After three years in my first job -- as an adjunct English instructor at a small New England college -- I recently decided it was time for me to try and move upward, or at least onward, in the teaching world.
As I've begun assembling cover letters and rehearsing my answers to interview questions, I've had to figure out how to put my educational philosophies into words. And in doing so, I've started to ask myself how I came to those philosophies: How did I end up with my current set of personal standards about what it means to be a good teacher? Since I'm taking those beliefs with me into my next classroom, I think it's important to know their origins.
I owe a lot of my development as a teacher to the good educators I've known: colleagues, favorite college professors, and my sister, who gave me the best teaching advice I've gotten yet: "Buy folders."
But as I've taken this professional inventory, I've come to realize that I have been shaped as much by my encounters with "bad" professors as with "good" ones. In fact, perhaps one of the biggest influences on my style and substance as a teacher has been my passionate and continuing desire not to be like the worst professors I had as a student.
Whenever I'm about to fall short of what I believe a good teacher should be, that little voice inside my head pipes up, telling me, "Come on now, don't be that guy ..."
For instance, in something as basic as evaluating my students, I'll think back on a professor I had as an undergraduate. That guy, on every test, assigned an essay on some minor point from a randomly selected chapter of an outside reading.
Reading a text closely, taking good notes, learning to predict what professors will ask on tests: those are all great skills for students to learn. But now, almost 10 years later, a teacher myself, I still have no insight into any purpose, evaluative or educational, that this professor's questions might have had. We had a better chance of figuring out tomorrow's lottery numbers than we did answering his test questions correctly.
I don't want to be that guy, the guy with the trick questions, the guy whose tests smack of power games and ego: "Ooh, aah, look how eccentric and demanding I am!"
I don't want to be the guy who asks students to memorize trivial facts because they're easier to correct than analytical essays. And I don't want to be the guy that others in the department diplomatically warn students to avoid. Of that professor, another faculty member tactfully told me: "He ... likes details."
All teachers want a reputation as demanding. But I want to earn mine because of how much I get my students to learn, not because of how good I've become at tripping them up.
I owe another one of my old professors a thank you for inspiring my work ethic. That guy "taught" a documentary film class that I took one summer in graduate school. In other such film courses, I had been expected to watch the week's movie before the class and come to each session prepared to discuss, and, I don't know, learn.
But this guy? He showed us films in class -- long films, films so long they took up almost all of the class time. After the viewing, we would talk, not about filmmaking techniques or style or context, but about our personal views on the often political topics explored in the films.
Basically, what I got out of the course was a very expensive trip to the movies once a week. Meanwhile, the professor got a free ride. His entire preparation for each class session consisted of making sure the right tape was in the VCR. He did everything but deliver the class poolside with a margarita in his hand.
We've all had slacker students who would love a blow-off summer class. The thing is, the professor isn't supposed to go ahead and provide one. And as a student, I didn't enjoy the blow-off; it was more like a rip-off, a waste of my time and money.
So now I teach with a belief that most of my students want to learn, or at least they want their money's worth. As a teacher, I aim to give them that. Whether I'm an adjunct being monitored or a tenured professor left to my own devices, I'm going to do my job. I'm not going to be that guy who phones it in. Except maybe if it's Game 7 in a Red Sox-Yankees playoff series, and we can get the simulcast on our classroom computer. But that only happened once.
Perhaps the "don't be that guy" who has most influenced my teaching is the instructor I had for a graduate screenwriting course. It was supposed to be a workshop-style class, but the only thing I learned was how not to deal with my own writing students.
Simply put, the instructor never gave us written feedback; in fact, he never read our work. Yes, you read that correctly: The guy was teaching a graduate writing workshop, and he never read our work. He didn't even pretend to read it; he never collected anything until the last day of class.
Instead, in each class, he had us read our scripts aloud. If that had been merely a part of the class, it would have been fine: It can be helpful to hear your work spoken as a script is intended to be. But our hackneyed readings were the sole basis on which the professor issued his verbal critiques. Have you ever heard writing students act? I'll leave you to determine the quality of our readings, and thus, his comments.
That guy had himself a nice gig at his students' expense: no papers to correct, no guided questions, no preparation at all. He would come in, listen to Bad Actors Studio, then give his masterful take on our pages after he'd had a whole 10 seconds to process them. And that was the end of it.
The lousy feedback and the fact that he was wasting our time and money weren't the worst insults. No, this guy's biggest offense was the disrespect he showed us by paying lip service to our work. We had invested seriously in writing our scripts and, in the end, got nothing serious in return. We were new writers, and the older, wiser writer who was hired to guide us never really bothered.
I will never be that guy. In fact, every semester since I started teaching, I warn my students not to freak out when they see a lot of ink in the margins of their papers. I explain my golden rule: "You put effort in, writing to me? I put effort in, writing back to you. That's the respect writers give each other."
Whenever I've watched my under-confident students in remedial courses scour returned essays for my comments, I knew it meant something to them that their work had been given real consideration, the consideration it was due.
I came to teaching through the back door, almost accidentally. Over the past few years, both gratitude and insecurity have motivated me to keep my standards high. I want to be a credit to this profession. I want to deserve my place. When I'm tempted to use my newness or lack of training as an excuse for lowering the bar, I only consider those professors who let me down, and the bar goes quickly up again.
It bears repeating though, that along with the bad, I've also been molded by the example of many amazing teachers, too. Those are the dedicated professionals and energetic scholars who stand before classes in my memories, ultra-prepared, irreproachably honest, personable, compassionate. They earned my respect. They were brilliant, in the most humble, humbling, and inspiring of ways.
I fall short in my attempts to imitate those people, but I'll keep trying as long as I continue to teach -- because those teachers are my role models; they are the guys I want to be.
