Teach to the Eyes

An ancient instructional secret: teach to the eyes.

Once the bell has rung, don't scan the room with your eyes. Don't look furtively at your notes. Don't refer to the curriculum guide, or preoccupy yourself with the teacher's edition, the principal's latest mandate, the temperature of the coffee in the teacher's lounge, or the wheezy whistle from the asthmatic kid's schnoz. Start making eye contact. Address a kid, address her eyes. Take a knee and look at kids. Move around and lock eyes. Sure, the pubescent students will be creeped out at a certain level, but at a more profound level they will be connected - humanly.

Don't fall in love with your gadgets. Brilliant cyber displays, magical white boards, nor dancing special effects have the power that locked human eyes contain.

Once you're comfortable with engaging students more, you might try something else that truly sets the stage for learning: the human touch. YIKES! I know, I've stepped into a goopy pool of liability where no lawyer would tread. But, let's face it, nobody with any sense of personal liability would cross the threshold of a classroom, anyway. Come on, teachers, you are  already a prosecuting attorney's sugar plum dream; why not teach kids? I'm talking the tap on the shoulder, the nudge with an elbow, a high-five (realistically speaking, keep your torso a safe, even awkward, distance from the student. It is scary out there).

 In any other human-to- human vocation, from healing to sales, the stage for success is set by human contact.

The most effective teachers I've met have been far more involved with people than with paraphernalia.


Con el calor humano,

Profesor Suave

El Destino

"Soy un aventurero en busca de un tesoro"

- Paulo Coelho, La Alchemista

Boot Camp for Teachers - The Atlantic

By Amanda Ripley

Before the Air Force technician George Deneault flew combat missions, he had to practice—a lot. “You can’t fool around on combat aircraft.” But when Deneault retired and became a special-ed math teacher, he walked into a Virginia classroom cold. When asked which was easier—being a military commander or being a teacher—he didn’t hesitate. “Commander.”

Now that researchers have quantified the impact that teachers make, we should do more to train them rigorously. And we could learn from the military, where a mantra of readiness is referred to as the “Eight P’s”: “Proper prior planning and preparation prevent piss-poor performance.”

The only way the brain learns to handle unpredictable environments is to practice. Before student teachers enter classes, Boston’s Match Teacher Residency program puts them through 100 hours of drills with students and adults acting like slouching, fiddling, back-talking kids. The brain learns to respond to routine misbehavior, so it can focus on the harder work of teaching. The Institute for Simulation and Training runs a virtual classroom at 12 education colleges nationwide—using artificial intelligence, five child avatars, and a behind-the-scenes actor. Some trainees find the simulation so arduous that they decide not to go into teaching after all.

But these innovations are rare. The average teacher-to-be does about 12 to 15 weeks of student teaching. Once on the job, most teachers get only nominal supervision, and 46 percent quit within five years.

It is time, finally, to start training teachers the way we train doctors and pilots, with intense, realistic practice, using humans, simulations, and master instructors—time to stop saying teaching is hard work and start acting like it.

Tilting at Windmills

"Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.”-Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

It has been suggested that I am a pedagogical Don Quixote.

Where the researcher sees trends, I see exceptions. Where the professor sees poor management, I see a shoe that needs to be tied before a nose gets bloodied.  Where a principal sees mediocre instruction, I see a lesson changed in mid-gear because it is a non sequitur in the context of Lauren's discovery last night that her parents are getting a divorce. Where a colleague sees the veteran teacher down the hall as "one foot out of the job", I see a woman wise beyond a novice's understanding. The politico sees American kids falling behind?   I see a mouthpiece who has never left the country. The neighbor complains that kids don't work as hard as those in days past? I see streets and parks empty of free-playing youth, and air conditioned "learning centers"packed with pre-pubescent academic strivers. You see gains caused by new-fangled reading instruction; I see an inheritance in a dad reading to his kids each night at bed time, without fail.

Don Quixote had Rocinante and Sancho Panza.  I have a pair of wrinkled khakis and a stubborn belief that we are overlooking what is  essential for successful learning. We are tireless in finding what is sufficient in education: techniques, strategies, technologies, meetings, plans, and good intentions.  They are  impressive, expensive, and short-lived.  They are sufficient, but not essential. In our hurried labor to do what we have to do, we neglect to do what we should do.

The renown psychologist Berry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice argues that American schools have their ladder on the wrong wall.  He claims that, "The wise are made not born" and that U.S schools are forced to spend an inordinate amount of time and money dispensing knowledge instead of cultivating wisdom. Wisdom, the trait of a truly productive people, is at the crossroad of intelligence and common sense. In its feverish pursuit of measurable gains in facts and numbers, schools gorge our kids with information and starve them of any practical judgement.

Cervantes wrote that too much sanity is madness. So, too, are too many rules. Rules, mandates, and policies have been inflated beyond their purpose; in their overblown applications they ruin wisdom. They skuttle the opportunity public schools offer us: to promote and maintain a democratic society. 

There I go tilting at windmills.  

Maybe my humble legacy, after a couple decades in the classroom, is to have survived in spite of my madness.

Con honor,

Peps


P.D. This marks the last in a series of short posts I've drafted as part of a graduate class I am taking this summer.  While trying to satisfy the course requirements, I have also attempted to articulate a way to thrive in the classroom.  In these trying times we wrestle to meet the expectations of the folks calling the shots and address the needs of our students. Often times the two have very little to do with each other.
I imagine any U.S. public servant, be it cop, nurse, or teacher, is struggling with the same issues as society undergoes a rambunctious cultural revolution.