Anne Fleming’s Teacher Story
I have a collection of moments- delicate and vivid celluloid impressions- that define my teacher identity. Composed of picture and feeling, seminal moments run in my head like a vintage family film- a sort of Super 8 of indelible teaching experiences.
1994. I am 20 years old. I have twenty minutes to prep for a student teaching demonstration and drag too many desks around the room in an effort to create two boxed in shapes lying side by side to corral twenty-five students. I finish, as a blanket of sweat collects on my scalp- I’m nervous. Just as I finish getting the overhead to project a laminated film of the hull of a slave boat schematic from the late 17th century, my students, all tenth graders from a local public high school, file back into the room laughing and shoving and telling jokes. The carefree jokes and laughter die down as they look confused about the two cattle pens constructed from desks. I ask my students to split into two groups and lie down side by side on the cold and dusty floor in between the desks. As they move into the small enclosures made by the desks, I hear them complain under their breath:
“What crazy thing is she having us do this time?”
“New teachers… what is she, like two years older than us?”
A fleshy snort of agreement by the boy wearing a Metallica shirt.
Then a timid voice: “I kind of like her. She never does anything by the book. There’s always some weird activity that makes us feel like the character or gets us to think like the character.”
An eye roll from the pretty and popular girl that sits at the back of the class.
Finally, they have settled down into the makeshift spaces. A bunch of students packed closely together, a sort of tableaux- a white teenage facsimile of the grainy boat schematic projected onto the wall from the overhead. I see their discomfort; I smile reassuringly, asking them to keep an open mind, as I take them on a journey into one of the passages of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved.
As they lie side by side in the makeshift pens trying to suppress their nervous chatter, I read aloud a portion of the passage where Beloved, the main character, is experiencing her fragmented self- once again back in the fetid, packed hull of the slave ship simultaneously alone and amongst others during the middle passage: “I see the dark face that is going to smile at me it is my dark face that is going to smile at me the iron circle is around our neck she does not have sharp earrings in her ears or a round basket she goes in the water with my face...”
When I finish reading, I ask students to stretch and look at each other and smile or chat for a moment to shake off some of the tension. Then we right the desks and start our discussion. With a few questions scribbled on the scratchy chalk board, students work in groups for 10 minutes to unpack the meaning of the passage I read. I wander from group to group just listening in on their interpretations, and I am floored by the nuance of their ideas. Key ideas fill the board, and they speak out one after the other to add, clarify, and shift perspectives. After we have collected ideas and interpretations on the board, I ask them to write for a while using the chalky notes as a starting point. Students scribble quickly with large flourishes, and I take in simultaneously fleshy and rough sounds of pens placing ideas to paper. The period ends, and they are still talking about the book:
“You have to work hard when you read this novel. The author really makes you work for the meaning.”
The boy with the Metallica shirt smartly makes an authorial evaluation: “Yeah, she’s not handing it to you, that Morrison. I never thought about that section of the book as the slave voyage, but it makes sense that any memories of that time would be all mixed up and all overload of senses, because you would be pressed in there with no sense of time and space. That would screw with your mind.”
The timid girl now with a bit more gumption says, “I think the meaning is different depending on who you are when you read it.”
“Sethe’s pain brings Beloved into the world. She wants to be haunted. It’s her only connection to her child.” That bit of insight from Metallica again.
My students are leaving class- not talking about girlfriends or gossip, but about passages, Morrison, and identities fractured. I am elated. For me, teaching means engaging, listening, and encouraging students to envelop themselves into the learning experience. Teaching must come from an inner place where my objective is to help create an appreciation of learning and honest engagement. I hope to create an experience for my students that will resonate. I want emotional engagement when I work with my students, and my activities need to have context, meaning, purpose that lead to student writing that is generative and connective.
A darker memory flickers. I taught for two summers at a SAT test prep company because I desperately needed the money. I was teaching highly motivated, smart, focused sophomore and junior students- many teachers would say dream students. And yet, this teaching period was utterly soul crushing. Forced, through the mandated and provided curriculum, to teach literature and writing as a means to perform well on a standardized test meant students only saw the book and other materials as transactional artifacts that gave them some skill to “beat” the test. I hated this transactional classroom; it was a dead space where authentic learning and growth never happened.
“Orthodoxy means not thinking- not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”- George Orwell
My attempts to read Orwell’s novel 1984 through a lens of critical pedagogy was met with resistance. One day, half way through the book, I brought in nuts and bolts and set up stations around the classroom where students would engage in themes from the book: rote, meaningless work screwing nuts and bolts together only to unscrew them, recording other students’ moves and reporting on them, and cutting down language in a passage into facsimiles of ‘Newspeak’. I wanted my students to experience what Orwell is warning his readers about: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
I envisioned the class engaging in the activities, moving from one station to the next to experience the rote work, the way such work could re-write our souls and steal from us by dehumanizing us and stealing our language. I had every intention of having students share their perceptions of the activity and relate it to a passage from Orwell’s novel.
Unlike my Beloved activity, students actively and openly resisted. They were totally disengaged, complained, and refused to fully participate because all they wanted to do was learn to beat the test through skill drills on grammar or to practice reading techniques to master reading questions. I went home that day angry, and I cried. I was angry with my students. I believe in teaching from a place of empathy and care, and yet I completely lost my empathy in that moment, even though I knew the goals of the company negatively impacted how the students viewed learning. My teaching style did not match the rote, prescribed objectives defined for me by the SAT company. In those moments, Orwell’s words, disseminated through Big Brother, rang disturbingly true: “It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.” Students had destroyed the language I value, the language that surrounds learning by stripping away the things I hold dear in teaching: collaboration, engagement, inquiry. The dissonance between my own perception of teaching and learning was diametrically opposed to the goals of the very company employing me.
In many ways it was probably one of my most formative teacher identity lessons. I learned that I can plan activities to engage students, but not all students will choose to be engaged. I learned that the moments that feel like failures do not mean I am a failure. I learned that I have to put myself out there as an instructor, and trust that some, not all, but some of my students will gladly come along for the journey and learn something about the course material and something about themselves as students. I learned that no amount of money (no matter how much I think I need a job) can induce me to silence what I hold dear in regards to my pedagogical principles. I now know that when I teach, I am teaching students how to engage in written communication in a world that seems to devalue the written world, seems to devalue facts, seems to devalue critical thinking. The summer of teaching 1984 reinforced the importance of building critical literacy with my students by thinking about how they engage with texts in the moment by examining them from a rhetorical lens: what is the message? Who is the intended audience? How is the writer pulling from other writers and other ideas, and how can students spot aspects of the language that send the reader these clues? I want students to seriously consider the ethics of a writer’s arguments and think seriously about the ways that their own writing signals a message to their intended audience about their ethics, their ethos as writers. I believe teaching students to actively and thoughtfully engage with readings and their own writing from the perspective of audience, writing as reflective of a situated moment, and writing as building off the ideas and interpretations of others makes students aware of how powerful language is as a tool. While on the surface the summer teaching for the SAT prep company seems like a negative teaching experience, I choose to view it as a positive one. It helped me to define with more clarity what I value in teaching and who I am as a college instructor, and my classroom is better because of it.