Today in the United States, “culture” is said to be divided into two warring religious and secular sects. Even as the concept of “family” becomes the crux of the divide, an increasingly large percentage of parents are raising their children without religion.

And as alien a concept as the Death of God might be to religious families, the labyrinth of religious ritual is becoming equally as foreign and repugnant to the new secular generations.

So, in the interest of bringing greater understanding to both sides, it seems necessary that secular thinkers ask the question: What do we lose when we lose religion?

Having grown up Catholic, though I am often skeptical of the Church, I am still grateful for the exposure to a faith tradition. By providing a certain ritualistic framework, my upbringing developed in me a mode of introspective thinking that is not always comfortable for those raised in a secular environment.

The Catholic ritual of reconciliation, or confession, in particular, encourages this mode. This ritual consists of a parishioner goes into a room where a priest sits and confesses to sins as mundane as nagging or teasing one’s sister (my childhood go-to) or as horrific as murder.

Most people are familiar with this practice through its depiction in movies, but movies universally leave out a step: The examination of conscious, which takes place before the confession and is more or less a moral checklist that the parishioner reflects upon.

Where I feel friction is with the content of the moral checklist; I find it difficult to swallow the dichotomous and arbitrary labeling of certain actions and thoughts as sin. But whether or not one agrees with the theology, it cannot be said that there is no value in learning to take concentrated, intentional time to examine one’s being in the world.

To this point, while on a JVC retreat this past January, I became familiar with the Jesuit prayer practice of Daily Examens. Though somewhat similar to the examination of conscious, the Jesuit concept differs slightly in that it is more an examination of consciousness.

It is not purely moralistic, and it does not prescribe proper actions. It merely invites one to go over the day and the habits, thoughts, feelings and interactions that surfaced and were. In its final step, it also prompts one to dwell on the next day, to prepare for the possibilities there.

Similar to this idea, the Bardo Thodal, or the Tibetan Book of the Dead, calls prayer smon-lam, which literally translates to ‘wish-path,’ and says this:

“It is not a request to an external deity, but a method of purifying and directing the mind. It acts as inspiration by arousing the mind’s inherent desire for good, which attracts the fulfillment of its aim.”

Though this and the Examens may be dismissed by some because of their religious language, how does one achieve goals other than by intentionally identifying one’s own desires? What could be more useful and practical than questioning oneself on a daily basis about one’s own progress towards those desires?

Of course, in a religious context, one’s own desires should be aligned with the desires of the Church. But this habit of reflection, sometimes known as prayer, might possibly be equally useful to the millions of secular people who desire to live in a right relationship with the environment, with the underprivileged, and with their own friends and families.

The teacher, taught

November 6, 2012

Teaching

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The learning curve of a teacher is steep and treacherous. Students are hyper-aware of every mistake, every inconsistency, and every sign of weakness.

They know a good teacher when they see one, and they know a green one. They have, after all, been observing teachers for years by the time they enter your classroom.

Students will give immediate and legitimate feedback —whether it be complaints or poor test-scores— and if a teacher cannot adjust, is either incapable of perceiving that feedback or adverse to then responding to it, they should not be in the classroom.

And honestly, after enough negative feedback, they won’t want to be.

Therefore, a new teacher’s job is to adjust every day, because inevitably, they are making many, many mistakes.

I happen to be a non-native Spanish speaker teaching native Spanish speakers how to produce and comprehend their own language, so my students are often able to call me out on pronunciation or vocab errors. They love this, and because I still have something to teach them about culture and history and literature and grammar, I don’t mind it either.

But the following mistakes impede learning of any kind. They fall into two categories: those that a new teacher can be taught to avoid ahead of time, and those that they will learn to respond to through experience.

Teachable

Backwards design
Make the test first, know exactly what you want them to know, establish the learning objective, and then teach it. My first unit was less than successful because neither I nor my students knew what I wanted them to know.

Procedural structure
It is ridiculous how much class time one can waste on small things like turning in assignments, starting class, and writing down homework. To my surprise, I was told that teachers actually plan these seemingly insignificant activities to minimize wasted time.

For example, for the first month, my class wasted 5 minutes asking questions about the homework, and I often answered the same question three times.

Now, I have their homework assignment on the projector when they walk in the door and give them 3 minutes to write it down in their planner. If they don’t finish in three minutes, they can ask me or a friend after class. This way, we start class immediately, they know what we’ll be learning about that day, and they ask fewer questions.

Not so teachable

Pacing
There is no way to know how long an activity will take before actually bringing it before a class. Even then, each group of students will react to an activity in a different manner. Seemingly, mastery of pacing only comes with experience, and until then, have back-pocket activities, just in case.

Expectations
I came into this year having no understanding of what middle school boys are capable of. There’s a balance between expecting too much and expecting the best from students. Having just come off of college, I am still adjusting to this, but I’d rather expect too much than underestimate or bore my students. Besides, recent research is saying to scrap the textbook and go for more scholarly texts, anyway.

So, there are certainly qualities of good teaching that can and should be taught thoroughly, but also some that only come with time and real experience. The trick is to have both at the same time.

In pursuit of the vote

October 30, 2012

Community, History, Social Justice

An educator is born

September 24, 2012

Media, Social Justice, Teaching, Uncategorized

36 Comments

Growing up, I never wanted to be a teacher. I thought it was out of the question for me, an impatient introvert with questionable planning and time-management skills. Teachers are born, are they not? Some people are just naturals.

My senior year of college, I realized that, natural or not, I wanted to be a teacher. I wanted that environment of constant, intentional learning, and I wanted to share the ideas I loved with others.

Yet, I was also certain that were I to find that I was not a natural, I would look for another career. I’ve had enough teachers who shouldn’t have been in a classroom, and I have too much respect for education to be one of them.

My personal fears have been reinforced by the rhetoric surrounding education and the recent slew of teacher’s strikes, especially in Chicago. In an interesting ideological switch, liberal politicians and media have mostly villainized teacher’s unions, calling them reactionary and resistant to any critique that blames them for our educational woes.

Teachers, it seems, are the problem. For the sake of simplification, let’s say that this is so, that the blame lies only a little with overpopulated classrooms, lack of resources, and unstable family structures.* If that’s so, then teachers must also be the solution.

How, then, do you teach teachers how to teach? The message, from both liberals and conservatives, teachers and administrators, is decidedly mixed.

Recent research shows that teachers with MAs deliver no better results than those with a BA. This dovetails with what I’ve heard about education programs. Courses that teach teachers how to teach are, by and large, a complete waste of time. It’s about classroom experience more than anything else.

Yet, I’ve had teachers who had been in classrooms for 20 years, teaching next to nothing for all 20 of them. And unions are criticized precisely for protecting tenured teachers.

And then there are programs like Teach for America, frequently hand-picking smart, motivated college graduates with absolutely no experience, providing very little instruction, and throwing them into a classroom to sink or swim. There, the swimmers tend to produce higher than average results.

So, experience means nothing, but neither can good teaching be taught, supporting the idea that teachers are born, not made. That’s the rhetoric. And it’s a rhetoric that, after only a month of teaching at Nativity, I no longer believe.

But more on that later.

*If anything, simplification is the problem. Even the best, most natural teacher cannot fill the place a parent fills, cannot give individual attention to 40 students, cannot teach students how to succeed in a technology-driven world without computers. It’s easier to place the blame on the “other” than imagine a total cultural and systemic restructuring that would affect us all.

Power trip

September 13, 2012

Literature, Social Justice, Teaching

1 Comment

In history, literature, and myth, to know the true name of one’s opponent is to have some power over them.

In the German fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin, the heroine can only free herself from her promise to the magical being by discovering his name. In Mark 1:21-28, a possessed man calls Jesus “the holy one of God” not to acknowledge Jesus’ position, but to gain power over him. Even Frodo Baggins gains some power and influence over Gollum by happening upon his real name, Smeagol.

In the classroom, the same theory applies.

In Tattoos on the Heart (an excellent read, by the way, on the dynamics of gang culture), Greg Boyle remembers that on his first day in a low-income school, a veteran teacher told him that his first and most important job was to learn names.

This does two things. First, it gives you the power of the demerit. A kid who discovers that you don’t know his name also realizes that you won’t know who’s name to put on a detention slip. No name, no consequence.

But it does something much more important as well. We all like to hear our names spoken by people we love or trust because our name is the one thing that symbolizes our entire being and identity. Using a student’s name signals to that student that they are worth being known. That’s true power.

There are 80 students in my school, and the teachers here know every one of their names, and I’m getting there.

Of course, when there are three sets of twins in the 6th grade, this all gets a bit more complicated.

Over troubled water

September 7, 2012

JVC, Social Justice, Teaching

—Kimberly Hursh

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Examination of consciousness

The teacher, taught

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