July 2024
Leslie Myint (Macalester College)
“How are you?”
This is always a challenging question to ask at the end of the semester because invariably, the answer is one that conveys immense fatigue. Students list the papers, projects, and exams remaining. Teachers list the assignments left to grade, and class periods and meetings remaining until freedom.
Everyone is just so tired. Does it have to be this way?
I’m not saying that we should never be tired, but the fact that this fatigue sets in so predictably at semester’s end begs us to explore its causes more deeply.
A contributing factor is certainly that students and teachers alike are doing a lot. Students are juggling extracurriculars, jobs, course work, and friendships. Teachers are juggling service, teaching, scholarship, and families.
But could the reason for the fatigue have a deeper cause? Could it be a dissonance, a disconnect, between what energizes us and the affairs that line our day-to-day?
In Parker Palmer’s book The Courage to Teach, he leads us on an examination of this dissonance in the realm of teaching, and my goal in this column is to share the wisdom of some of his ideas.
Diana Chapman Walsh, President Emerita of Wellesley College, aptly describes the book’s premise:
At the heart of it all is the idea of vocation—vocation as the unification of “who we are with what we do,” and how we project that inner identity out into the world, whether consciously or not. This is a choice that Parker helps us see is ours to make.
Perhaps our biggest source of struggle as teachers is a disconnection between who we are and what we do in our courses: a tension arising from identity. As Palmer discusses, being true to our identities—our hearts—takes substantial courage that we’re not always ready to embody:
Many of us became teachers for reasons of the heart, animated by a passion for some subject and for helping people learn. But many of us lose heart as the years of teaching go by. How can we take heart in teaching once more so that we can, as good teachers always do, give heart to our students?
We lose heart in part because teaching is a daily exercise in vulnerability. I need not reveal personal secrets to feel naked in front of the class. I need only parse a sentence or work proof on the board while my students doze off or pass notes. No matter how technical my subject may be, the things I teach are things I care about, and what I care about helps define my selfhood.
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To reduce our vulnerability, we disconnect from students, from subjects, and even ourselves.
I grew up in a home where expressions of love were contingent on standard measures of academic achievement (grades, awards), and I had many formative experiences where my innate capacity for creativity was called into question. These experiences caused me to live a great deal of my life in fear of losing connection and respect from those close to me and in fear of straying from the traditional path. After reading The Courage to Teach, I see that these fears, both through their existence and my unconscious recognition of them, have had notable impacts on how I teach and what I long for.
While fear can play a positive role in learning by signaling us to an opening in worldview, Palmer encourages us to think deeply about the fears that cause us to shut down and disconnect from learning and teaching. What do these fears look like for me?
I find immense beauty in using data to learn about the world, and sharing that beauty with students was why I became a statistics teacher. But statistics still has a bad reputation for being rote and arcane, and I fear the hurt of sharing a love of mine in a way that wholly fails to resonate with my students. This fear of hurt goes hand in hand with a fear of disillusionment about my identity as a teacher: if I can’t succeed in generating meaningful learning in a subject I treasure, am I any good at the only profession I’ve ever known?
When I started at Macalester, I was deeply inspired by our innovative and cohesive introductory statistics course, and this gave me considerable hope in connecting with my students about my dear discipline. However, with this added hope I was also that much more fearful that my students would still find no meaning in what we did. As much as I longed to know if they were valuing statistical ideas, I protected myself by erecting a barrier of silence: I did not ask in my first few years of teaching our introductory course. I would catch glimpses through course evaluations—those who did find the course meaningful enthusiastically told me so. What a cup of hot cocoa for my heart! But I was always still left wondering about the others.
This semester I chose to care for my heart and decided to no longer be left wondering with my introductory epidemiology students. I turned our last oral exam into a low stakes conversation about what ideas they thought were most important from the different course units—effectively a conversation about where and why they found meaning in our course. These conversations took a lot of time, but I do not regret deciding to have our conversations in this way. All of my conversations felt so true, and so many of them nourished my soul in a way that even a glowing course evaluation comment could not.
One student told me that he found an unexpected but delightful connection between confounding and a discussion in his French film course. His class had been debating whether a particular film had spurred a revolution and ended up discussing how the film was released soon after considerable revolutionary activity had already taken place. With endearing sympathy and laughter, he told me how much it heartened him that the filmmakers truly wanted to believe that their film inspired such impactful change—how human it was to look for causation in correlation and how humane we have to be in communicating ideas that will change others’ worldview. This conversation will always have a special place in my heart.
My fear that students will not have a lasting appreciation for statistics also manifests in my discomfort with having a uniform experience for all students. Students in all of my classes, from introductory to advanced, come from such a wide range of backgrounds and have such a diversity of interests. Some relish technical details, and others are most engaged when thinking through complex applications. I have long had a fear that having a single middle path in my courses does a great disservice to some students in terms of lasting learning. Because I discovered my creativity late in life and how fulfilling it is to follow my own curiosities, the importance of forging my own path is fresh and constantly present in my worldview, and I have experienced dissonance in not providing students with opportunities to create their own individual paths through a course.
I have experimented with this path-forging to an extent by allowing flexibility in the form of course projects in an upper-level course: I encouraged students to do anything from a data analysis to literature reviews, blog posts, R package creation, and learning an advanced topic. I was happy with the work they produced, but I also felt a longing to have allowed for more flexibility in the content they explored.
I’m following my heart this coming semester by rethinking how I use class time in my upper-level statistics course. I plan to use one class period every other week for meeting in small groups as opposed to the whole class. Students will form groups after they have had a chance to get a sense for what the course is about, and the small group meetings will be a space for students to explore areas they were unlikely to encounter in a course following a single middle path.
My other primary fear as a teacher is feeling disconnected from my students. I feel connected when there is clear trust in our relationship—they trust that I’m doing what’s best for their learning and are comfortable asking for help and speaking up if their needs are not being met, and I trust that they do their best work. For this reason, I am uncomfortable having power that makes my students fearful, docile, and untrue to themselves and me. I truly feel that grading is at the crux of this matter.
For years, I’ve experimented with alternative grading approaches to better foster a growth mindset, encourage deep learning, and reduce stress for my students. I’m happy with my experiments. I’ve learned a great deal about the delicate balance between structure and freedom and the nuances of student agency and discomfort. I’ve had a majority of students thrive under the systems that I’ve designed. But. Because it is ultimately in my power to assign a grade that my students believe has substantial influence on their available opportunities (a power I wish I didn’t have!), the mere existence of grading automatically alters the student-teacher connection. This dissonance has been playing discordant notes in my ear for a long time.
Within the confines of the traditional evaluation systems to which our institutions are beholden, what I wish for is a lengthier process in which my students and I discuss grades and co-create structures that support deep learning that is relevant to them. I’ve experimented with letting students choose between two options for a course grading system on the first day of class. By far the best part of this experiment was the trust that it engendered between me and my students, but the downside was that a small group of students would have preferred the other grading option. This diversity of needs is what reinforces my desire to try a longer discussion and co-creation process.
I’ve tried designing and setting a grading system before the first day of class, and I’ve tried letting the students pick on the first day of class. Neither have fully resonated with me: the former ignored student input, and both used a one-size-fits-all approach. What if over the first month of a semester course, students had time to acclimate to the course, the subject, their peers, and my expectations as an instructor? In this time, they would develop a much better understanding of how we could align my expectations with their needs and interests. The connection, conversation, and trust in this process feels so much more in line with who I am, and I’d like to try. Could it end up being underwhelming? Absolutely. But in not trying, I erect another barrier distancing myself from who I want to be as a teacher.
My biggest takeaway from The Courage to Teach is that to constantly work towards uncovering and living our true hearts as teachers is the ultimate gift for ourselves and our students. This journey allows us to cultivate the gardens of our lives with intention, and in so doing, share some of that beauty with our students. An examination of fear can lead to our unmasking and more active alignment between our souls and our actions, what Palmer calls “an undivided life.”
By living undivided lives we have the capacity to spread this gift to others, a topic which Palmer explores at the end of his book. That is, to live an undivided life is to constantly hold the capacity for systemic change.
So. What is the future of education?
A movement.