January and February are difficult months for teachers. Winter break recedes into memory with unseemly haste, as if it were trying to get away from you. The days off pulsed with leisure, but they didn’t refill your cup. Arguably the break made things worse: by reminding you life isn’t always this way. The new semester is here, with new courses, new units; it drags you along at a breathless gallop, or maybe it’s riding you.
By January, I have got through enough of my year-long classes to have become dissatisfied with certain aspects of my teaching, planning, and course design. I see clearly where the rotten spots are, notice every flaw I’ve engineered in. I feel impatient to start again. By January, I have ideas about how I will do it differently next time, or at least I have the notion that, given a little time and space, I will access these ideas. The sense of what’s wrong and what could be better is close around me (it will be harder to grasp when summer comes, when I actually have time to plan). I want nothing more now than to burrow deep into my cave and devise a better way. But that can’t be. It’s January, the pace is frantic, and I simply have to keep teaching these classes, to go along as I have been.
Ninth grade honors English weighs on me especially, this winter. Being honest, I believe that teaching ninth grade English may be one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I yearn to get it right, to do it well. The challenge itself also fascinates me. It fascinates me that it feels so freaking hard.
I’m sure every subject has its difficulties. I’m not discounting them. But I’ve been thinking a lot about the weirdnesses of teaching high school English, in particular.
English is both vast and poorly defined.
English is too big. It can’t be taught. It is too many things to too many people. English is the skill of reading, and it’s the content of the texts themselves. English is the skill of writing, and of critical thinking and rhetoric. It’s constructing an argument using a text, which sure feels like something everyone should be able to do, but which turns out to be tantamount to rubbing your stomach while patting your head and also riding a unicycle, as far as most ninth-grade students are concerned. English is grammar and mechanics and syntax. It’s formatting a paper properly, a topic I believe teachers emphasize because it’s something that even the least talented student can master, a rare objective and quantifiable goal in this endless steppe of subjectivity and intellectual je ne sais quoi. English is also history and sociology and current events: it’s casually assumed that the texts taught in high school classrooms are encountered not only as literature, but also as a way of teaching students about other times and places and cultures, instilling empathy and sensitivity. So while we are attempting to rub our stomachs and pat our heads on this unicycle ride, we’re also learning—not about literary genres, but by using the books as though they something like documentary films. It’s assumed that English class, like history, will tackle the thorniest issues our society has to offer: race and gender, abuse, poverty, every type of identity politics. English is also ethics and psychotherapy. It’s creative self-expression. It’s writing a poem or short story that makes your teacher smile a genuine smile at your personhood and then, the next month, writing a crummy analytical essay that makes her want to die. English is diagramming a sentence and it’s gushing about how Shakespeare had tons of insight into the human condition. In college, there are survey courses. But in high school, you don’t spend a year on 19th Century British and a year on Restoration Drama and a year on The Postmodern Novel. You’re just working the basics. But there are so many basics! They’re all worthwhile, but you’re supposed to do everything and it’s all too easy to end up with a bunch of confetti strewn meaninglessly on the floor.
English is the same every year.
One problem is that all of these “English skills”—reading, writing, knowing about literary devices—are the kinds of skills that a person develops over a span of many years. English is less a body of knowledge than the mastery of activities that even elementary school children already know. Doing English means refining those skills, and refining them some more. As a result, there’s a kind of blobbiness about English from year to year, a sense that it can always be the same damn thing. So you don’t get the crisp good feeling of advancing, say, from World History into US History. (Even though history skills are basically the same old humanities skills that we practice in English, history has the added dignity and purpose that comes from discrete and important subject matter. In order to be an educated person, you need to know the basic facts about the founding of our republic, in a way that you simply don’t need to know the plot-line of Wuthering Heights.1) When you’re in English, it’s always just English. You’re talking about symbolism . . . again. You’re learning about MLA style . . . again. You’re at the mercy of the tastes and whims of your teacher, completely. There’s no window, no air coming into this room. I will write about my own high school English experience another time, but I think this repetition and non-definition factor is one reason why, as much as I did enjoy English in high school, I did not consider it my favorite class.
On top of everything else, it’s art.
Everyone knows that a studio art class is supposed to be fun, an outlet, not that serious. Everyone knows that history or math are core classes: it’s nice if you “enjoy” them, but they aren’t meant to be a pleasure cruise; you’re there for some serious learning, and to get to the next level. English, I submit, sits uneasily between studio art and one of your hardcore intellectual pursuits. I’m sure that teachers in every discipline yearn for some students to fall in love with the subject matter, to see the beauty in a well-wrought proof or a juicy primary source. But only in English does love feel like part of the basic mandate. Implicitly and explicitly, we ask that our students fall in love with the stories (and the habit of reading itslf), that they react emotionally. To succeed completely, we need the students not only to get it, but to appreciate it. I’m just saying it’s a high bar. It also creates a bit of a conflicting impulse. If I could relax into the knowledge that my course was tantamount to an art class, I would teach it differently. If my overarching goal were to make students enjoy reading and writing, I would select different books. I’d run the class more like a book club, with lots of softball discussion and personal reflective-type writing. Actually, that might be a really great class. But it would take a tremendous act of will to cut off the idea that I ought to be doing Serious Academics, teaching critical thinking and the five-paragraph essay and all the waypoints of suffering required to produce one. I do happen to think that critical thinking, correct writing, and clear expression are enormously important, if devilishly hard to teach. I don’t know: the idea that they love it and the idea that they Learn Something. It would be nice to be able to let one or the other go. Inevitably, you try to play both sides. But it can feel subtractive.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about what my bottom line is as a teacher. The last two and a half years have made me so much better at the craft of teaching. What I think is that the next hurdle—and kind of a pleasant hurdle, really—may be to define some kind of personal teaching credo. Given the sheer size of the bailiwick of English, I have no choice but to pick what to emphasize and how. I’m ready to home in on what kind of teacher I am and am not; what I really care about and want my students to learn, and how I can jettison some of the other stuff so as to make this possible. Relatedly, I need to decide what success means to me. How will I know when I’m doing a good enough job? What will I look to? I see now that this is critically important, and how not having a personal benchmark could make a teacher insane. It has to be the right kind of benchmark too: appropriately meaningful yet not perfectionistic. I can’t have my bottom line be “have every student leave my class able to write a lucid and persuasive five-paragraph essay that’s intellectually insightful and syntactically correct” because that is never going to happen, and expecting to achieve it would set me up for a lifetime of feeling like a failure. But not knowing or not caring what I’m looking for would also be corrosive.
So: What is it? How hard do I push, and where? What’s rigor for me? What’s the specific and achievable goal by which I’ll know that I’ve done what I wanted for the ninth grade? Who is this Ms. Sharpe anyway, and what are things like in her classroom? This is about confidence, and about coming home to who I am as a teacher, now that I’ve tried all kinds of different things in order to address myself to the differences of teaching high school vs. college. You can’t be anything if you’re trying to be everything to everybody.
Obviously I have ideas already about the answers to these questions. But my task for the coming year is to pull them together, trust in them, and translate them into my practice.
Emerging from work today around 5:15, I remembered that I had chosen to walk to school this morning, and would therefore be walking home. It was warm out for February, almost balmy. Halfway down the path to the street I looked up and spied a man and a woman and a girl, ambling along. The girl looked familiar; the man looked fatherly, then grandfatherly, then fatherly again. The woman had a long, neat shock of blond hair. It was my daughter, her dad, and his girlfriend. I turned around.
Being “in the moment” has a lot of cachet. But I would like to aver that “the moment” can be painful, and confusing too. One moment can take a lot of moments to weigh and understand. My therapist thinks it’s important to feel pain because (I extrapolate her words) if you don’t, it will stay on you as a sort of psychic dulling residue; it will sap and shut down your whole system. Feel the pain, she says, and trust that it will drain away. I’ve been thinking about this lately, and I admit that faith in anything has not come easily to me; that feelings shock and overwhelm, and that letting them shake me like a palm tree in a hurricane is not my idea of a safe time or a good time. I tend to trust her, though, and I am trying to get better at that skill: to feel the burn, really feel it, without mistaking the burn for life itself.
In fact, even though your class is most likely reading and teaching books that are read and taught in thousands of other high schools, the one thing it seems you’re not expected to do as a teacher is familiarize your students with a canon; English is everything except for a shared body of knowledge in the form of particular stories and texts. I understand the long-running debate over the very idea of a canon. I understand the critiques. But I note that (halfway) doing away with a canon has left English feeling a bit unstable, in flux, undefined. And now that computers can write and reading is an increasingly optional/niche activity, I wonder which way the winds of the discipline are going to blow.
Thank you for sharing all this. Your students are fortunate to have such a thoughtful and articulate teacher! I'm guessing some of these points will be things to wrestle with for as long as you teach.