I would argue that this attitude has been taught to us by our schools.  We are made to sit passively at a desk and taught to, with no say in the lesson plans.  We become a cog in a large administrative and political machine that runs no matter whether we are there or not.  In fact, if we resist, if we speak out if only to say “I am here, and I matter!” the machine breaks us into submission under the justifications of disciplinary action.  It damages at the level of the soul.  Last night in class, someone mentioned that we are placed in a society of self-hate.

When our souls are broken, how do we heal?  As teachers, how do we heal the defeatist?  I reflect on this often, because I’ve had many students in both high school and even at the career college who come to me wounded.  I tell them, “If you want it badly enough, the only thing that stops you is your will power.”  However, that’s the crux of the problem I think.  When that will power has been eroded away from you in this process of schooling, in a society that deliberately makes you feel incomplete, what can you do as a teacher?  How do you say, “YOU ARE WHOLE, YOU ARE WONDERFUL!” and have people simply…believe it?

I was talking to a friend of mine, who is failing their classes.  They explained to me that college wasn’t for them.  They weren’t “feeling it,” and it’s just not something they want to do.  This person is one of the smartest people I know, and yet, they have the defeatist attitude:  I tried, I fail.  I will stop trying because I can’t afford to waste the energy and money, when I will simply end up failing again.

Our conversation ended with me saying, “I wish I could show you what I see in you.  You are beautiful, intelligent, and our society NEEDS more people, more unique and brilliant thinkers like you.  I can write an essay about all the reasons why you can succeed and have the talent and ability to surpass your classes.  Although I believe this fully, if you don’t believe it yourself, I cannot do this for you, even though it is my greatest wish that I could.  I love you, but only you can self-love, only you can self-believe.”  It was a very sad conversation for me, because in this sense, I felt very helpless.  Only we can light the inner fire in ourselves, and no one else can do this for us.

When I teach, my heart says, “I love you.  I will love you and be your strength until you are ready and can love yourself.”  Self-love is a far more difficult thing to teach than standards.  Maybe that is why our system has never tried.

Will you?

You can find more of her work here:

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My sister is a second grade elementary school teacher .  She received her bachelors in sociology and master’s at an online institution.  Straight out of college, she has taught for over ten years and has more teaching experience than I have.  I on the other hand, arrived at teaching after several years in science research.  She has always taught elementary school, whereas I’ve taught high school and post secondary.  The irony is that although our mother, my sister and myself have all been teachers, we have never had critical or productive conversations about teaching.

My sister has bragged a lot about her teaching experiences over the years I have know her. Her conversations would consist of: how you can tell the poor kids from the rich ones; the parents who care from those that do not; the Johnnies that would come to her class who, based on her infinite amount of wisdom, she knows will not have the intellect to be successful; how she can tell the difference right off the bat of whether or not her student is “problem child” or a struggler.  She chose to teach at a school that was sponsored by the Bill Gates Foundation and located in an affluent neighborhood because all teachers could get free laptops.  She received a class set of Leapster pads from mother for Christmas one year because it would keep her students busy so that they wouldn’t bother her.  She hated teaching kindergarten because the little kids are so needy.  They touch her too much with their grimy, germy hands.  They always had sniffling, runny noses that made her sick.  This is why she prefers teaching older kids.

Last Thanksgiving (2011) was the first time I actually really listened to what she was saying.  My sister was complaining about her students’ parents.  She didn’t like how they coddled their children too much – how their incessant phone calls and check ups on their kids’ progress bothered and annoyed her.  “I don’t really care about their kid.” she would say rather authoritatively, repeatedly bragging about it in different ways over our Thanksgiving turkey.

I was so shocked at her words that I didn’t know how to respond.  I was horrified, and repulsed.  I said to myself, “She must be kidding.” with a feeling of both disbelief and anger.  Anger, because I didn’t speak up about it for the entire time over the Thanksgiving dinner.  Afterwards I thought, “The next time she says this, I should speak up.  But what should I say?”

She did it again at brunch the next day – as if saying “I don’t care about my kids” was an accomplishment.  Sister treated the statement like a badge of honor that she wore proudly.  She said it so often and so strongly that everyone was silent – silently ashamed for her, I think.  In my eyes, she was dehumanizing the very kids that she was responsible for teaching.  Mother, a former teacher herself, averted her eyes, not speaking.  Did she feel the same way?  Was she disturbed as much by her daughter’s admonition as I was?

I was disgusted – nauseous even, because I felt at that moment, she symbolized everything that I was fighting against.  How could you be a teacher and not care about your students?!  My repulsion to her was so strong that I couldn’t stand being in the same room with her.  I was angry.  I wanted to yell.  I wanted to rip her apart with my words and render her powerless.  Killing rage is what bell hooks calls it – a silent, seething anger that, because she dehumanized her students, I wanted to dehumanize her.  In my silent anger, I left the room and did not speak to her afterwards.  She of course, was blissfully oblivious to this anger however.

So here I am, on my flight to my in-laws.  I’ve had a year to think about my sister, and what I will do and say to her when she speaks about this blasphemy again to me.  I want to tell her just how repugnant I view her as a teacher, and how despicable I find her teaching beliefs.

I want to ask her, “If you don’t care about your students, why do you teach?  Do you teach because of the middle-class paycheck and summer vacations?  Is it because of the shortened days, or the excellent benefits?  Since you don’t care about your students, do you only prepare the minimum for them?  Do you even prepare at all?  Is it really true then, about what society says about us teachers?  -That most of us choose teaching because it’s a job where we can be lazy?

If you don’t care about your students, if you really ARE doing this because you don’t want to work very hard, I can understand now why the government wants to take over the teaching profession and hold teachers accountable for student success.  After all, if you don’t care for your students, who will?  If most teachers are like you, I can see why people have a bad impression of teachers in general.  She is the reason why teachers have such a poor reputation.

Telling her off would assuage my anger for the moment, and keep me from having it pent up inside.  It would express what I really felt and thought about her.  However what stops me, and why I hesitated from this approach was because I too am a teacher.  I knew that to express myself this way would shut her off.  She wouldn’t listen or understand.  Instead, my sister would probably chalk me up to being some bleeding heart liberal that didn’t really understand how the world works.

Sister, you make my job as a teacher harder for me.  You make it harder because unlike you, I care and love my students.  Teaching to me is a big responsibility because I change lives when I teach.  I change the world.  I teach because I want all my students to realize their full potential, work towards it and exceed it.  I teach because I believe and know that education is empowering and transformative to everyone, because I get to share the absolute joy my students feel when they discover that they can go beyond what they ever thought they were capable of.  I teach because I care, and because I believe in my students.  I teach because I know that at times, I am the only light in a student’s life and that I may be the first person to ever say to them, “You can do it” and actually believe it.  I teach because I believe and I dream for my students until they find that belief, that inner strength and beauty to dream for themselves.  You make my job as a teacher harder for me because you never believed.

Why do you teach?

If this is what I believe, that teaching is a responsibility, and that it is an opportunity for people to be self-actualized, then is that not my responsibility for HER too?  If I am teacher, is self-actualization only reserved for my students?  Or is this something, a movement in social justice, that I must take advantage of even outside the classroom?

So how do I speak up?  How do I transform this killing rage into something enlightening?  CAN I show her what she’s actually saying, and how it is perceived?  Rancier talks about the teacher’s opportunities to show intelligence unto itself.  Does the same work for showing ignorance unto itself?  Is that my job?  Who am I to tell her though, that my belief is any better (even though I feel it is) than hers?  Does saying, “You are wrong and here’s the reasons why” justify my desire to teach her?  Teaching and feeling the wherewithal to teach is an act of power that person you want to teach as the subject who is less than you, who needs to be “educated.”  Is that my right and place to do so?  Is this what teachers should do?

NO.

So in my head, I revisit the statement that has plagued me for almost a year, “I don’t care about my students.”  Maybe, it’s not at all that I want to impose my ideas on her.  I want to take out my rage on her.  But, can we really impose our ideas on another, especially when it is uninvited?  How much of that will be listened to?  How much of that will be transformative?

I forgot my other responsibility as a teacher – to be a learner too.  While we create opportunities for our students to see their own intelligence, we do so through learning about who our students are.  We engage our students where they are by learning about who they are and what they need.  Why?  So that they can realize their thinking for themselves.  When teachers take the position of learner – learning about our students, we open our minds to what they have to offer us.  We no longer think in deficit, but in equal.  I can’t do that yet with my sister.  I don’t know enough about her.

Sister, you are so different from me.  You beliefs repulse me.  You words disgust me.  I want to understand the nature of this repulsion and disgust.  I want to stop dehumanizing you, and begin to learn from you so that I see you as human again.

I run the scenario in my head again, when she says, “I don’t care about my students.”  Instead of automatically judging her, or admonishing her, what if I make it an interview?

Sister – “I don’t care about my students.”

Y – “Why not?  If you are not there for your students, why are you there?

Tell me sister, why do you teach?

What makes you get up so early to tolerate those annoying parents and their needy children with their grubby hands?

You come to school for 180 days out of the year, for more years than I have ever taught.  Why?  What motivates you?

Does teaching make you happy?  If so, what is it about teaching that brings you to this joy?

Are you unhappy about it?  What is it that makes you unhappy?

If you could change the system, what would you do?

We are so different, you and I, my sister.  Please help me understand you better.  Maybe this isn’t about telling or changing you at all.  Maybe it’s about changing ME, and converting my rage into energy that is transformative for myself.  I’ve learned though, that the process of transformation is often a mutual endeavor.

Even though my voice is shaky

Tomorrow my thoughts may evolve and change

But this is part of being human

I am not afraid to speak my heart

Even though parts are locked and secreted

Emotions felt and written on paper

Fondly remind us of the joy in living.

I am not afraid to speak my body

Even though speaking causes pain

Recognition and healing of the hurt

I become self-actualized whole.

~Yen

I am a little person

Standing in the shadows of giants.

In the forest of trees, my small sapling body

Outstretched, strains to touch

The scarce light reaching the forest floor.

It is blocked out by the bigger trees around me

Claiming the light for themselves.

Struggling to speak

My little voice is drowned out by the cacophony of the others

…and no one hears the message

That

I don’t want to be a big tree like you.

I want to be

A big tree like me.

 ~Yen

Just to share you this literature review on Inquiry Science Teaching. I found it very informative. Check it out if you haven’t yet .

Cheers,

Demeke

My message and what I wanted to teach my “students” at the conference went beyond the content of science as we saw “content.”  I didn’t want to emphasize the scientific facts, the scientific process, nor did I want to even really address the subject of science itself.  Instead, I wanted to address critical awareness – what was it to be critically aware.  How do we raise critical awareness, and especially, social justice in our classroom.  The subject of science no longer had that degree of importance to me.  Nor did any other subject for that matter.  The subject of science served as only a context, a “common ground” for which my students could use to think critically.  Ironically, a mentor of mine at a workshop on reading apprenticeship that I attended, offered this advice, which I teach by:  Focus on the process, and the content will come through.

I approached my workshops with the idea that all my attendees were my equals, and that they had different experiences that they could bring to the discussion table.  The only thing that made us different was that they wanted to learn about something I had to share.  To teach these workshops, teachers had to be in a situation where they could teach each other.  My job was to show them, and to make explicit these practices so that they could do the same things in their classrooms.  By asking guiding questions, I had them think critically about their own teaching practices.  In particular, I brought up the question of student voice, and where it is heard.  Instead of answering their questions, I would provide opportunities for teachers to answer each other, and to have them see how this is done.

When we (as teachers) speak, what does this mean in terms of power?

When we (as teachers) tell, give procedures or explain, what does this imply about our own students’ knowledge and their own ways of reasoning?

How have we invited their voices to be a part of the classroom culture?  How do we acknowledge and respect their opinions that they bring to the table?

In one particularly poignant discussion, a teacher asked me whether they should provide sensory charts for her students to guide them in the investigation.  My reply was that if we provide sensory charts, we are telling our students how they should touch, see, observe, smell and act.  Is this what we want?  Are we in the business of telling our students what to do?  Is this because we cannot trust, or rely on our students to do this for themselves?  Or, is it our job as teachers to nurture what is already innate in our students – the natural curiosity that we have to explore and make inferences in our world?

I begin to see that it is traditional schooling that, in its subtle ways, kills natural curiosity in us.  When I observe students in my son’s kindergarten class, and in elementary school, they are not afraid to voice their opinions, nor share what they think.  It comes naturally, and joyfully.  Something happens though, between those years before I see them in high school.  Usually in the first week of school, I have to un-teach most of my students who have learned to be silent.  They learn to voice their thoughts again, and to not be afraid to share.  Somewhere, before they come to me, they’ve learned that their opinions do not matter – that they will be ridiculed or corrected.  “Is that right miss?” looking to me for answers, because they no longer believe that those answers come from within.  In adults, it’s even worse.  Adults become afraid to even try, lacking the confidence in themselves that they will not “break” whatever it is that is presented to them.

When I see this, and what schooling does to children, does teaching SCIENCE really matter anymore?  Where do we teach critical thinking?  Where do we teach students to question, to debate, and to be self aware?  If we expect  our students to think critically, what opportunities do we give them, and how do we scaffold this into our daily lesson plans?

If we haven’t done so, why not?  What is more important to us?  To you?

If students are able to think on their own, and they see for themselves that they are intelligent and can teach themselves, is any subject really closed to them?  Whether or not it is science, history, math, or economics, what book is not open to them if they have the fire to learn it?  They are certainly intelligent enough to understand it for themselves, aren’t they?  So often I have heard friends who have said that school has taught them nothing.  Their success and their lessons have been learned from life, or that they taught themselves.  If this is true, what is school for?  Why do we believe, or assume that without the teacher, our students will be ignorant?

I come back to this when I think about what I was REALLY trying to teach in my workshops.  My goals for the Flower Power workshop were the following:

1. Emphasize the free form of scientific inquiry.  Students explore and create the protocol based on observations using science practices such as: asking questions, observing, experimenting and collecting data.
2. Collaborative processes of science – how is science done?  How will students document and think about the process that they have used.
3. Use of observation and collaboration to come up with the vocabulary for parts of plants.
4. Explanations of the culture of science – a critical lens on how science is done – the understanding that there’s no ONE answer, but alternate explanations, processes and the doing of science.

It wasn’t science, nor was it a practice or a theory that I emphasized.  I was teaching a process – a process for self-actualization of that which we already know:  That all people CAN think, and given the opportunity, they will.  Perhaps one of the biggest take-home messages for many of my workshop attendees that day was this – how to step out of the way so that our students can fill in the gaps and think for themselves.

I invite people to watch this very insightful TED video if you haven’t yet . It is all about how kids teach themselves very much anything! What would the sage on the stage teachers say about this?

What was unique in all of the three presentations was witnessing the experiences of participant teachers: their first reaction to the set up and their  ahas and wows during the investigation and final summary discussions. When we were asking teachers to introduce themselves and to  tell us their expectations from the presentation, we have made note of  the experiences that some teachers have had using some kind of similar activities in their classrooms. But, we were able to witness how engaged the teachers themselves were in the investigations  to the extent of extending their investigations and discussions even at final minutes….they kept playing like kids with the flowers….some make some kind of geometry by piling up flower petals,  comparing the shape of the petals of the different flower types, even some painting using flower petals, ….some keep hunting their curiosity by mixing various liquids in the PH experiment using the cabbage water….some even talk about connecting to biotechnology, genetics, etc. All sorts of ideas were aired out but there was only flowers. How do flowers just become such robust resources of learning? It was indeed amazing?

Then comes the third workshop: we simply gave them some nuance introduction about the nature of science. How doing and learning science is a non-linear, messy process. Then we just simply provided them a piece of paper and an envelop full of checks and ask them to pull out 4 checks at a time and try to make sense of it. We had never given them what we wanted them to come up with, nor what the goal was. We were simply watching and at times interjecting ourselves in the conversations and pose  some questions. As they do the investigation in pairs, whatever ideas emerged in the discussion, we were able to fill out the walls with Warner papers jotting downs conversation ideas, questions, conjectures, etc. As they keep working in their investigation, they throw their eyes to the walls…read at a glance what is written on those papers and keep the momentum of their discussion. In one group they were making tables filling out the tables with any evidence they see on the checks. This is their organizing tool. In another group, they start to make historical records of when the checks were signed. In another table, they came up with this idea of who signed the checks for whom kind of question and trace across the checks. I see full of energy, engagement, every one curious about it. But, one interesting outcome of all these various ways of trying to make sense of the evidences was the fact that when each pair reported their final story line of what they found out form the checks, there were amazingly similar claims though there were other anticipations as well. But, they never stop making a story line for this particular investigation. They rather extended their discussion by making points such as “very much any thing can be used as productive learning resource!”, one participant teacher mutters.  Another participant asked: “why we failed to give this opportunity to our kids?” . This last remark by one of the participant teacher captivates me the most. Yes, we witness lots of professional developments for teachers on progressive ideas and teaching tips such as ours, yet the status quo remain in place mainly in urban schools. The same old style of teaching-handing over worksheets to students and asking them to memorize facts is almost a standard in those sschools. I  had a chance to ask many science teachers who are teaching in Buffalo public school about what they know and believe about science teaching. These teachers will tell you all the jargons that we talk about now: authentic science, inquiry, etc. Yet, their classrooms are full of worksheets. Why teachers’ beliefs and understandings are so different from what they actually practice in their classrooms?