The best teachers are the ones who can read a room. A great teacher knows when to pause the lesson for a moment because there is an undercurrent that alerts her to the fact that the students are not mentally present. An exceptional teacher notices that one student who seems uncharacteristically silent or has a worried expression on his/her face. A masterful teacher reacts to such things without missing a step.
We are in an era when business people are attempting to use ridiculous tactics to keep the pace of classrooms moving without paying attention to the humans sitting in the desks. Teachers are given scripts to read and timers and stopwatches to measure the number of minutes they are taking to deliver information. The whole concept is absurd. It assumes that all children and teachers are alike and the goal is to just keep moving from one topic to the next.
Perhaps such a scheme might work to determine how many tellers are needed to keep the lines of customers flowing. Maybe it works inside a factory where objects are moving down a conveyor belt. It might even work to successfully close a sale, but it is totally wrong in a classroom.
I don’t call myself an exceptional educator but I learned how to read the faces of my students a long time ago. I realized that the young people in front of me have way more on their minds than just learning the skills and knowledge that I am attempting to impart to them. Sometimes they show signs of growing weary when attacking a very difficult concept. Using a couple of minutes to allow them to laugh or even to groan about what they are doing often has the power of immediately changing the negativity of their feelings. That little pause may be all that they needed to continue pushing to learn.
We’ve all seen comedies with teachers talking over students’ heads. Such folks are totally out of touch with the youngsters in front of them. Living breathing people are going to be all over the map with their abilities. A droning lecture, especially one read from a script, can sound like the bad acting in the voice over of a foreign film. Those glazed eyes may be trained on the person who is talking but it’s a pretty sure bet that little to no learning is happening in their heads. The process of teaching has to be dynamic and interactive. The teacher must be aware of who is catching on and who is struggling to understand. The variance will always be part of the process of getting everyone over the goal line.
It’s difficult to know for certain how to demonstrate the how to dos of with-it-ness to a teacher. Some seem to have an innate sense of its importance and others are like brick walls that are tone deaf to the moods inside their classrooms. I have to think that some administrators are even worse when they devise ridiculous programs that operate like machines rather than people. Sometimes the most horrific of them are in fact computer driven, devoid of any kind of human interaction.
I tutored at a high school for a time and it was a wonderful experience. The teachers whose students I was helping worked very well with me. We were in a kind of partnership in which they would send students who were struggling with certain concepts. They showed me how they had taught the students and the kind of work they were doing. They gave extra credit to the kids for coming to me. I soon had a roomful of eager boys and girls who truly wanted to improve their grades. Then the powers that be who were funding my position for the school stepped in to literally throw a monkey wrench into everything.
They decided that they would tell me what the students needed to learn even though they were not even in the school building nor had they ever taught high school mathematics or any mathematics for that matter. They wanted me to use only certain materials, not the ones that the actual teachers provided, and they furthermore preferred that I use their computer programs for practice. To say that such a system was a disaster is an understatement. The humanity of the process fell apart and the students no longer wanted to come to the sessions. In fact I no longer wanted to be nothing more than a proctor guiding kids to a machine. I left in protest even as I felt for the students with whom I had formed quite a bond.
I once had a person tell me that everything is a business, even schools and churches. I recoiled at the idea even as I saw much evidence that demonstrated that my colleague was in fact correct. Luckily I worked for principals who saw the success of my teaching style and allowed me to run with it. In today’s world it feels as though the forces who see time and profit as the goal for every endeavor are exerting their force on the entire world. They have not read a room in ages and it shows. They are bean counters who ignore the majesty of every human in favor of profit and one time scores. Hopefully we will protest the artificiality of their methods when we see them and remember to always look into the faces of the people to make our decisions about what to do next. In fact, we would do well to apply that dictum to just about everything that we see happening in the present. None of us are machines to be used to create profit or success for someone else.
All It Takes Is A Little Love 