saying, then you have peer pressure on your side. Then disruptions are simply that, minor disruptions to what everybody else wants to get back to. Once you make it fun and engaging and approachable, then, then, ah, then you have learning.

Even in my dream, they were asking those great irrelevant (but not to them) questions that totally take the point off track. You're working like an artist, shaping an academic focus, whittling away at the disinterest in the room, and suddenly a question comes out of left field.

In an out of control classroom, that derails learning, because everyone is looking for a break. In a focused classroom, you just deal with the question quickly or put it on hold for later, and everyone relaxes when you get back into your point.

Wow, that was just fun. Pulling apart sentences, brainstorming good topic sentences, organizing a paragraph, analyzing characters - all of it was a blast to me, every single day. It was a joy to share something I loved with others, especially with those who had never liked it much before.

I didn't leave teaching because I was done with it. I left because life said it was time to go. Sometimes I remember how absolutely exhausting it all was, and I don't mind not having to deal with that. Mostly, I wish I could go back.

I wonder when and how I'll teach again.