Loving the Subject

When you have to teach the topics you once feared... you learn to have a new appreciation for your students' perspectives.

I loved being a 5th grade student. We turned the classroom into a rainforest. We wrote our own newspaper. Nearly every homework assignment involved application of creative imagination. In retrospect I realize we studied the things Ms. Rainey loved, and I was lucky they were also the things I loved.

But I don't remember Ms. Rainey ever teaching us any math and the year I spent on vacation from the subject set me back and furthered a math phobia I've had ever since.

Since working at Inspired Teaching I've gotten over the math phobia a little, mostly because I don't have a choice. We incorporate math into just about every workshop we do and the result of this constant bombardment is that I've grown more confident in my skills.

As an English teacher, grammar was the topic I most feared teaching. The first year I taught, much like Ms. Rainey, I avoided it entirely. I now know that was to the detriment of my students who struggled with writing and reading and would have benefited from the exposure to the rules and regulations of language.

It wasn't until I went to grad school and took a class in grammar that I realized just how weak my own skills were. I studied hard and took time to play with each of the rules I learned and try them out in different contexts so I understood where they came from and why they existed. I was not taught grammar in this manner. I had to teach myself in the way I knew I needed to learn. After that class I taught the topic much differently, and without fear.

Thanks to my own struggles to learn the content I now understood why, when dished out as a set of seemingly arbitrary rules, English grammar seemed boring, rigid, and confining. I felt what it was like to be a student on the other side of that intimidating book with all its red lines and tiny font. And I knew that wasn't the experience I wanted to recreate for my students.

So, instead, I assigned teams of students to different grammar rules and worked with them to create lessons they could teach the rest of the class. We practiced with examples. We used our own language to describe the rules. We learned a lot together.

You go into teaching and face a classroom full of students who expect you to be the expert in your field, and most of the time you probably bear some love for the subject(s) you teach. But it's okay to recognize that you don't know everything - and to accept that you might even be a little afraid of some of those things you don't know much about at all.

The act of becoming a teacher doesn't stop the process of being a student and opening ourselves up to learning and teaching simultaneously might just put us in better touch with the students we see each day.