Topsy Turvies in My Classroom

A letter to Herbert Kohl

Dear Mr. Kohl,

Funny that you call it a topsy-turvy.  I had to come up with a similar paradigm-shift as a new teacher, and called it a “complete 180” because I felt I needed to learn from my students if I was to succeed during my second year.  I chuckled to myself with recognition as I read about Julia, the student who heard you encourage the class to make mistakes but didn’t believe you.  The way you tell the story, you were practicing as you preached, so in your class Julia learned to be a headstrong and opinionated student.  You created a welcoming space where she felt safe to challenge you (and the state test!) when a test-day reality did not conform to her feminist values.  I have been in similar situations where I spent class time paying lip-service to a principle, only to have students find all the inconsistencies in my application of it.  For example, once I made an offhanded response to a (very helpful and community-minded, for the record) student who was asking for extra help before school: I would help him with his math if he would help me put some books away.  My words, thrown out so carelessly because I was in a hurry, caused him to stop short.  He reappraised me with his gimlet eye before informing me, “Jessica that is a low level of moral development to say that.  Is almost like to do something only to get something back.”  

I appreciated also your story about the white teacher who crucified herself with self-flagellation when a disgruntled student called racism (Kohl, H. 2002).  When we are uncertain about our role as teachers, or feel called to account for ourselves as members of a social group, it can lead to sticky situations in front of the kids.  Her response reminds me of some of my confusions as a new teacher in West Farms.  I am wincing now as I recall an incident during my first year teaching seventh grade, before I had started to figure out the power of doing a “topsy-turvy.”  The confrontation between a student and myself occurred after he insisted that he did not have to respect me just because I was an adult, and I overreacted.  After this incident, I had a lengthy exchange with the student’s mother and she pointed out a number of actions by myself and the lead teacher which her son had “heard” as disrespectful:

Daniel feels he is listened to and understood by Ellen whereas with Jessica and sometimes Lisa he is rarely understood or listened to. When asked to explain, he said that when people are really interested in what another has to say they give their full attention to what the other person is saying and oft repeats what they hear to be sure that they have heard correctly.

His voice and opinion are very important to him and right now he feels disrespected when his teachers 1) are not actively listening to him 2) do not follow up (no consistency) 3) signals him out when others are acting unruly, as well. 4) say things like” It’s your time guys—this is an example of teachers not caring 5) overexaggerates “aggressive” behavior (parent, personal communication, April 16, 2007).

I see now from the way that I interpreted the conflict between the student and myself that I had not come to “an acceptance of opposition, of the idea that what you want as a teacher and what your students want or expect may be dissonant” (Kohl, H. 2002, p. 150). 

In her first email, Daniel and his mother requested “a no holds barred school assembly where all the students get a chance to voice how they feel about the school, teachers, and curriculum with all the teachers and personnel present without any backlash on the students!” (parent,personal communication, April 16, 2007).  The other staff-members and I rose up at once when we had read over the chain of emails in the principal’s office.  “We don’t want to hear kid grievances against teachers at Town Hall!  Kids need to respect our authority! Not everything is open for discussion.”  It is interesting to me now that Daniel and his mother “heard” this series of exchanges as being about something much larger than myself, yet I responded based on my own wounded sense of the deference due to me as an adult. If I had taken a moment to put myself in their shoes, I might have remembered that “as the children [and adults!] listen, their own experiences, beliefs, and understandings can often provoke crisis or prevent learning” (Kohl, H. 2002, p. 154).  From where they were standing, the administration’s actions and words signified that kids and teachers did not deserve equal respect in our school, so Daniel and his mother were interpreting my speech and actions through this lens.  At the time, I wrote “It pains me that Daniel imagines his desire to see the school improve and better serve its students are at odds with the teachers’ desires…we are all (parents included) collaborators in shaping our school and classrooms” (J. Berenblum, personal communication, April 17, 2007).  I wish I had been skilled enough at the art of the topsy-turvy to convey this sentiment clearly to my students. 

It is easy for me to remember and feel awful about the ways in which my touch was less than light. I fell short of my vision for the teacher they deserved and the level of instruction she would offer them.  I guess many teachers feel this way when they look back at the beginning of their careers.  Even Susan Ohanian admits to struggling as a new teacher; after her first year in the classroom, her principal gave her a C+ grade on her official evaluation (S. Ohanian, personal communication, September 7, 2010).  However his report also stated that she had a good heart and would develop into a fine teacher with time. More than two decades later, Ohanian recalled the importance of this evaluation to her sense of self as a teacher in the years that followed: “I would like to believe that somewhere in the bowels of the NYC department of education is a little piece of paper stating that a good heart counts” (S. Ohanian, personal communication, September 7, 2010). Your article has helped me understand that it is not only having a good heart that counts, we must also wear it on our sleeves in a way that is “easy and sincere” and can be read as such by our students (Kohl, H. 2002, p. 150). 

I know that the department of ed probably has no such paper on my account. It’s hard to imagine such an evaluation today, when schools are hemmed in by Common Core standards and scared witless by the “accountability” camp eager to find fault with our performance. But the students I taught left me notebooks full of evidence that a good heart counts in teaching. For a recent Personal Artifact activity at Bank Street, I selected from my treasure trove of student work and correspondence some examples I think of as “gifts to my teacher self” (P. Jones, personal communication, September 30, 2010).  These were two mirrors held up by the kids I worked with, and they helped me see my teaching self more clearly.

The first is a literal gift (from a friend), a mug decorated with a quote from a student’s essay: “when I write a story, I write it with my heart. My heart makes my brain think about cool stuff.”  This came from an essay where Jenny described her discovery that she is a writing, story-telling person: “I never knew I was a good writer since [because] Jessica told me I asked myself the same question” (T. Oxholm, personal communication, September 10, 2010).  Whatever my failings as a semi-skilled new teacher, she could tell that I was trying to see her and the other students more clearly.  What were they were trying to learn or figure out as seventh graders?  And how did these smaller pieces connect to the person they wanted to be or become? 

The second gift was an email I received from a student after his graduation from my class.  He wrote it in the fall of his ninth-grade year, and it is an update about his school.  He says: “I really miss u so much…but there is a teacher that looks like u…not phisicly but the way she acts…she remind me of u…she is like u” (J. Reyes, personal communication, October 29, 2008).   From his very ellipses-filled description, the similarity boils down to his perception of our reactions to him: “every time I talk to her she always smile just like how u use 2” (J. Reyes, personal communication, October 29, 2008).  I did, at least some of the time, translate my caring into actions that were personally meaningful to students; such as my habit of staring hard to try and understand the undercurrents of their thinking: “and every time we say something and u figure something out u be like ‘ah haa’” (J. Reyes, personal communication, October 29, 2008). Gifts such as these help me remember that I actually was able to project my personality in a way that was legible to the children.  To them, the threads of human connection and care tied my disconnected teachings and lesson plans and gajillion moment-by-moment interactions together. As I reassess the disparity between my harsh self-assessments and the kids’ memories of me, I am reminded of some words in Susan Ohanian’s Barbara Biber lecture, which she borrowed from Emerson and applied to her own fumbling efforts as a new teacher: “character teaches above our wills” (personal communication, September 7, 2010).