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It was time for my husband to start grading papers near the end of our vacation, and he began to procrastinate. “I don’t know why it is so hard for me to just get started,” he said as he embarked on yet another project that had blissfully gone unnoticed for months.
Grading isn’t exactly teaching, but it is part of teaching. It’s evaluation, of course, but really mostly discovery of what your class is capable of doing. Students are with the concepts by themselves – not in a classroom or in peer discussion – independently creating meaning. Grading can be frustrating and disappointing but also joyous and exhilarating as you learn what students’ minds can do with a subject you love… and as you understand them as thinkers and knowers in the world of ideas with you. It is also an intensely personal feedback loop of your teaching – and of their learning (which is different, but only by degrees). No wonder it is hard to get started.
At one point he returned to the kitchen buoyant and delighted. “I just read the most lovely paper,” he stated. “It was insightful, cogent and deep!” It didn’t matter if other papers were less inspired because faith was again restored in himself as a professor and his students as full participants in the world with him.
And so goes the lives of the good teachers we know.
Parker Palmer, author of the acclaimed book The Courage to Teach, describes the practice of teaching as intensely personal. “Good teachers possess a capacity for connectedness. They are able to weave a complex web of connections among themselves, their subjects and their students so that students can learn to weave a world for themselves.” Like all good schools, at Columbus Academy so much of that work of connectedness is in the off-hours of a classroom when grading, planning and talking with students and colleagues forges teachers in their web of connections. They work most nights and on weekends imagining how the next lesson might go or riddling out why one of their seventh-graders hasn’t quite caught on to the concepts just yet. Time is an essential element of good teaching, and we work hard to preserve it.
This past week, Columbus Academy has taken off more days than other schools around us. I know it can be difficult for families to have an extended Thanksgiving break, but I am also learning that day schools around the country like ours are beginning to take the full week as well. I believe they are doing it for the same reason we are – our faculty and staff who, because they give so much of themselves throughout the year, need the distance to regain their sense of equilibrium from the fast-paced fall and be ready to devote their energies to their students.
I taught for 15 years, and it was not until I became an administrator – responsible for an entire group of faculty – that I fully understood the exceptional personal commitment good teachers make year after year to their students. They are collectors: of ideas, of projects, of readings and of tricks. They are creators: of special intimate moments, of grand celebratory moments (like the one being enjoyed by our kindergartners in the wonderful image below) and of quiet, corrective moments for each of their students. They are givers: of their time, of their emotions and of what they know, both academically and personally.
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