All you’re expected to do is to keep the students in your class under control for the entirety of the school day. Keep them quiet; keep them sitting down. The principal tells you straight up: as long as she can walk down the hallway and not hear or see anything “out of the norm,” you are doing your job perfectly. How you achieve that result is totally up to you. But it must be done.
This would not be an easy job.
Keeping a group of ten, twenty, thirty people quiet and seated for a prolonged period of time is no joke. I think this is true no matter the age of the people in the group. Sure, we do it all the time voluntarily - think waiting rooms, public transportation, airports - but only when we have an actual reason to do so. We sit in a waiting room because we want to speak to the doctor and that is the purgatory one must endure before being allowed to do so. There is some meaning to the experience. It is not just sitting there.
And even in these situations, it is often hard to bear the tedium of “just sitting there.” People who are lucky enough to be with a friend or family member will talk. (In fact, my current leading theory for why people get married is so they have someone to talk to in waiting rooms.) Others will get up and pace, or browse through a magazine or the endless stream of content on their phones; some daring souls may even start a conversation with a stranger. (My greatest fear is accidentally sitting next to one of those people.) The point is: people have this inherent instinct to always be doing something.
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| Hell is other people in a waiting room who want to chat. |
And remember: we’re not talking about adults. We’re talking about kids, somewhere between the ages of six and eighteen. And I think it’s fair to characterize them as a pretty restless bunch. Not a criticism, just an observation. And your job is to keep them sitting down and quiet for the same amount of time that a regular teacher would be trying to teach them. In elementary school, that would be pretty much a full seven-hour school day, with breaks for lunch, recess, and special (when someone else would have the job of making them sit down and be quiet); in middle and high school, it would be for about fifty minutes, but then as soon as they left, a whole new group would come in.
Question #1: How would you do it? (I’m actually curious.)
But my point here is this: keeping students under control is actually an end in itself. It is not something that just happens. It is one of the many ends that teachers try to achieve on a day-to-day basis. Now, I’m not trying to do one of those poor-teachers-our-jobs-are-so-hard, please-pat-us-on-the-back sort of things here - I hate that shit as much as anyone.
(an incomplete list of my responses to that sort of shit:
A. suck it up, you chose this job
B. every job is hard
C. you get paid pretty well
D. you have ten automatic weeks of vacation every year
E. you’re exaggerating how many hours you really work,
[I’m pretty sure I could go through the whole alphabet on this if I wanted to.])
What interests me is what happens when this end of keeping students under control comes into conflict with another end that we are trying to pursue. Because in the real world, it is not enough to keep your students quiet and sitting down. You are also supposed to get them to learn something - some content, a skill, whatever it is that you were actually hired to teach. And that is not to even address the myriad other ends that a particular teacher could be trying to pursue with his or her students - to respect each student’s individuality, to nurture their creativity, to expose them to the “real world,” etc.
There is no guarantee that all these different ends are going to work together. Sometimes there are conflicts. There are learning experiences that inherently involve a certain amount of disorder, noise, or even what may look to an outside observer like chaos. Likewise, it is possible to have a quiet, orderly room where absolutely no learning is going on. (I mean, if you want to keep a roomful of kids quiet for a while, put on a movie. It doesn’t have to be a good movie. They’ll shut up anyway. Of course, this only works in the short term - it would not work day in and day out the way it does for Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher. So don’t try to use that as your answer for Question #1.) So when there is a conflict, which end do we consider to be paramount?
A couple of years ago, when I was still in college or even during my internship, I probably would have said: you should always go with the learning objective. That is what school is for, after all. And so what if it leads to a little bit of chaos? So what if it makes your job a little harder in the short run? As long as the students are learning, that’s what really matters. And - I would have continued, idealistic as I was, three whole years ago - those experiences are true and authentic learning, not just memorizing and regurgitating things out of a textbook. (Notice how this implies that those two extremes are the only two possibilities.)
But you’ve also got to consider the full scope of the impact here. A learning experience that disrupts the established sense of order and quiet is not necessarily going to go exactly the way you expect or want it to. There may be students who take the absence of sitting-down-quietly as an invitation to behave in ways that you were not anticipating. To play, to talk, to roughhouse, to fight. Especially if they don’t have much experience with anything but sitting-down-quietly. Or maybe it would spill over into their next class (in a middle or high school environment.) Or it might even carry over into the next day. When you violate the established and expected structure, it is always a little bit more difficult to get it back than it would have been if you had just kept it the same. And so sometimes this can lead to a negative impact upon future learning activities.
This, essentially, is what I learned from my first year teaching.
Take the rapping teacher from that commercial that I think we’ve all seen ten thousand times. (Pre-emptive rebuttal to the person who’s going to say they don’t watch TV: just shut up.) In the commercial, the kids just sit there and listen to him rap about why it’s called the remainder. In reality, I bet they’d be so distracted by the idea that he was rapping that they didn’t even hear any of the math content. At least the first time. They’d all want to show off their own rapping skills; they’d brag to everyone else that they got the rapping teacher; they’d ask him if he was going to rap every time he taught a lesson. Which would be enough for many people to be all like, “You know what? If this keeps up, we’re not even going to do this anymore!” And so that’s the end of rapping in the classroom.
Of course, if you are willing to put up with all this disruption in the short-term - and your colleagues are willing to do the same - great things can happen. But it’s a question of priorities. You must decide, every time, whether a given learning experience is worth losing the sense of order, structure, and regularity. Sometimes it will be; sometimes it won’t.
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| Not the rapping teacher. But definitely the same archetype. |
Of course, there are definitely teachers out there who make the decision in favor of order, of sitting-there quietly far too often. (You know what, let’s call it SQT.) These are the teachers who do put on movies with surprising frequency, who rely on worksheets, who give out what we all know as “busy work.” (By the way, that’s my answer to Question #1: pass out busy work. Something easy enough that they don’t really have to think very much in order to do it, but also pretty time-consuming. Word searches are great for that. Or copying definitions from the dictionary or a textbook. That will get you much further than anything else I can think of.) And that is certainly a problem. But not one that is solved by doing the exact opposite. The key here is judgment.
There are also those who tend to assume that sitting-there-quietly and learning are inextricably linked, and that is what I consider to be the most dangerous. Maybe it’s just because this is how I would classify many of the people I work with. “If you can’t behave, you can’t learn” - a sentence that I have heard uttered in many meetings over the past year-and-three-weeks. And the extension of this is: if a classroom does not require students to sit-there-quietly all the time, then there cannot be any learning going on in there. They recognize that there is such thing as STQ without learning, certainly, but not that there can be learning without STQ. Under this way of thinking, there are no judgment calls to be made; there is nothing complex or nuanced about the decision-making process. It’s as if the scenario from the beginning did happen, but then the principal added on her way out, “Oh, and you’ve also got to teach them math.”
And that, I think, is a very limited and limiting way of thinking about things. But it’s the environment I’ve got to work in.
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