The Conflicted Mess of Real Learning

illustrated by Evan D., age 10

I’ve been a teacher longer than I have been an adult. It’s true, though the meaning of that word has shifted for me many times.

I started assistant teaching as a high school senior, interning half-days in my hometown of Bakersfield, CA. I worked in two kindergarten classrooms that year, each one settled into “rough” neighborhoods on opposite sides of town. I’m reticent to elaborate on the poverty and under-resourced nature of these communities for fear of encouraging the Dangerous Minds school of teaching. Narcissistic do-gooding is, perhaps, behind trying to garner the affection of children, the most asinine reason for getting into education (more on that at a different time). What I will say is that although I did see children going with just barely what they needed to survive, the true shock was that the teaching practices used in these schools emphasized scarcity. The reality of teaching public kindergarten in 2004 rendered these teachers unable to respond to the children as full of complex people with vast — if constricted — potential. Their main vantage point was continued deficit: Only the relentless testing of the No Child Left Behind era. The many things the children did not have. Did not know. The lack of time to teach. A spiral headed down toward a mythologized lack of “desire” to learn.

There was an extra layer of lack in the teacher’s lives, too, as they struggled with limited pay and resources for their own self-actualization. I liked the teachers tremendously, and I appreciated them allowing me into the traditional inner sanctum of teaching life, their classroom, but there were times their frustration made them callous, even mean, in the face of so much standardized bleakness. I remember vividly as one teacher called to another across the classroom, spelling out her frustration, “T-E-G-A-N is being a real B-R-A-T today,” the irony being this was probably the most relevant spelling lesson given all year. These were five and six-year-old children who should have recognized the letters of their name, yet the teachers (and system) were bottomed out to the point where they hardly expected anything of these children beyond the quiet compliance they understood as “good behavior.”

As the intern, I was often tasked with cutting out all the construction paper shapes the children would glue together in tandem for the purpose of, you know, crafts. It took me hours to die-cut perfect hearts and jack-o-lanterns for a class of 30 children. To this day, there are still millions to be made in the industry of artless school crafts meant to be child/foolproof. What a waste of precious resources of time and labor for the sake of making something the children couldn’t mess up. I wondered, wouldn’t it be better to let the children cut their own construction paper strips? We might not get a perfectly triangular penguin nose befitting the importance of the holiday season, but like, wouldn’t the kids at least learn to use scissors? Granted, I was seventeen, and seventeen-year-olds love to know better than adults by default, but I began to develop something more than adolescent self-righteousness, I started to feel the conviction that these children deserved at least as much respect as we “grown-ups” were paying the annual paper leprechauns.

By May, I was a self-convinced expert on applied curriculum and inspired by the teacher’s own spelling skills, I launched an impassioned campaign to teach the children phonics by the end of the school year. I created a series of lessons designed to systematically drill the children on letter sounds as a group by relying on my goddess-given gift of making children think I am charismatic. Though charisma is not a reliable foundation for meaningful teaching practice, it can be a lucky charm. I learned to build rapport with a group and saw that a 30-minute break in routine could wake the children and me up. Actual fun was had, likely in part because I was an intern with basically zero accountability for the learning. Though I couldn’t have articulated it exactly at the time, actual learning was had, too. Because there was no undue pressure for myself or the children to perform, unlike all the many standardized tests plaguing the class that year, each of us developed a more positive association with letters and school by virtue of our shared, joyful experience. We learned to live a little closer together as we engaged in the risky business of learning at the same time.

I ultimately “failed,” of course, because rote memorization is the least effective way to learn, charisma or no. I didn’t even get through the whole alphabet, but it was affirming that the teachers made space for me in their classroom. Maybe they were tired and thought, “Okay, let this little B take the wheel for a minute” (and now that I’ve been a teacher for a long time, I get that), but I suddenly saw those teachers in a new light. As overwrought as they were, they still opened a space for us all to grow in unstandardized ways. No longer confined to the die-cut room, I saw the teachers for what they really were: dimensional people doing their best for children within the system and attitudes they’d also been raised in. We were all from Bakersfield, after all. It takes courage and trust to hand over the reins of a classroom, especially one in such socio-economic and political precarity. That little slice of belief in me was just what I needed to confirm my belief in the children. We didn’t learn phonics, but we learned to find exhilaration in the attempt.

June came. The children and I graduated to the next levels of our education, and as passionate as I felt about the particular children and educators I’d worked with that year, my culminating sentiment was, “Glad I’m not a real teacher, dudes. Peace out!” Fifteen years later... I still feel that way. The difference now is that I know this Real Teacher idea is an illusion of power designed to put distance between teaching and learning, knowing and finding out, child and adult, us and them. That same space we put between teaching and learning is the place where callousness forms because it is too painful to fail in isolation. But meaningful education is about learning to fail and fail and fail again while maintaining curiosity and resourcefulness about the world around you. Real learning happens in the space we inhabit together, just like me, the children, and my not-terminally-burned-out mentors. That place is a conflicted mess with few perfect penguins but a lot of silver linings.