I
am an educator who has been teaching students from the ages of eleven through
adulthood for over 35 years. Of course, my profession is disseminating what I
know to others but it’s also a process of learning a great deal from my
students and other people. I love that and how we do it here in the US. No, I
don’t really like the trained poodle hoop jumping that I have to do to get
certificates or proof of training, but there is a little fun in learning
shortcuts. And I love sharing ideas and learning how to do new things.
This
past year when the pandemic shut school down, I had to learn a great deal about
teaching remotely. I’m 58 and have never taken any classes remotely except for
a few video training courses that have more often than not seemed like time
wasters—poodle hoops. As an English teacher who has always specialized in
reading and reading instruction, I quickly learned that for my high school
English courses I needed to be focusing on literature and writing because those
are the key components of what students are expected to take away from those
courses. The quickest way to get literature across to my students who might
struggle with reading is to simplify how they read. So I lead them to audio
books. Short cuts do not prevent you from learning, they just need to be
recognized as short cuts and many of the incidentals—the emotional attachments—you
would gain might be lost. Duh! How could someone who has taught for so many
years not know that? I did know it, but crystalizing it to the exact skills
lost through my teaching was not something I could have articulated so well
before this era of remote learning. It’s another thing I’ve learned: how to
articulate why face to face learning is so much better than remote learning. Nevertheless,
I love that we have ways to communicate and share ideas during this time of
physical distancing.
I
think that it is also true that we can learn remotely from the people of the
past. Of course I think that! I teach literature. Our ancestors have so much to
tell us about living. The American ideals began hundreds of years ago and they
were expressly written for us to see and to emulate. The very handwriting of
men and women from the past is still visible for us to see, just as are
paintings and physical structures which we live in and conduct our business and
gatherings. To read a journal or letter from hundreds of years ago in the very
building in which it was written can carry you back to a particular time and
that presence of humanity from such a long time ago is both inspiring and haunting.
I love that.
I
love how ideas are exchanged and how we learn. The importance of communication
and leaving record of how to do things, how people feel in certain spaces, how
they have felt—all of that is so very inspiring to me. As I grow older I know
that what I do now does have an impact on others. Yesterday I ran the last five
miles of a fifteen-mile training run with one of my cross-country athletes who
is training for and running a marathon for his senior project. I know he got the
idea of doing that from me and running those last difficult miles with him is
such a privilege because I know he will accomplish it. I know how he feels.
Sharing that in a way that can’t be fully articulated is an honor and a joy
that I feel privileged to do. How we share our ideas and our living with one
another is very important. It is how we love one another.
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