The Best Clark Kent That I Can Be

I am frequently asked, “So, how is teaching?”
I usually respond with, “Err…”

It’s not that I am uncertain about what I am doing and how I feel about it. It’s just that I would hesitate to call it “teaching.”

I teach 9 classes of 40-60 students, who I see for 90 minutes once a week. That comes out to 360 – 540 students, once a week. On top of that, I am teaching ‘conversation.’ Conversation is an interesting subject, and I think is actually closer to an art class than, say, history or math. I’m not speaking in any sort of qualitative measure, but in methodology, but in purpose. I am not so much imparting knowledge as I am developing (1) a skill. Unlike art, though, I have the only frame for what sounds right, and therefore must be personally involved in everything that happens in class. Doing the rough math, in 90 minutes I could hear each person speak for between a minute and a half and two minutes and fifteen seconds. Awesome.

There are days when the lesson plans go well, the students are engaged, they are asking good questions, and I get to hear some interesting opinions. Even on those days, though, am I actually teaching anything? Is anyone getting more conversant? How would I even know?

All of the real teachers out there will probably tell me how foolhardy this is, but I’ve come to realize that I teach out of pure force of personality. I am more a conductor than a professor, more a performer than educator. I project so much that I can hear my over-enunciated syllables bounce back at me; I fill the room with my voice. I am learning to dig deep trenches of silence to foul the steps of a wandering mind, then my words erupt again: first clipped and precise and then lower and drawn out, the percussion to arrest their attention and the flow to bring them in. I am becoming a good orator, I will give myself that (2). But are they learning?

I see their eyes locked on me as I present the material, and then watch them lower when I ask them to respond. I call names and they respond, their words stiff like a marionette, a puppet master still struggling with the strings. Rome was not built in a day, but was it built on two sentences a week (2)? Today I paired them up and gave parameters for a short conversation, asking that there be no Chinese spoken for 3 minutes.

They lasted 45 seconds. I timed it.

I think we are all in denial. I hear the teachers talk about the interesting topics brought up by this or that student, but know that they are just the over embellished pearl stolen from a gross, hairy hog’s snout of a day. I do it myself. I make dragons out of windmills, for fear that the truth might reveal that my fight against poor conversational skills is insignificant, empty, and foolish.

In the end, the students who want to learn will make the effort to speak in class and those who don’t will hide at the corners and bow their heads in silent shame when they are called on. I can’t make them try, and forced compliance only makes them look stupid and me feel like a jerk. Maybe I’m copping out. It doesn’t feel good to accept someone else’s lethargy, but it feels right. Most of the time. I guess that if I can’t be Superman, I might as well become the best Clark Kent that I can (4).

(1) Trying to develop… sigh.
(2) We discussed William Blake’s The Poison Tree, and at the end of class I read it as I thought it should be read. I got a standing ovation, a nice little ego stroke for the end of the day.
(3) That is, if you are one of the 10% of the students who get called on…
(4) Caveat time. I can’t accept this. Maybe I’m still too young and idealistic. There is truth in it, and now that I look at it again, it’s kindof a DC comics version of the Serenity Prayer (5). But I cannot accept that we don’t have within us the capacity to become more than mortal. Some small seed that may remain dormant for a lifetime, but also that may, under the right conditions, erupt with blinding fury, transforming us and all around us. A grain of sand, dreaming the dreams of stars...
(5) God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.