Month: November 2024

“Rule 3: General Duties of a Teacher: Pull Everything Out of Your Students”

November 9, 2024 / JennyDetroit / 0 Comments

It’s not that I don’t try. I just can’t achieve it.

I can’t pull everything out of my students. I can sometimes barely pull anything out of my students.

This is one of the anxieties I have always had about myself as a teacher: that I’m rubbish. I don’t think I’m a complacent or “going-through-the-motions” type, but despite my attempts, my enthusiasms, my professional development, I can’t fulfill Rule 3. I simply don’t know how or don’t have the ability.

I’ve been putting off writing about this Rule because doing so would mean admitting failure. (Perhaps I should glance down at Rule 6 for some perspective…)

If I wondered what Rule 2 means, I really struggle to understand what it takes to achieve Rule 3. How does one “pull”? Is it my style of teaching? Is it the work I assign? Is it the reading list, the pedagogy, the grading system, the relationships I try to form? What is it that pulls everything out?

It sounds coercive. It’s not “coaxing everything out,” it’s not “inviting everything out,” and it’s not just “some things,” it’s EVERYTHING. How does one person pull anything out of another person let alone everything?

I used to do this thing called “ungrading” or a grades-less classroom. I couldn’t completely abandon grades because our school still uses a GPA system and no other teachers joined me in the grades-less revolution, so at the end of the term, students still got grades. But we made the grades a collaborative thing where I sat down with each student and we talked about the work they did for the term, we looked over their portfolios, and they wrote reflections describing what they learned and what they could have done better.

When this system worked–when the students bought into it–it worked great. But most students did not buy into it. They saw it simply as a way to get an easy A. Sure, they did the work, but they still did the work as a means to an end, as a way to get a good grade. I didn’t pull anything new out of these students. And frankly, I don’t blame them for it. Why should they approach their education as anything other than a series of hoops to jump through to get a grade and move on to the next hoop-jumping season and the next grade and so on, until they get a job, I guess. We MADE this system for them, so we shouldn’t be surprised when they do their best to succeed in it.

So inviting students to learn for learning sake didn’t work, at least not when I tried it. Again, maybe that’s on me. I have anxiety about my ineffectual teaching skills. Maybe I just didn’t do a good job. Again, not able to “pull everything out.”

But when I went back to a traditional grading approach, I still couldn’t follow Rule 3. I still had no clue how to do this pulling and have it work. I could pull for them to work hard for good grades, but that didn’t feel like “pulling everything out.” That simply felt like getting them to go through the motions to achieve the external outcome they wanted.

I can pull hard work from the students, and maybe that’s enough–maybe my “hard” grading pushes them to strive for more–but it doesn’t feel like enough. I feel like there’s some secret here that I don’t understand, some qualities I don’t possess. I try to be enthusiastic. I absolutely love reading, writing, and communicating, and I believe these things are worth doing for their own sake; they make us more fully human. I try to communicate this love to my students. Is that what it means to “pull everything out”?

I give them space and opportunities to write and discover and read cool stuff. Is that what it means to “pull everything out”?

And even though I don’t do the “ungrading” thing anymore, I still try to impart a philosophy that says, “Grades aren’t the be-all, end-all. Learning and growth are the lasting rewards.” Is this “pulling everything out”?

I struggle with this Rule because I have no way to measure it. I have my efforts; I know what I’m trying to do. But do I do it? That’s what I don’t know. And that’s why I’ve struggled to write about Rule 3.

Perhaps the struggle to achieve the Rule is what fulfills the Rule. Perhaps this hope is the real duty of the teacher.

Caesar’s Triumph

November 6, 2024 / JennyDetroit / 0 Comments

We started watching Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar today in my AP Lang class.

I didn’t feel like teaching. Thinking about the play, the class, being around other people, all of it made me sick. I wanted to crawl into my Bandcamp app and listen to midwestern alternative rock for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to teach. Not today. Not today of all days, and definitely not this play with all that it is.

But as the opening scene started–Act 1, Scene 1– and “Oh Caesar, Caesar! Caesar, Caesar, Caesar!” and the drumbeat and the triumph of the plebes started, I was struck in a way I did not expect.

I always knew art could be a balm. It could be an escape.

But this was different. It was clarity. A startling truth, and with that truth some measure of consolation.

We are in a cycle. This pattern–the pattern of human behavior, of politics, of leadership, of self-interest, of anxiety, of helplessness, of being seen, of needing to be seen, of finding champions who will mirror your desires back to you, of allegiances that shift like quicksilver, of worry, of glories long-past, of the need for some cash, of the need for some scapegoats–all of it is a wheel, turning and turning, each spoke of the circle destined to repeat.

I cannot hate the plebes (of which I am one and not one all at once), as I cannot condone the condescension of the patricians, even if my head agrees. Once we get to Caesar’s triumph into Rome, it’s too late. Brutus never had a choice. Conspire, don’t conspire. None of it mattered. Rome was going to fall to Caesarism no matter what.

The play is incredibly dark, but not untrue. Watching that opening, as the tribunes chastise the plebes, as the plebes want nothing so much as a holiday, as we await the ominous fate of Flavius and Marullus (“they are put to silence”), we know where the train is headed and that it can’t be stopped. Once the triumph starts, the play is on its way. It can only end with Octavian’s raised fist and “this happy day.”

I don’t know why, but watching it unfold on the screen–a dramatization of the pattern we simply cannot escape–was strangely comforting. There are artists, writers, poets who have seen what we have seen and they have responded to it–not with despair, but with creation. Not much can be done, in the immediate, but art can be done, and it can last, and generations hence shall act this lofty scene “in states unborn and accents yet unknown!” and that’s more than a comfort.

It’s a call, a voice out of time, a reminder that poetry still stirs the heart. That theater and performance and art and imagination are not dead. They are part of the cycle too, and they are destined to keep turning.