David Lee Finkle is best known on the internet as the creator of Mr Fitz, the long-running teacher comic strip. But he also occasionally blogs, as in this piece about what he sees as attacks on the heart of the profession.
I recently wrote about why I love teaching, and why I think my love of teaching benefits my students. I would now like to address how this love of teaching is under attack. I won’t necessarily conjecture why love of teaching is under attack – I simply want to demonstrate that it is.
I love many things about teaching: planning the school year, finding new ways to reach students, framing learning around big questions, choosing the texts we will read together, creating writing exercises and assignments and lessons, and being creative to bring out students’ creativity.
Many, if not most, of the things I love about teaching involve choices I make as a teacher. I have borrowed this idea of both writing and teaching as a series of choices from Scott McCloud’s book Making Comics. McCloud says making comics is a series of choices: choice of Moment, choice of Frame, choice of Image, choice of Word and choice of Flow.
In teaching, I believe there are even more choices: choice of Focus, choice of Flow, choice of Texts, choice of Assignments and Assessments, choice of Methods. Having the autonomy to make these choices used to be called teacher professionalism.
When I began teaching, it was the wild, wild west. I was given a classroom, some textbooks, and basically told to teach them something. It may not have been perfect, but I was a professional, and I built my year from scratch. Doing so made me a better teacher.
But now, now the system wants to undermine all our choices.
Choice of Focus. Now we are supposed to focus not on what we feel students need or what students want to learn. We are supposed to focus on standards and benchmarks decided by a committee – standards that are supposed to absolute holy writ – except for the fact that they change every few years. We are supposed to be “benchmark aligned.” If something isn’t in a benchmark, we aren’t supposed to teach it. Thus, under Common Core, poetry wasn’t encouraged because it wasn’t part of the standards. That’s just one example of things that end up not getting taught because they were overlooked in the writing of standards. I love thinking deeply about what I am going to teach my students. But now we are not supposed to think at all about what we teach. We are, as George Orwell once said, supposed to let others do our thinking for us.
Choice of Flow. I used to freely construct my school year so that ideas about life intertwined with writing skills and reading skills. Everything built on everything else and connected to everything else. I loved planning out the flow to my year. Now we are told what to teach when. Curriculum maps are now detailed enough to tell you what you are supposed to be doing each and every day. It’s practically a script. A map implies you have freedom to travel. They should be called Curriculum Itineraries.
Choice of Texts. I used to choose the very best texts from my literature textbooks. I used to dip into my extensive library of books to make class-sets of short stories, poems, and essays to find just the right text to work on a reading skill or just the right mentor text to show students possibilities for what their writing could be. In the age of the internet, it became even easier to search for and find great texts. I love hunting down just the right text to engage my students. But now we’re told to use only the textbook for the most part, and only the texts that are on the map. If we don’t think our students will find a particular text engaging, tough luck. If it’s not on the map but we want to use it, it’s frowned on.
