A Teacher's Morning Coffee: What is My Story?

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

What is My Story?

I love to ask my students this simple question: “What is your story?” With great accuracy, most respond as all others gone before them; they offer me a half smile. I know exactly what that smile implies. One half is uncertainty, the unknown, the disbelief that they even have stories worth sharing. Their squinty eyes suggest sheepishness in divulging what they do not necessarily think is worth an incomplete sentence. But the other half of the smile tells the story of freedom, as if in that question they finally have the chance to articulate how their unique past created them to be who they are today.

We too must ask ourselves that same question. What is our story? Do we know what path we took into education? Conceivably, these questions may open sour wounds left untouched by time. These questions could reveal a past not yet understood but crucial to our teaching philosophy. Perhaps we know our stories well, but have not had the chance to compare them to others, and like my student, feel sheepish in sharing any part of it. That "half smile" feels ever present in our lives; "...why would anyone want to hear my story?" we think.

Norman Maclean, author and narrator of Young Men and Fire offers his story of maturation as a way for us to relate and understand our own. He suggests, “The nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself.”(145). At any given time, at any given stage, we are the culmination of our past; finding the connections between them not only gives us our story but an awareness of who we are today, and who we are as educators.

Today, therefore, I implore you to join me in reflecting on the past. Reflect with me over these questions, as they are the essence of who we are today:

What is my story?

Why did I decide to become a teacher?

Who were the teachers that impacted me as a student, what did they do?

What is it about my story that I want my students to know?

In knowing our stories, knowing why we chose teach, we will begin to understand all that it is we want to offer our students. We did not come into this vocation with aspirations of becoming state robots teaching unclear state standards. We came into teaching seeking something more, desperate to share more; knowing our stories opens the opportunity to discover what it all is.....

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Dear Teacher

Dear Teacher,

Let us open our memory to when we were students seeking our degrees in education. Be it college or grad school, from day one we were taught how to teach. Between demanding methods of teaching, classroom behavior management, curriculum development, and the like, our professors modeled the ideal classroom. We presented lessons to our peers, critiqued deliveries, and role played numerous classroom scenarios until we all had an idea (or at least we thought) of what faced us in our journey ahead.

In the chaos of student teaching, interviewing, graduating, and so on, some of us forgot why we entered education in the first place. We simply did not choose jobs; we chose a vocation that impacts the rest of the word. Our souls have great purpose in what we are doing and there is something within all of us that moved us toward the classroom. Teachers thrive in the classroom, what we have to offer is more than subject material; we long to share ourselves.

Our belief in one student can change the world, yet we were unable to materialize our beliefs in our "how to teach" courses. Believing in students is an understanding of why we chose teaching as our careers. It is difficult to believe any of us chose this vocation without the ambition of changing student lives. Propelling one student beyond the content material is the difference we make as educators. As teachers, we must teach in such as way that our students can reflect upon their education and use us to mark history.

State testing and the bureaucracy that comes with our evaluations, tenure, and outside judgment will continue to haunt us all. Though rarely talked about and certainly not fully developed in our educational training, our desire to reach the adolescent heart is omnipresent. You are not alone in your quest to lead students to a greater peak in their learning, one higher than any state test can measure.

We have chosen an emotional occupation; the days may be long, the journey exhausting, and the victories difficult to see. Throughout this blog we will find meaning in our teaching through why we teach and allow it to transform how we teach our students.

Come on the journey with me to discover why we became educators. There is something deep within calling us to pursue more than the subject we teach. Our hearts long to be part of a story more important than standardized tests and student success hinges upon us being masters of that story. Rarely have we been given a chance to listen to our heart and reflect upon why we teach. Together we will pursue the source of the ever flowing spring of educational desire.

We are in a career in which we receive little monetary compensation. We are frequently berated from lack of tangible success and often blamed for the problems with America’s youth. Yet we are connected emotionally to our occupation. We love it….but sometimes the system kills the passion we had entering education and brings us a new reason to educate, to pass the test.

What happened to our initial motivation? What stole our spirit and how do we get it back? In the end, it is not really about dollars and dimes, what parents think of us, or how well our students remember Romeo and Juliet or the Pythagorean Theorem; it is about giving ourselves to our students. And when we give ourselves, there we will find true joy, there you will find motivation to keep teaching. There you will find the purpose in what we do.