The Days of Day

Palmer describes two teachers, one who found joy and success in his career, and another who did not.  He attributed the joyful teacher's success to the idea that he taught "from an undivided self."  He says, "In the undivided self, every major thread of one's life experience is honored, creating a weave of such coherence and strength that it can hold students and subject as well as self."  The other teacher, on the other hand, projected his inner warfare onto his students.  The joyful teacher enjoyed craft, while the sour teacher enjoyed nothing.  The joyful teacher was "enlarged" by his teaching.  The sour teacher was diminished. As teachers we are either the joyful teacher OR the sour teacher.  We have days, maybe even weeks, of being the joyful teacher and days of being the sour one.  In my personal experience, when I am actually in the room teaching students I am the joyful one 95% of the time.  When I leave the room and enter the rest of...

The Courage to Teach  talks a great deal about fears, about how imperative it is that we learn what our fears are.  Palmer points out that if we don't recognize our own fear, then we cannot recognize the fears of our students. The other day I was explaining to a colleague with whom I share a classroom that I like my classes best when they are teetering on the edge of chaos.  I distrust the type of quiet learning that comes with a face carved stiffly into stone.  He responded with a chuckle, "Yeah.  I can tell by looking at your speech class."  I know he didn't mean it in any way other than humor, but his words made me feel defensive.  I wanted to stop the polite laughter and say, "What do you mean?"  The exchange showed me that I do feel self-conscious about the edge of chaos I foster.  I'm afraid that people will see my classes and think that we are on the edge of mayhem because I am INCAPABLE of creating order.  The defensiveness came ...

I thought of another gap that is hard to live in.   I believe in the potential of public education.  I believe that good teachers, with time and resources, can help students find joy in the process of learning, can push students to generate critical thought.  I also believe good teachers thrive in space to be creative and to dance. I also see that not every student in our system is getting an education I'd order up for my own children.  In fact, in some cases, I'd sooner pull my child out of school and homeschool him than allow him to sit in a room where learning is a punishment for some crime he didn't commit.   So many well-intentioned people entered education.  We saw what was broken and created theories about how to fix it all.  We created Programs, which became Policies.   When those Policies needed accountability we created Directives and said "Yes, I Do Know Better Than You."  We created those things out of helplessness, out of a drive...

In The Courage to Teach , Palmer addresses the issue of relational trust as "a vital but neglected factor in school success."  He cites all kinds of research which shows that schools full of teachers who report strong trust and far more likely to create improvement in reading and math scores.  He points out that schools like mine, where we high numbers of students in poverty and large numbers of students who are constantly moving in and out of our boundaries, creating lasting improvement is more difficult than in schools that are predominantly upper middle class.  No surprise there. As I prepared to take over the job of English department chairperson, I assessed the needs, strengths, and liabilities of the department.  One of the things it did not take a particularly observant person to notice is the fact that morale in the department is incredibly low.  Some of us eat lunch together, trying to cobble together something that sounds like community, but we are all...

Parker J. Palmer uses a phrase on his website for the Center for Courage and Renewal: the tragic gap.  He says the challenge is to figure out out how to have courage while we stand in this "tragic gap...between different realities of life and the knowledge of what is possible."  When our emotional resources are all used up, or worse yet robbed of us, the courage to stand in this gap has a hard time even making gasps to help us know that courage needs emergency help.   Here are a tragic gap I've witnessed this week: My dear colleague reported a Twitter feed devoted to hate at our school.  The Twitter account had cropped up in response to one a student made to offer anonymous compliments to others.  The words in the hate account were horrible, energy sapping words by anonymous students who, tragically, had never learned to trust kindness.  When my friend reported the account, the principal was business-like, letting her know what she could do about it: very l...

As I take over the English department, I am taking a look at the pain I feel when I hear my colleagues cracking like fragile glass, speaking words that hide their own pain, words that sound like "valueless kid" and "jerk boy" and "blind administrator."  I know these words of pain are ways for them to protect themselves, and I know this because I do the same thing myself from time to time, within my own limits of allowable bitching -- never, ever, ever allowing myself to use demeaning words about a child.   This book is about protecting and supporting "the inner journey at the heart of authentic teaching, learning, and living" (ix). I have always taken time to hear the complaint because I know the words of the complaint are less important than what the content of the complaint are saying about the work load of the teacher, about the hurting heart of the teacher, about the powerlessness of the teacher, about the need for someone to remove distracti...

Okay.  It's time to claim it.  I am a good teacher. I don't know why it has taken me this long to claim that.  My colleagues tell me and I squirm uncomfortably inside my soul, uncomfortable with the spotlight, uncomfortable with the unspoken rest of the sentence which the speaker keeps wrapped tightly inside a face that says, "and I'm not."  My students tell me and I say, "I love you, too," because what I think they mean is that they like me and "good teacher" are the only words they can think to use in a world where the word love is often fraught with weirdness, at least when you are 14.  My bosses tell me when they stamp "highly effective" across my permanent record, whatever the hell that is.   I worry about claiming it, afraid that if I believe it that I'll jynx it, that I'll suddenly fall face down into a pile of apathy I can't get out of, that I'll become a teacher who can't see even one good thing in that ki...