Teaching: Vocation, Mission, Profession

In this installment of Ayers...
On page 71, Ayers speaks about student work being linked to student questions or interests. He says " I want to develop my agenda in light of theirs." I think that student work should mirror the questions or interests of students because then they will relate to the material easier, and have a greater chance of learning it. But...I think that a classroom that is only made up of what students want to do is not a healthy one. The reality is, there are certain things that students need to learn in order to be successful in not only school, but other areas of  life. Tailoring every day and every lesson to the "agenda of a student" seems to me a bit extreme. Especially because many students do not have an "agenda" for their education. Or maybe they do...

Page 74 begins with Ayers talking about standards up on his soap box. "But who decides what the standards are? And can standards ever be definitively summed up? Since knowledge is infinite, and knowing intersubjective and multidimensional, anyone who tries to bracket thinking in any definitive sense, is in essence, killing learning." I do agree in some sense that standards put brackets around learning, but we do that all the time as teachers. Tests and quizzes put brackets around learning too, its just brackets that we create. The reality is we need to assess students in some way to have grades. It is unfortunate that sometimes the things that we pick to assess students on may not be the things that they actually learned...but that's the challenge of teaching....that's what keeps it interesting and fun-coming up with new ways to have students learn the material that I am teaching. Working in a private school we do not have any of the state tests that other schools have to worry about, so maybe that is why I am a little more open to the idea. I would love to see how the students at my school would score on the tests.

"The work of a teacher-exhausting, complex, idiosyncratic, never twice the same-is, at heart, an intellectual and ethical enterprise. Teaching is the vocation of vocations, a calling that shepherds a multitude of other callings. It is an activity that is intensely practical and yet transcendent, brutally matter-of-fact and yet fundamentally a creative act." This quote from page 93 speaks to me because I do feel as though teaching is my vocation. Teaching should be so much more than "just a job." I think about the teachers in my life who I learned the most from, and without a doubt, they are the teachers who truly felt that teaching was a calling for them. I talk a lot about vocations with my students, and there is always interesting conversation around the difference between a job and a vocation.

On page 98, Ayers writes, "The mystery of teaching keeps me on my toes. If teachers are never self-critical, they will become dogmatic, losing their capacity for renewal and growth. If they're too self-critical they become powerless and timid. Balance and clarity is key." There are many teachers at my school who are afraid to be self-critical. They never want to step back and look at their teaching and see if students are actually learning or if they are just memorizing and forgetting. Self reflection is scary...it means that things might have to change, and some teachers are just not willing to do that. I know when I first started teaching in my practicum and at the beginning of my student teaching I was too critical of myself, always looking for the bad things that I was doing, and not celebrating anything that I was doing right. When I learned that being critical of yourself is looking at the positives as well as the negatives I began to see the real value. If I did not reflect on my teaching, I do not think that I would be an effective teacher at all.