Yesterday in my Pedagogy, Curriculum, & Assessment course, Amanda Thein, co author of Teaching To Exceed The English Language Arts Common Core State Standards: A Literacy Practices Approach For 6-12 Classrooms, skyped my class to discuss the book. When speaking about formative assessment, she said that assessment should often be a meta-cognitive activity. As a teacher, you should identify your own personal teaching goals (as well as the goals of your students) when assessing how well your learning community is learning. I found a lot of truth in this idea, and so I set out to attempt to write out my overall goals for teaching ELA in a public school classroom. My first overarching goal for teaching ELA is to empower students with their own literacy. I want my students to understand and use their voice. I want to be and help create agents of change within our society. Great idea, yeah? Except I'm a big ol' hypocrite. A phony. A sham. I dazzle you with a fancy phrase like "agents of change" and yet I do nothing to use my own voice and make changes within my own community. I have turned into exactly what I feared: I let go of my identity and isolated myself in academia. I stopped focusing on my own development as person that exists in a real world that deals with real issues. I let these abstract ideas stew in my brain and do nothing to bring them into the world with action. I have sat in circles in a college classroom and spoke about connecting community and classrooms and yet I have not even begun to take the small steps to connect with the people in my own community. I cannot be a teacher that speaks about using literacy to affect the world if I do not do that myself.
Even worse, I have let the pressures of social norms and academic standing take hold of myself and my writing. I no longer feel like I own myself, my writing, or my own education. I think I may have accidentally fallen into a system I hate, and I'm not sure how to jump out. I do not want to be a woman that shields her true self in order to maintain her position in society. I want to challenge social norms! I want to stand up and be unafraid to share ideas even if I'm wearing a Mrs. Frizzle rainbow skirt or have purple hair. Right now I feel as though I am help back by anxiety about how my less-than-conservative identity will be received. I have compromised aspects of myself in order to fit into academia. A few days ago while writing log reflections about my classroom time, I wrote about an episode in which a student questioned my authority as a teacher because of my age. When searching for solutions to this, I actually wrote down "dressing more maturely and asserting myself as an authority figure." Who am I? Why have I become like this?
I think my main issue is that my college classrooms seem so very isolated from the rest of the world. I have begun to gauge my intelligence based on my school performance (grades) rather than HOW I have used what I have learned. In fact, I am so preoccupied with my school performance that it has become my ONLY performance in the world. I am gauging success based on a product (a degree/grades) rather than the learning process and the connections I make within the world using literacy. At some point, I began boxing myself into the classroom and stopped making direct connections between the classroom and the rest of society.
I am desperately trying to find my place within the school system, but I question how I feel about the amount of teacher agency I am willing to sacrifice to fit into this system. I am in now way abandoning teaching, but I think that perhaps I need to step back and reexamine my goals and expectations of becoming a certified teacher in Louisiana. Can there be a space in a schools in which I can be myself as well as an effective teacher? I feel like I am threatening the authenticity of learning because I am censoring my personality and conforming to social norms. I see a huge disconnect between my education and my life.
I think all of this might be calling for a break from the academic life. I am contemplating taking a year to focus on experience and reexamine my reasons for attending college. If my primary motivation is to get a degree and make money and work, I'm doing this wrong.
I am losing the joy of discovering knowledge and I can't pin point where I went wrong. As I told my husband earlier, I feel as though I got onto a bus to happy passion town but somewhere along the way I got off at a stop and got on the wrong bus. I think I might be in the right area, but this bus just isn't cutting it for me. I need to find the right bus.
Edit 10/14/14
So after posting this, I had some really great conversations with other pre-service teachers, experienced teachers, and one super fantastic awesome great convo with my college adviser. I realized that a lot of the issues I am having stem from my realization that I am not making meaningful connections to the people around me. I have been stepping back and avoiding "the work" of friendships. The more experiences I have in English Amped, the more I come to understand that there is real power in physically being present with other people and sharing stories. Right now I am an not actively engaging. I don't know nor understand many of the issues members of my community face. I really have isolated myself. That being said, I am acknowledging my problems and I am finding options for growing and developing this part of myself. I'm looking into some volunteer organizations around Baton Rouge and I'm feeling optimistic about my future in education. Right now, I think that I need to trust that I am expert in my own life, and that I should follow my heart about exploring where my place is within the education system. I don't want to be another teacher that propagates the cycles in which our society is stuck. I also don't want to be a teacher that emphasizes the power of language, but doesn't use that power herself. I need to take a step out of my comfort zone as a student. I need to get to know myself, my voice, and the people around me. If I can't at least make an effort to start to get to know these things, then what am I doing becoming a teacher?
