Teaching Hope: Anticipation

For much of this chapter, I found it hard to ignore those two little voices that are my cynicism and my inexperience as a teacher. That said, I did find a few of the passages enlightening, mostly because I felt like the experiences some of the first-day teachers were having sounded like experiences I might end up seeing when I start teaching. Most of the first-day experiences I identified with for this reason were usually the ones centered on getting the attention of the students and giving them some idea of what kind of a teacher they are going to have. That said, I didn't agree with a lot of the actions of the teachers, a few were:

The man who told his students they had three birthdays, the man who created a "teachable moment" by allowing his classroom to verbally berate one of his students for the rest of class, and the teacher who, instead of allowing his lessons to accommodate "Tommy" and the kid's obvious interest in the map on the wall of the classroom, forced him into academic submission by traveling to his house and, among other things, coercing Tommy's grandma to help rearrange his bedroom.

I feel like I am not reading the same stories that these teachers want me to read, but when they are all placed next to each other, their remarkable situational similarities all end up becoming one easily-defined characteristic, which takes a back seat to the actions and personalities of the individual teachers. So, while I noticed that there were some testimonies that I was not quite on board with, there were a number of teachers who seemed to have a real ability to think on their feet, as well as a desire to help students become individuals. The teacher who created the cultural history research project comes to mind, and I hope that there will be more entries that showcase the kind of forethought and execution that he (or she) did. I guess that means that while I am optimistic about what I could learn from this book, I know that there will probably be a lot of teachers out of the 20 that I will have a hard time sympathizing with.