The Class

I am finally starting to feel comfortable as a classroom teacher again.  This past week, I was "observed" by my "teaching mentor," which helped me to develop a different perspective on things.  After his observation, he generally had complimentary remarks for me along the lines of "I could tell you knew the content you were teaching," "It's clear that you've taught before," and "It seems like you're a natural."

That last comment got me thinking.  Maybe I'm a natural-- I've always felt at relative ease in the classroom-- but you can't really say, at this point, that I succeed because "I'm a natural." I have, after all, spent four whole years in the classroom.

This made me want to do some math.  I spent four years teaching high school, where we're required to instruct for 170 days a year.  On my schedule, that equates to 3,060 hours in front of the class.  This doesn't count grading, or planning, or organizing Student Government, or even teaching summer school.  I've spent 3,060 hours in front of 20+ kids, and there are some lessons I have literally taught dozens of times.

My three credit English 101 course meets a grand total of 35 hours this semester.  This means that in order to accumulate the number of hours of experience at the college level that I have at the high school level, I'd have to teach 87 three credit course sections.  87!!  I have a double course release this year, but next year my funding package requires me to teach a "full load" of three sections, which is, incidentally, the same number of credits that tenure track professors teach at UMd.  If I continued teaching 3 sections per year, I'd have to teach for 29 years to amass the same number of hours of experience that I got in just four years in the high school classroom.

I discussed this over lunch today with my friend Danielle, who still teaches at the high school I left.  I was telling her how my mentor teacher seemed surprised at how well my students behaved and how well they performed on the quiz he told me was "pretty hard."  "I know they're good kids," I told her, "but I kind of just expected them to pay attention when I talk.  I feel like I'm missing something."  Danielle's an excellent teacher, so it shouldn't have surprised me that she solved the riddle in a single sentence, but it still did.

"It's because you're prepared," she told me.  When I asked her to elaborate, she reminded me that kids know when you're prepared, and when you're prepared, they behave and pay attention.  "You can see it in your own classroom.  On days when I haven't fully prepared the lesson, I know they're going to be chatting.  I expect it."  And she's absolutely right.  We all have the occasional class of rambunctious and/or uninterested kids that are hard to reach, but one thing remains the same: when you're prepared, they focus better.

So thanks, Northern High School, for teaching me to loathe procrastination and to value the importance of being prepared.  It's made me an exponentially better teacher, a "natural" even, and I know it's made me a better person, too.  (And thanks for bringing me Danielle, as well.)  : )

(The Class is a novel by François Bégaudeau about a teacher in France trying to teach French to African students.  It exists in a sort of postcolonial context, as I understand it, which reminds me that I must get back to my actual homework.)