In the Middle

I feel as if Nancie Atwell’s story mirrors the story of many beginning teachers. Whether or not we’ve learned about student-centered learning and teaching to exceptionalities, we all more or less enter the classroom with expectations and preconceived ideas of how we are going to run our class and what education means to us. Over the course of a year, or several years as the case may be, we come across students that test these notions and make us critique and revise our personal philosophy of education. Atwell writes, “I didn’t know how to share responsibility with my students, and I wasn’t too sure I wanted to. I liked the vantage of my big desk. I liked being creative, setting topic and pace and mode, orchestrating THE process, taking charge.” I think many of us enter the teaching profession for just these reasons; we feel we are creative and we want to spark creativity in our students, but within the confines of assignments we know and want each student to master. 

            This phenomenon doesn’t seem unusual or worrisome to me. As a new teacher, we have to grapple with our philosophy of education as well as our philosophy of classroom management at the same time. If we are not comfortable in the skin of a teacher, a useful form of control can be to demand the same assignments of all students. Homogeneity is easier to deal with. I feel that it takes time to learn that it can be okay to experiment in the classroom. Giving up control, even for the benefit of student learning, is scary. Talking frankly and openly to students is scary—and some educators are better at it than others.

            While Atwell ultimately learned that an open-ended approach to writing sparked creativity and higher levels of learning among her students, it took her time to get there. We can certainly learn from Atwell’s experiences, as I believe we should, but learning is a process, even for the teacher. It’s okay to start somewhere and end up some place completely different, even if that starting point affords little responsibility to students. Because ultimately a good teacher is someone who feels comfortable in his or her own skin, in front of his or her own class, exercising a practice that she or he has refined over years of trial and error. And Rome wasn’t built in a day.