Category Archives: classroom management

A retiring colleague of mine gave the graduation speech last year.  He is someone who I looked up to a lot and always appreciated my interactions with him.    One point he made during his speech that struck me was when he spoke of how thankful he was to have spent his life in such a “spiritually challenging profession”.  He talked about how it made him a better person, and then a better teacher.  I understood myself to know what he meant because much of my own classroom clarity came from a similar realization.  There is a beautiful quote from a book I love by Robert Pirzig called Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance which describes this spiritual challenge perfectly, albeit not from the perspective of a teacher:

“The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the building of this structure, is something everybody does.  All the time we are aware of millions of things around us – these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road – aware of these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect something we are predisposed to see.  We could not possibly be conscious of these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of useless details we would be unable to think.  From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it.  We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.”

It is so hard to know if you are really seeing your classroom for what it is – rather than what you want it to be or what bugs you about it.  Or as simply a collection of small events that deviated from your predictions of how you thought it would go, or heard it would go, or read it would go.  We share stories of our classrooms and those stories are a collection of things that stood out.  Little pieces of awareness that we brought into consciousness.  But who knows what we missed or how our consciousness mutated the actual events in the room.  They are by definition incomplete stories and maybe at the end of the day the best teachers are the ones who can reconstruct the clearest and most accurate picture of their class as a whole.

How do we thrive in a spiritually challenging profession?  These bullet points are my two cents:

• Decide how you internalize
• Remember you aren’t your lesson plan
• Laugh and smile
• Begin anew.

Along the way I’ve realized that every time I felt out of control, or stressed, it could be alleviated by improved lessons, or new structures.  No doubt about that.  But somewhere below all of those great teaching strategies that we know work – there are still personal insecurities that need to be understood.  Teaching will make you confront those.  That’s the spiritual part.  I thank my profession and my students for exposing me to my own.   It made me a better person…  who then became a better teacher.

I remember the very first time I stood up in front of a room of teenagers and asked them to do something.  I nervously gave them a scattered lecture on the intricacies of y = mx + b.  As I was talking they were writing down the things I was saying, and whatever I put on the whiteboard they also put into their notebook.  During the lecture I even asked the students some questions, and a few of them even raised their hands and offer up answers.  Next I told them to get out their workbooks and there was a huge rustling of paper as they actually did it.  I told them to go to section 5-4 and do problems #1 – 20 or something like that, don’t remember the exact numbers.  Either way, in unison the class asked me “which page number is that?”, I mean it was probably only two students but it felt like they were all asking.  I learned students prefer page numbers to section numbers.

At that point it was about answering individual questions.  So I basically just floated up and down the rows, or at least it seemed like I floated because I don’t remember hearing my footsteps.  Or maybe I just ignored them because the sounds in the room were really beautiful – I was hearing words I wasn’t used to hearing teenagers say, like “slope” and “intercept”.  And I was hearing words more familiar to me like “yesterday” and “that’s cool”.  The students all knew each other because it was the middle of the year.  I was just there for one day as a requirement before beginning a student teaching assignment.  I was a guest in their house.

At the end of the period they all turned in their papers to me – full of calculations and circled answers.  And their names were all at the top right even though I never asked them to do that.  Then a bell sounded and they all packed up and left.  I looked at their papers, more specifically their names, and thought about how cool it would be if I actually knew who they were.  If I was actually their teacher.

I was amazed at the whole experience.  And I’m not saying it was the ideal class, nor am I advocating for any particular teaching strategy – I’m just saying I was amazed.

“How’s it going my fellow teacher?”  One of my students told me that.

I’ve been telling my students that people call me a teacher because I get paid to teach. But being a teacher isn’t about a paycheck – it’s about teaching someone something. So all my students are teachers because of all the times they work together and help each other. When we pair share I will say things like “give your fellow teacher a fist bump before we get started”, and they will give each other a fist bump. It has been fun to watch them pick up and run with the message.

Around the end of the year I like to look at my class and remind myself that in a couple weeks the course will be over.  And after that, those 30 students and I will never again be in the same room together.  For all eternity there will never be another moment when a room will have this exact collection of souls.  I think about how our lives have intersected –  and it amazes me that for 1 hour a day, 180 days, we lived together within these walls.  And the fact that it will never be again makes me cherish each remaining moment.  Makes me cherish every time that magical bell rings and those 30 young people walk into room A3.

It is a simple thought but it keeps me excited to go to work, and keeps me insulated from feeling overly exhausted or too impatient for it all to be over.