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As I thought about my own life and my values I realized that
something Parker Palmer had said rang true for me. In Change, Palmer wrote an
article entitled "The Heart of a Teacher. Identity and Integrity in Teaching".
In it he said:
Recovering the heart to
teach requires us to reclaim our relationship with the teacher within. This teacher is one
who we knew when we were children but lost touch with as we grew into adulthood, a teacher
who continually invites me to honor my true self – not my ego or expectations or
image or role, the self I am when all the externals are stripped away. (p. 19)
My teaching values had to become coincident with my personal values.
And for a long time they had not been. I needed to reevaluate my role in the classroom and
I had to determine where it was I wanted my classroom to be. I needed to develop a
classroom vision and my own vision of how I wanted to live my life and both visions needed
to become coincident.
As I said I realized that there had been a pervasive sense of fear in
my classroom and now it was not just the fear in the gross anatomy course, it was in the
histology and embryology courses I was teaching as well. My courses were taught in the
first semester of the first year of medical school and in these classes a tremendous
amount of material was presented. We hoped they learned the material as well, but I became
very aware that most of my students were fixated on learning for the examination and not
for accumulating the foundation knowledge to practice medicine. For many, all they wanted
to do was give back the facts that I had given to them.
As I said, a few years ago I was able to see with clarity the anxiety
level of my students rise and crest as we reached the midterm examination. What I saw was
that my students became very focused on memorizing facts and simply learning for the exam.
The students got so wrapped up in figuring out what facts they needed to learn that they
forgot why they had to know them and who they had to know these facts for. The vision of
patients in their future was lost and they had no notion of why they were learning. Grades
and doing well on the examination become the sole motivation for their work.
I can think of a very specific incident which illustrates this point.
It was October and the mid term exam was one week away. My students were getting very
anxious. They asked the question that all students ask. What is going to be on the exam?
They were persistent and they were very focused on that particular exam. However as I
started my lecture I looked down at my watch. It was 1:00 p.m. and I knew that at that
moment my mother was undergoing a gall bladder operation 4 hours away in Connecticut.
Now why weren’t my students more interested in learning for my
mother. No they couldn’t help her. They were not doctors yet. However they would be
someone’s doctor one day. And why were not asking me what they needed to know to help
their patients? That was never a question. It was always: What’s on the test? Not
what do we need to be the best doctors we can be.
But then again we were the system. We didn’t want our students to
learn, though we said we did. We wanted to evaluate them and see if they could pass our
tests. Our vision, if there was one, was that of the gatekeeper. We would decide who would
make it. Who could go on and who would be turned back?. We had to insure that they were
“qualified” to proceed along the academic pathway. I had to get away from this
madness.
When I think back on my teaching methods and how I had taught my
students in the past, I knew one of the ways I tried to motivate them was through fear. I
have talked a lot about what we called the “Socratic Method”. As I have said,
John Housman in The Paper Chase would have been proud. I tried to intimidate my
students in the classroom. Many years ago, I really believed that students learn best with
a little fear. We called it ego trauma. I had asked them questions and they were to
answer. If they failed and were embarrassed in front of their peers and in front of me, I
was not sorry. I only tried harder to embarrass them into learning more. And I felt
justified in this approach. For many of us, the idea of being negative and chastising
students came as an integral part of the academic culture. Many of us looked forward to
finding out who failed our exams. Many of us like to play the part of the gatekeeper. Many
of us like to make our students uncomfortable. But now, after many years of this behavior
I had to stop. I could not do it any more. Now I realize that it just was not me. I could
not continue this teaching game – pretending to be someone I was not. I could not act
the part of the authoritarian dictator.
Now I can look at Parker Palmer’s words and really understand what
they mean for me. In The Courage to Teach he says that,
If we regard truth as something
handed down from authority on high, the classroom will look like a dictatorship. If we
regard truth as a fiction determined by personal whim, the classroom will look like
anarchy. If we regard truth as emerging from a complex process of mutual inquiry, the
classroom will look like a resourceful and interdependent community. (p. 51)
Parker Palmer, Mary Rose O’Reilley, Jane Tompkins, Susan Saltrick,
Steve Gilbert. I had found Circe and Teiresias. I knew the way I had to travel. I had only
started the journey, but now I had people to help me. Now I had people to tell me that it
is OK to be me. That my classroom should be a place that I like. My teaching should be
done the way I liked to teach, coincident with my values. That my students need love more
than chastisement. I had been wandering around in Dante’s Dark Wood and Susan
Saltrick (1997) in a wonderful talk given in a New Jersey workshop in the Fall of 1997
made me realize that I was not alone. She said:
For at forty years of age, and in
what I hope will prove the very, very early years of the middle of my life, I, too, know
what it is to be in a dark wood, where the straight way is lost.
By most measures, I have known my share of success. But it seems these
days that the rules by which I once conducted my life and work do not govern as they once
did, and the truths I once held no longer have much purchase in my life. The straight way
is lost, and the woods are dark. Without knowing quite how, or when, or why it began, it
seems I am involved in the search for some new sequence of meaning which will make clear
the way of the rest of my life. And, in truth, I am afraid.
I tell you this, not for your sympathy, nor for your prayer, but
because I have come to believe that many of us may be feeling discomfited in these times
of change and dislocation. And I hope my thoughts on this feeling of loss and my struggle
to replace the old order with some new construct may provoke some insights, some
reflection, -- that from it may result the formulation of a vision worth working toward. A
journey like this requires a vision—a vision that is rooted in reality so that we can
actually achieve it, that has a clearly defined path so that we can take action, that
provides a strong base of support so that we are not alone when we grow discouraged—a
vision that gives us hope for making better the world in which we find ourselves.
I cried that day. When I heard Susan talk I heard words that I had
wanted to say but was not able to utter. I cried because I had been so proud and so blind
that I had not even realized what was happening to me. My heart ached as Saltrick talked
and I realized that I too had turned 40 and wandered into that dark woods and lost my way.
Today I can say that I have a vision and my vision is a safe,
humanistic classroom that is a community. My goal now is to explore how I can achieve that
safe classroom. My efforts are directed to helping my students learn in an environment
where there is no fear, or where fear is kept to an absolute minimum. There should be
excitement in my classroom. Chances need to be taken. Efforts need to be made for students
to feel free, to try new ways of learning and not be afraid of failure. It is this concept
that led me to think of our pond gardens.
About six years ago my wife and I decided that we wanted to start a pond garden in our
backyard. We knew nothing about pond gardens. We had no experience with them and knew no
one who had them. Yet we would learn. Or I should say my wife would learn. She read books,
magazines, and pamphlets. She would go to garden shops and ask questions. Her teachers
were gardeners who tried it before. They were the merchants who were selling the pond
equipment. My wife went to seminars to hear how pond gardens were put together. And she
would then teach me what we needed to do. She would relay to me how we had to go about
putting in this pond garden. And we started. I would dig and she would tell me where to
dig and how deep to go.
And as we built our pond, as we assembled the materials and organized
our plans, the one thing that I noticed was that there was no fear. We did not worry about
what “grade” we were going to receive. We did not worry about whether our pond
would pass or fail. No, we knew we would do our best to follow all the things that we
learned, and put in the best pond we knew how. And as we did this not only was there no
fear, there was no concern about failure. If one plant died, we would try again. We would
go back and try to figure out how to keep that plant healthy. We planted a lotus and yet
last spring we both thought the lotus was dead. We left it in the pond thinking that we
would need to try again. Maybe the water was too shallow. Maybe the plant was too deep. In
the future we would learn how to keep a lotus alive. Only it did not die. And by July we
had six beautiful lotus flowers. Had we been graded for our knowledge, we would have
failed. Yet because there was no fear, because we could afford to try and see what
happened, the lotus would come alive. We also have lots of fish. We did not want them to
die and so we learned how to keep them alive even through the winter. It did not work the
first winter. But we tried again. Last winter they made it! This spring we are waiting to
see if they are back. Only time will tell.
Our pond garden has been a source of enjoyment and wonder for our
family. And we truly learned how to make pond gardens. We learned how many fish, frogs,
tadpoles, plants, snails and other creatures would fit in our pond. And we learned how to
make waterfalls. We learned how to make bogs. And now we have five ponds in our backyard.
They are all connected. They each have their own characteristic feature. And because there
was no fear we learned much about ponds. And we have learned enough to teach others about
ponds.
I want my safe classroom to be like my pond garden - where my students
learn much, and where they are not afraid to try to learn. I think of the vegetable garden
I plant each spring. I have a plan for the garden. I know when to put in the onions, when
the peas get planted and in Philly you can’t plant tomatoes until after Mother’s
Day. Our vegetable garden is planted and tended to over the year with a mixture of
information that was handed down to me from my father and my grandfather and from new
things I learn from reading gardening magazines and poking around garden nurseries. My
garden is my classroom and I really enjoy being there.
Too often I think what we do as teachers, and what I know I did as a
teacher is simply give my students the Burpee Seed Catalogue and ask them to memorize it.
Then we ask them to tell us how many days until the tomatoes germinated, how many inches
apart to plant the squash plants, and how long until we could harvest our first peppers.
Many of my students are actually very good at memorizing these catalogues. They have made
a career out of it. Unfortunately many have never placed their hands in the soil and
really learned anything about gardening.
In my safe classroom, students should not need to memorize information and give it back
just as they received it. In fact, I don’t want them to learn that way. I don’t
even think that is learning. They pass tests; they score well on exams. But they do not
learn. They never enter the garden. Their hands never touch the soil. They never prune or
stake the tomatoes.
My goal now is to try to bring my students into communion with my
subjects. I teach embryology. As I look back over my teaching, my students were able to
learn when organs developed and how they developed. I showed them pictures of the
development of an organ system. I made them animations of how organs developed. However,
what was often missing was the realization that we were talking about human life and its
earliest beginning. We were not speaking about abstract facts or unseen theories. No we
were talking about human life and my students really never had to address that fact. I
would show them development of an embryo or fetus at 8. 10, or 12, weeks, but they did not
know what that embryo or fetus looked like. They did not understand the fact that this was
early human development and respect was a very important part of the subject.
Two to three percent of infants that are born have structural
abnormalities. How do my students relate to that fact? Do they realize that they are
learning this so that they can help these children?. Do they understand that their
learning will one day permit them to console worried parents. This learning will allow
them to become healers. They have joined a community, just as all learners do. Yet they
often do not acknowledge that they are part of a community – only a test-taker ready
to confront the next examination and then the next and É..
I was not there to be the gatekeeper. I was not there to make sure they
were “qualified”, whatever that was. No, now I can be there to help them. I can
be there to help them to be part of the community. It is a community they want to be part
of, but often don’t know how. They are afraid they will be told they can’t join.
I want them to know that they can. It is their community as long as they have the passion,
as long as they have the fire.
Parker Palmer (1998) in the forward to Mary Rose O’Reilley’s
new book, The Radical Presence said,
Tips, tricks, techniques are not
the heart of education--fire is. I mean finding light in the darkness, staying warm in a
cold world, avoiding being burned if you can, and knowing what brings healing if you
cannot. That is the knowledge our students really want, and that is the knowledge we owe
them. (p. x)
And I want my student to have that fire. I want them to have it so that
they can warm the lives of their patients. So that can use it to heal.
And I want my students to feel safe, and find the fire, and finally I
want them to find out who they are and why they were placed here. For my ultimate mission
is to help them understand their own relationship to the community in which they live. And
how they can help this community and those that are in it.
Parker Palmer in To Know As We Are Known said:
At this moment we have an opportunity to revision
education as a communal enterprise from the foundations up, - in our images of reality, in
our modes of knowing, in our ways of teaching and learning. Such a revisioning would
result in a deeply ethical education, an education that would help students develop the
capacity for connectedness, that is at the heart of an ethical life.
In my vision this ethical education begins in a safe, humanistic
classroom where students have the freedom to learn without fear and in the comfort of
knowing that those teaching them want them to succeed. In this way they can not only join,
but also help the community to which they belong. But how do we build safe classrooms? And
how do students like safe classrooms, especially if they have been taught in other types
of classrooms their whole lives? And finally how do other faculty and administrators like
safe classrooms? I was about to find out.
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