One year teaching in high school

This month marks one year since I start­ed teach­ing in a high school in Ger­many. This new chap­ter fol­lows one of 12 years teach­ing in var­i­ous uni­ver­si­ties in France and Ger­many, and a few oth­er work expe­ri­ences as well. I have learned a lot this year, and have yet a lot more to learn.

Teach­ing in high school is very chal­leng­ing and very inter­est­ing; it has some­thing of the ulti­mate human expe­ri­ence in my eyes. My per­son­al mis­sion is to do things that trans­late into inter­est­ing sto­ries to tell lat­er, and my pro­fes­sion­al mis­sion is to be doing some­thing mean­ing­ful as part of at team that shares the same val­ues. Being a high school teacher ful­fills the first of those, and work­ing at the Inter­na­tionales Stiftungs­gym­nasi­mum Magde­burg ful­fills the second.

I am teach­ing math and physics to 7th and 9th graders (13 and 15 year-olds). The job has many facets. Deal­ing with group dynam­ics. Deal­ing with beings who are self-con­struct­ing and social­ly anx­ious. Deal­ing with deep emo­tions, in one­self and in oth­ers, every week. Work­ing through local­ly-pre­scribed cur­ric­u­la in glob­al­ized dis­ci­plines. Hav­ing to change work modes every 30 min­utes. Chang­ing class­es three times in a day, each time re-adjust­ing ful­ly. Car­ing for emo­tion­al and phys­i­cal safe­ty. Con­scious­ly remain­ing cool-head­ed, and espe­cial­ly, con­sis­tent. All of this as the basis on top of which some amount of aca­d­e­m­ic learn­ing can hap­pen, and some amount of fun can be had.

Most of the work is, of course, about the social and emo­tion­al con­di­tion­ing of stu­dents that must occur so that actu­al learn­ing can hap­pen. Depend­ing how your head is built, this can be hard to cope with — as an intro­vert, I find that too much of my ener­gy is drained by the con­stant inter­ac­tion, regard­less of how much suc­cess I am hav­ing. It is the aspect of my job upon which I most want to improve.

In terms of ped­a­gogy, I think I am doing well. I am cer­tain­ly doing a bet­ter job than my high school physics teach­ers were, and that is a good met­ric to go by. There are still some unre­solved ten­sions, how­ev­er. One of them is, in class man­age­ment tech­niques, how to con­cil­i­ate the need for con­sis­ten­cy (not accept­ing or ignor­ing behav­ior that is not accept­able) and the fact that some pupils, in a con­fronta­tion, only know how to esca­late. There is a gap in my skills here: I have slid sev­er­al times right into a dead end, tak­ing the class with me, and am miss­ing a good approach to avoid that.

Anoth­er res­o­lu­tion I am search­ing after relates to authen­tic­i­ty. I strive to be authen­tic when I talk to the class, when I dis­cuss the rel­e­vance of the mate­r­i­al (“this is impor­tant, but that is not”), when I deliv­er crit­i­cism or praise to indi­vid­ual pupils. It’s hard to describe exact­ly what this means because it involves bring­ing my per­son­al self into what I am doing, with­out at all mov­ing away from pro­fes­sion­al­ism. Authen­tic­i­ty always requires some lev­el of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, because some part of one­self is exposed (and relat­ed­ly, enabling authen­tic par­tic­i­pa­tion of the pupils requires hav­ing built a safe social and emo­tion­al space before­hand).
How­ev­er, this strife con­flicts with the need to respond to chal­lenges to author­i­ty in the class­room. Sim­ply put, a class and its indi­vid­ual stu­dents will test you, repeat­ed­ly. It’s always annoy­ing, often dis­ap­point­ing, and some­times upset­ting; but it remains a com­plete­ly nor­mal and nat­ur­al com­po­nent of school life. This is because, first­ly, class­es have a life of their own (they are more than the sum of their com­po­nents) and are on a slow but always active search for the behav­iors which are accept­ed as the cur­rent nor­mal. And sec­ond­ly, the teacher is the only adult in the room, and the teenagers, who are told exact­ly what they should do and how all week long for years on end, are exper­i­ment­ing, some­times even uncon­scious­ly, with bound­aries. Luisa is allowed to won­der what hap­pens if she does not actu­al­ly work on the assign­ment today, or if she goofs off while I talk, and there is real­ly only one way to find out.
There­in lies the dif­fi­cul­ty: the only way I know how to respond effec­tive­ly to such chal­lenges is with the oppo­site of authen­tic­i­ty: prepack­aged answers, unfazed body lan­guage, grad­ual con­se­quences, and rock-sol­id con­sis­ten­cy. To be effec­tive, response must cost as lit­tle ener­gy and self-involve­ment as pos­si­ble. Your favorite pupils are active­ly destroy­ing the activ­i­ty you lov­ing­ly and joy­ful­ly craft­ed for the class today: fine, don’t get angry, deliv­er con­se­quences and move on.
So, the joy and guid­ing ought to be gen­uine, but the con­di­tion­al iron cur­tain is there ready to fall at any time. That’s a dif­fi­cult state of mind to main­tain and the switch is a gym­nas­tic that I don’t quite master.

There are many such con­tra­dic­tions and bal­ances to be struck. Over­all I find the dai­ly dive into social and emo­tion­al mechan­ics of high school to be exhaust­ing, if reward­ing. I am still not sure that I will stick with this pro­fes­sion, but whichev­er the out­come, I will have no regrets hav­ing tried.