My younger daughter, who wants to be a teacher, sent an email to several of her former teachers (and me) asking how we as teachers try to treat our classes. Her questions are in italics below, my responses in plain font. The reflection was valuable and interesting; I would encourage anyone who reads this to do the exercise as well. Also, if you want to give feedback about my responses, that’s cool too.
Everyone has their favorite teacher/professor… think about yours for a few minutes (yes, think back to your days as a student). What is it about that individual that made them your favorite?
Passionate about their subject; knowledgeable about it; interested in me as a person and not just what I knew in their subject; wanted me to be successful in the subject and believed I could be; good sense of humor; treated me as a fellow human being who just happened to be younger rather than as someone inferior.
What type of relationship did they have with their students? How comfortable were they with their students? On the line drawn between teacher and friend, where did that teacher draw the line?
See above. On the teacher-friend line, I would say a “friendly teacher” in class and a friend outside of class. We both knew (better than people do today, perhaps) that there was a line between the two that neither should cross in school.
How effective was it in regards to how they handle their classroom (did the familiarity, if it exists, help or hinder the management of the classroom, and how)?
It helped because students knew there was a line and rarely crossed it. The classroom was a comfortable environment, which made class more enjoyable and encouraged intellectual risk-taking and creativity.
In general, do you think it’s better for educators to focus on helping students grow as individuals? Or should the focus remain on the academic growth of the student(s)/school? If you think it should be somewhere in between, please explain why and where in the continuum it should ideally fall.
Both. In the short term (ie, “this year”), the academic growth of high-schoolers is very important (to the students more than to me, but still…) because of college-admissions pressure (at least in the kind of school where I teach). In the long term (even intermediate–ie, two years down the line) the growing-as-people is much more important because unless they use your subject matter soon after they take your course, the content becomes irrelevant, but the skills they learn about learning, what they learn about values and personal relationships, are very important. As a boss, they will probably act somewhat as their teachers treated them (just as most teachers, unless they make deliberate efforts to the contrary, will tend to teach as they were taught).
Also, does this or should this differ depending on what level of schooling you’re discussing? How so?
Probably, in the sense that the specific life- or academic- lessons differ significantly depending on level of schooling, but not in principle, no. Kindergarteners need to learn how to stand in line and not to hit each other just because they’re momentarily annoyed as well as how to read, for instance…
In your classroom, how do you handle the task of forming meaningful relationships with students while still maintaining a role of authority? How does defining the line of teacher/friend play into this? What is your goal when you enter a classroom full of new students, none of whom you have a relationship with?
I start, I am sure, as an authority figure, particularly at my age. I try, however, to treat students as I would want to be treated when I’m in a student-mode: for instance, in the audience in a workshop. I want to be treated as a peer in the human sense and only inferior in terms of knowledge or skill in the specific class/topic at hand: someone who is an interesting, intelligent person who wants to learn more about the topic at hand and is willing to work to do so. That’s how I treat my students–or at least, how I try to.
Perhaps as a function of my age, I find there’s not much problem with the teacher/friend line any more. Indeed, there rarely has been. When students cross lines with me, it’s not normally because of a teacher-friend ambiguity but because we don’t share the same values–as in, for instance, that it’s wrong to steal someone else’s cake just because you want it and it’s there.
My goal in a new class is for them to leave the class better people than they came in (in terms of knowing more about themselves–how they learn, how to learn how to learn, how disciplined they are and how to incorporate their self-knowledge in their work, what they like and don’t like and why, why and how reflection is valuable–and in knowing more about life and how it works, whether in more external things or interpersonal relationships) and for them to achieve as much discipline-specific success as they are willing to work to achieve (which, as I point out, may be less than they’d like to have if they could simply magically acquire it without effort).
