Learning to Teach
Hi! Rather than continue struggling to find the perfect first words to publish on my new blog, I'll get straight to the point: welcome! Here's why I'm starting this blog:
I am a teacher. Specifically, a middle school music teacher at a public charter school, although I've also taught private music lessons, university music lessons, and English as a Second Language to adults. As no schoolteacher will be surprised to hear, my first year in K-12 teaching might as well have been my first year teaching out of college; no amount of experience or training prepared me for the challenge. No conversation with veteran teachers managed to convince me that it could very well be the worst year of my life. The life of a first year teacher, it's well documented, is perhaps the truest definition of hell; I can't remember a more difficult time in my career, perhaps in my life, than my first year teaching middle school.
Teachers, resilient creatures they are, mostly get through their first year and carry the experiences into their second, and they grow and improve. But growing and improving, any good teacher will tell you, is a lifelong process. It can be difficult to grow and improve, especially if best practices or the focus of the educational zeitgeist shift away from what we're used to. Certainly, in October 2020, distance learning is throwing us for a loop, even the most seasoned teachers have very few experiences to look back on that may have prepared them for this.
But that's not unique to 2020. There's not an endpoint to learning and growing and improving, and, pandemic or not, we should always be looking for ways to revolutionize, innovate, and improve our teaching. Every student we teach, every class we manage, every paper we grade, every administrator we work with, is different, and we bring our past experiences to bear as we try to be the best teacher we can, in every situation. This is very, very hard.
My first year teaching left me with so many unresolved questions, and my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th years gave me experiences that started to answer them. Professional development and training in my first year filled my head (and my notebook) with buzz words like "differentiation" and "relationships" that teachers are so used to hearing, but it wasn't until my 4th year that I had even an inkling of what I could do as a teacher to turn these buzz words into actual practice.
Still, a month or so into my 5th year teaching K-12, the year I had originally believed would cement my legitimacy as a teacher, I still feel like I have more questions than answers. I still worry that much of what happens in schools actually works at cross-purposes to teachers' and administrators' intentions for learning, most of which are noble. I still wonder why students' legitimate desire to learn (and they all want to succeed) are sacrificed at the altar of classroom compliance. I still question whether we're right to prioritize content without asking why our students aren't seeing themselves as scholars, and I don't believe that any amount of well-taught content can cram the identity or self-concept of a scholar into a student's brain. I still struggle with the best way to communicate with parents, who are ever-appreciative to receive updates from me on their kids' learning, but don't want (nor should I expect them) to learn the complex, nuanced systems I employ to help their kids succeed in my class. While my first four years have taught me a lot, and I've (mostly) overcome the imposter syndrome and the first-year feeling that I'm a complete failure in the classroom, I still don't feel like I, or anyone I've asked, has all the answers.
This blog represents and chronicles my adventure learning to teach as I continue to address these uncertainties, as I acquire new experiences, develop new opinions, learn to transform the buzzwords into real teaching practice, and continue to grow and uncover new questions. The idea to write about learning to teach came to me in my first year, as I wished I had someone to demystify and help me tackle the incredibly hard work of teaching, and I hope that this blog may guide younger teachers as they rise to the challenge. But this blog isn't only for new teachers - my hope is that my experiences reflect yours, regardless what stage of your teaching career you've reached, and that through our shared experiences we can catch a glimpse into what really matters in the classroom, and perhaps shed some light on what new teachers (all teachers) should be doing to ease the burden of learning to teach.
Listen to this post as an audio podcast: