The tyranny of the bell
While I’m complaining, I may as well add one more. This feature of classroom teaching is one of the most difficult to manage, and it is another aspect of this profession that I think most people don’t understand. It certainly contributes to the fast burnout of many young idealists, and maybe also to the subtle but pervasive battiness of many old, successful teachers.
Rather than explaining it myself, I’ll quote from Teachers Have It Easy: the big sacrifices and small salaries of America’s teachers (Daniel Moulthrop, Nínive Clements Calegari, Dave Eggers). The rest of the book is mostly like this excerpt: brief testimony from teachers, with chapter introductions and interstitial commentary from the editors.
Julia Normand, 65, English—Goldenview Middle School,
Anchorage, AlaskaWhen I was working at a law firm as a computer-support person, my typical day amounted to coming to my desk with a cup of coffee and a roll. I’d sit down and go through messages, drinking my coffee. I’d greet my co-workers when they came in; I’d make a phone call to set up a meeting and plan my day. If I had to go to the bathroom, I just got up and went. I was in charge of my own body, my own life, and my own schedule. I had certain things to get done, and if it took longer than a day, I got paid overtime for it. It was a high-pressure job in many ways, but not in terms of having thirty people needing your attention immediately and knowing that legally, I’m required to be in the room. As a teacher, if I step out of the room to go to the bathroom and something happens, legally, I’m responsible.
It’s just such a different thing. You feel like a person when you’re working at another job, and you don’t feel like a person when you’re teaching. It feels like being a train. Somebody switches it on, and it’s moving and you had better keep running. You don’t have the option to make a personal choice like “I think I’ll put this off until tomorrow.” There are thirty people, and they need things. You go with it all day.
I guess the equivalent might be if thirty people called me at the same time to tell me their computers crashed. But that’s just impossible. The network could go down and thirty people could call, but there’d be five or six of us in the IT department who would go troubleshoot it and one person would man the phones and say to people, “This is probably what we think is happening, it’ll probably be about fifteen minutes, we’ll let you know.” You work at high speed on it, but it’s not thirty people standing over you wanting immediate attention.
Teachers are required by law to stay within their classrooms. They are responsible for anything that happens when a student is in their charge. This is a reasonable requirement, yet because there aren’t reasonable breaks in school schedules, teachers often lack the basic liberties most occupations take for granted.Few other professionals see thirty or more clients at once, all with different needs, some of whom may be determined to work counter to your goals. The combination of these factors can be stressful, to say the least—especially when there is no possibility, for hours on end, of respite.
pp. 116–118
Work
I have three potentially full-time jobs. (1) Taking diverse and uneven resources and within the bounds of (a) state frameworks, (b) school- and (c) district-level requirements making a curriculum with daily lessons; (2) using this creation to teach kids every day, and to work with them however they need it, including after-school activities and tutoring; and (3) devising methods for collecting data on their progress, collecting that data, analyzing it, and using it in the performance of (1) and (2).
Most people seem to think that only (2) is the full-time job of teaching, and that (1) and (3) are mere periphery requirements. These people are wrong. I could easily fill a full 40+ hour week doing any one of them, and realistically I spend 20–30+ hours weekly on each, sometimes skimping on one (generally (3), or parts of it) for a week or two and then spending a maddening weekend or taking a sick-day (or both) to catch up.
I would gladly do any one of these jobs—I think I would even enjoy doing any one of them—or alternate between them from semester to semester or year to year. Ideally, if I were doing only one of them and two others were doing the other two, we would work in very close collaboration.
But giving each of the three the attention it ought to get is difficult-bordering-on-impossible, and this is one of the reasons I will not be able to keep doing this job forever.
Why Devanagari is awesome
I was disappointed to hear that the students of Sanskrit in the Eastern Classics program at St. John’s aren’t working much with Devanagari this year, at the discretion of their tutor (we used it a lot last year, with a different one). Apart from the practical consideration that a large number of Sanskrit texts and resources assume knowledge of the script, I found myself explaining to a current student why I think Devanagari is totally awesome. To wit:
In our (the Roman) alphabet, the order of the letters roughly follows that of the Greek alphabet, which itself follows that of the Semitic alphabets. Thus, a-b-c from alpha-beta-gamma from aleph-bet-gimel. But in all of them, this order is to all appearances arbitrary. Not so in India.
All of the consonants in Devanagari, as in most (or is it all?) of the other Indian scripts, are divided into five groups called sthānas—which literally means “standing,” or “position”—according to the place of articulation in the mouth, and the sthānas are themselves arranged according to distance from the throat.
Thus, the first group is articulated nearest the throat: the ka-sthāna.
The second is forward slightly: the ca-sthāna (“ca” being pronounced as what in English we would write “cha”).
The third is not necessarily further from the throat, but uses a further-forward part of the tongue: the ṭa-sthāna. (This is the “retroflex” sthāna, pronounced with the tip of the tongue straight up in the palate. It’s the stereotypical feature of Indian speech mocked in fake Indian accents.)
The fourth is at the teeth: the ta-sthāna.
The fifth is at the lips: the pa-sthāna.
Now, within each sthāna the letters are arranged according to prayatna (literally, “effort”). These begin with the unvoiced, unaspirated consonant, so the first letter in the pa-sthāna is “pa.” Next is the unvoiced but aspirated form, so the second letter in the pa-sthāna is “pha” (pronounced the same as “pa,” but with more breath). Next is the voiced and unaspirated: “ba.” Then the voiced and aspirated: “bha.” Then the nasal: “ma.” This pattern is repeated for all of the sthānas.
Some of these distinctions can be hard for English-speakers to hear and produce, since we pay less deliberate attention to them. For instance, we do have aspirated and unaspirated consonants, but we don’t distinguish them in writing, and most of us are usually unaware of the difference though we hear people who get them wrong as somehow vaguely foreign-sounding. The “p” in “pot” is aspirated; the “p” in “spot” is unaspirated. If you’re a native speaker, you’ll put more breath into the former, though you might not realize it, and you’ll think people sound non-native when they get it wrong.
It also looks like we don’t have so many nasals in English; but we have more than you might think, and just use “n” as a generic nasal-marker. For instance, people sometimes refer to “dropping” the letter “g” from words ending in “ing”; but nothing is being dropped, only replaced. “Talking” ends in a nasal of the ka-sthāna (a “velar nasal”); “talkin” ends in a nasal of of the ta-sthāna (a “dental nasal”). The place of articulation of the sound has changed, but neither form has more sounds than the other. You might say we’re using “ng” to indicate a single sound, which would be indicated with a single letter in Devanagari.
So the consonants in Devanagari are arranged like so:
k — kh — g — gh — ṅ
c — ch — j — jh — ñ
ṭ — ṭh — ḍ — ḍh — ṇ
t — th — d — dh — n
p — ph — b — bh — m
Each row is a different place in your mouth; and then within each row, all of the letters are pronounced with your mouth in the same position, but changing the manner of enunciation. So with your mouth in the position for the “k,” add breath to get “kh,” add voice to get “g,” add breath and voice to get “gh,” and make it nasal to get “ṅ” (which is the “ng” in our “-ing” words).
(The vowels and other letters come before the consonants, and are similarly—though perhaps less obviously—arranged according to manner of enunciation.)
One consequence of this ordering is that, whereas when looking up a word in an English dictionary I find myself singing the alphabet song in my head, when looking up words in Sanskrit I find myself moving my tongue through the different positions in my mouth.
When I first learned this, it seemed like something Tolkien would have used for Elvish. And it’s the main reason I think Devanagari is awesome.
A public service for teachers
Thanks to @randomspaces for the idea. Feel free to print or distribute.
The Moon
These photos were taken 40 years ago tonight, probably by my father but conceivably by my uncle, aunt, grandfather, or grandmother, about 14 months after they arrived to the United States from Argentina.