The Wisdom of Uncertainty
“The work of a teacher — exhausting, complex, idiosyncratic, never twice the same — is at its heart an ethical enterprise. Teaching is the vocation of vocations.” ―William Ayres
I don’t actually know the future of teaching. I left the classroom for good after 2009 and started my own company. I left because the huge high school where I taught was where ideas went to die. Every grant I applied for and received; a poet in the classroom, a digital storytelling week in Washington DC using the National Museum for our visuals, organizing Poetry Out Loud events resulting in a student going to Springfield to recite her poem, a special class to study the short story at the University of Chicago, a weekend seminar on Mark Twain and the final insult, the theft of my proposal for a writing center supported by Northwestern writing tutors and the head of the Northwestern Writing Center was greeted with indifference and in the case of the Writing Center, betrayal. When I published a novel in 2003, I received actual hate mail from a colleague. It was exhausting and frankly pathetic. My boss tried to cushion the blow by saying, “You’re an intellectual. That threatens people.” Whether this was accurate or not I wanted my students to get every opportunity to excel, to see themselves as valuable and as scholars, as kind and good almost adults. I did this by thanking them for coming to class, always being prepared, giving their papers back quickly, finding a way to teach that was challenging but also created community. When a young man with extreme Asperger’s stood on my desk to recite Hamlet’s soliloquy about life being meaningless the class was silent and then filled with applause.
Photo by Philippe Bout
After 9/11 a Middle Eastern student of mine came to the classroom to say he’d been forced to leave a shopping mall by a security guard. Later, observed by a Black administrator who was writing my latest evaluation, he stood in the empty classroom while I cleaned the desks for the next class and asked, "How do you know them so well?” I knew he found the atmosphere in my classroom puzzling as I was a middle-aged white woman with a classroom full of Black young men and women who were engaged and laughing. It was one of those low expectation English classes and they were reading Invisible Man and competing to comment. My response? “How can you teach students you don’t know?” I didn’t invite them to my house or attend pep rallies or encourage hugging but I knew them, I saw them, I was filled with hope for their futures, I respected them. I did my job.
So how do you create a digital classroom that supports and inspires and teaches students? How do you make it clear that you love them when you’re confronted by all those boxes, when muting and unmuting and sharing screens wastes precious time and makes you look like an idiot? I have no idea. But understand this, children don’t respond well to manipulation, to indifference or to inflexibility. When I left the classroom, I was bereft. They were my children, they were my colleagues and my teachers.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach