Two Years a Teacher: Big Blocks
by Olivier Cleynen
I have just completed a two-and-a-half-year stint as a high school Math and Physics teacher at the Internationales Stiftungsgymnasium Magdeburg. This is a meaningful and challenging job, and I have grown a lot through it. In this article as well as a few following ones, I would like to reflect on the experience.
I took the job almost on an impulse and never regretted it. Before that, I had taught 12 years at the university level. I had a vision for what teaching in a high school could be, but no plan to get there. Five semesters down the road, I decided to leave after I found out that I am hypersensitive, so that regardless of how well-prepared I was and how well my work days went, I ended up markedly more tired than everyone around me. The physical exhaustion stemming from the sensory and emotional stimulation not only prevented me from raising my work hours to receive adequate compensation (I could not bear more than 75% occupation), but also denied me from valuable energy for myself and my family. I closed this professional chapter with a heavy and thankful heart.
My mom told me that if you want to fill a bucket with rocks, you should start with the big ones. Here I would like to present my “big blocks”, the most important elements of my daily work. At the Stiftungsgymnasium, I was blessed to have a supportive and open-minded leadership team, who gave me complete leeway to do things just how I desired. I started from scratch, and ended up with the following:
I work and communicate at eye level. Some adults use a special voice and special language when talking with children and teenagers, and I cannot do that. In class, I am the same professional than in the teachers’ room. I mean what I say, and I say what I mean. This holds true when I find something to be important, funny, or boring (I am especially afraid of boring). I share my joys and frustrations and am not beyond apologizing to my students when my work is below my expectations. I find it important to make the objectives of the activity explicit and achievable every time. In return, I expect the same eye-levelness of my students, whom I expect to tell me when they are uncomfortable or unhappy, so I may address that.
I know that students will have forgotten 90% of the content within one school year. I embrace that fact, and instead of trying to change that percentage, I try to affect which 10% will remain and focus on that. I know that the important things learned in the classroom are not written in the curriculum: how to work, how to find a little joy in work, how to approach and solve problems, how to deal with conflicts, how to deal with your moods and emotions, how to organize yourself and get things done.
I start and finish class on time. This is one of two battles I chose in my time as a teacher. Before and after Physics period is break time. I see the students’ break as sacred and do not allow myself to eat into it for any reason. I also expect my students to be exactly on time, every time. The first few minutes of class are the most important, and the most difficult to make happen successfully. Getting 28 teenagers ready to work at the exact same time is a challenge and costs a lot of effort, and I have spent without counting. Correspondingly, in each class I have put a student in charge of interrupting me, no exceptions allowed, when it is time to end the period. I have never regretted it.
We leave a clean classroom after ourselves. After us comes either another class, or the cleaning crew. For them, we leave a tidy room with a swept floor. This is the second battle that I picked (in truth this is more a war than a battle), and here too I have gone to every length to win it. I have dedicated a lot of routines, sacrificed a lot of class time, handled a lot of conflicts, and yes, swept a lot of floors myself when I failed. But I was just never going to take crap from a teenager who has not yet spent a single hour in their life on a job and thinks sweeping after themselves is beneath them: my respect for the cleaning crew goes beyond that. I took an entire semester to figure out the mechanics, but I did it.
I don’t give homework. I know that the sociological and pedagogical aspects of homework are controversial. I do not even engage in this reflection, because for me the issue is much simpler: I don’t believe in homework. I just do not believe that any of the things we want to happen with it actually happens, and therefore, I am not prepared to spend my students’ energy or my own on implementing it. Instead, I view it as my responsibility to recall and re-activate Physics in my students’ minds, and I do it in class instead of at home. I respect that they have had a billion things in their minds and lives since we last worked on this thing last week, which to them really is a century ago. So we do a little easy recall routine at the start of class. It’s not difficult, and then they can walk out of the classroom at the end and not have to think about Physics for another 6 days and 22 hours.
I love my students. I learned a long time ago from Rita Pierson that kids don’t learn from people they don’t like, and recently from Rob Plevin that you can actively pursue and cultivate liking and being liked by your students. This is a bit odd, because if you are an adult, teenagers are sometimes very hard to like, and when in groups, can be extremely annoying. Additionally, I never had many friends, and prior to landing this job, had never thought of friendship as something I could actively pursue and work on. Yet here we are two and a half years later, when I have made friends with 250 people. I greet each student at the door by shaking their hand and saying their name, even and especially those who don’t like me back. I am very bad at recalling names, and I tell them that openly. I love my students. I tell them that too sometimes, most especially when I am frustrated with them. But mostly it is something that I experience: I am proud of them, proud of what they achieve, and proud to be their teacher. It is at once an emotion, a resolution, and a professional attitude; and it has not just made my work thrillingly enjoyable: it has made me grow so much, too!