Todd at tremble.com writes:
“I am quite serious when I say I would be totally happy if this video was the World Wide Web’s grand finale, and then the Internet just went dark and we all went back to making candles and reading the bible and stuff.”
And it’s not an isolated moment:
A fitting response, in the guise of a blogging how-to:
Take that, Internet.
I remember reading that the University of Mississippi had banned sticks in its stadium, in an effort to reduce the number of Confederate flags at games without overtly violating first amendment freedoms. There was quite a hullabaloo apparently. I laughed about it, I think. I doubt I would have been confident to say that no such place existed, that no such controversy would erupt, that nobody cared about or took seriously that sort of thing, but I was surprised by it anyway. It seemed so strange and quaint. So archaic. I probably reflected on it for a few seconds, but if I had a thousand years I don’t think it would have occurred to me that I might one day live and work in that state, attend courses at and be awarded a degree from that very school.
But here I am. The way I got here is recorded in the early posts to this blog; a lot of what has happened since is chronicled in the posts between then and now. After college I wanted to take a few years to experience a place I didn’t know, to try being helpful during my time there. So I applied to the Peace Corps, and almost went, but decided in the end that I could accomplish the same things in my own country. I had some vague notion of a teaching program in Mississippi where a lot of graduates from my college have gone, and a friend who had recently entered the program filled me in with the details, so I rescinded my Peace Corps application and applied instead to the Mississippi Teacher Corps.
A short time later I was in Oxford, which became (and remains) a town that fascinates me. Two months and I was in Sardis, Mississippi — a two stop-sign and no stop-light town — where I would have easily the worst and hardest year of my life. Then to Oxford again, and then a year in Jackson, the tiny and hollow urban center of an overwhelmingly rural state. And then they give me a degree and I’m free to go. (I’ll be staying another year in Jackson first, though.)
That, in a paragraph of fewer than a hundred words, is my Mississippi Teacher Corps Experience, and I hardly know how to begin unpacking it.
I wrote in my portfolio (the culminating project of the coursework for the M.A. degree) that, “I wasn’t a teacher when I arrived and I am one now.” That change was often hard and I’m still not sure that I always like it. Last year I often hated the person I had to be to get anything done at school, to maintain any sort of order, to function as (I hope) a beneficent part of a system that I believed (and now believe still more firmly) to be corrupted and corrupting. I can justify my role with a belief that even this corrupted system is the only way out of something for a lot of people who badly need out of it, that it can sometimes offer a badly tarnished glimpse — but a glimpse! — of what is beautiful and true, but sometimes it takes a hard willfulness to continue making this justification to myself. This year I’ve adjusted some, and I’ve found my bearings, and I’m usually happier with who I am in my teacher clothes. But I’m not always sure it’s good for me, and I’m not sure I haven’t just become complacent about some things. That can be a disheartening thought.
Still, I am deeply grateful for this experience. One of my central aims in coming here was to get to know my country better, and that I have certainly done. I don’t pretend to know it thoroughly or with any extraordinary insight, but I know it better now than I did two years ago, and see better both its beauty and it ugliness. Mississippi is a sad and a beautiful place, and I have come to love it. I can’t stay here, but I wouldn’t trade it.
I am thankful also to the Mississippi Teacher Corps for introducing me to my classmates, so many of whom have been so instructive to me, and so many of whom I now count as close friends. The frustration and struggle and conversation we’ve shared have been as formative to me as anything has. It feels rare and somehow magical to find a community of such people. Whenever I leave from one I brood over the likelihood of ever finding another.
I can’t better describe my “MTC experience” than I did in my portfolio: These two years have taught me beyond all measure. I have become a vastly more competent and useful teacher, in just about every sense that clause can be understood, and I have become a different and better human being.
Quitting can be a heated issue in the Mississippi Teacher Corps. My class lost three people (out of twenty something), all of whom finished the year teaching. This year’s class has lost several more than that, several have left the state and their schools in the middle of the term, and there is some bitterness about it. People leave after finishing the year, and there’s some shit-talking unfortunately, but there is usually at least an acknowledgment that they had the fortitude to finish the year. Leaving mid-year strands a district without a teacher — especially frustrating when the abandoned classes include those that, like many that MTC teachers teach, will take a pass-or-don’t-graduate exam at the end of the year — and the MTC thus asks those who leave (or is there more teeth to it than this?) to refund the expenses it has already paid toward their training and coursework.
I thought about quitting a lot. Most of us do, I think, though some of us more seriously and some of us less. I thought about it seriously and often. It was hard as hell. It was the most excruciating year of my life, and I wanted it to end. I was miserable at work, and I felt like an exile, alone in the community where I lived, treated usually with degrees of hospitality but at a tangible distance from the two communities (white and black) that I lived between. I would not have finished the first semester if not for the biweekly Friday nights in Oxford, staying at the Day’s Inn talking and joking over drinks with other MTC teachers, with my people — young and vaguely hip literate liberal artsies — or the weekly (or more) trips to my nearest MTC and TFA friends, forty-five minutes away. In the second semester I seriously considered not returning for a second year. I swore not to return to the same district, to move — if I stayed in Mississippi — somewhere with a better administration and more of my peers.
I’m not sure why I decided to stay. I think it was a lot of things. I wanted a chance to keep at this and start fresh. I wanted to get to know better some of the wonderful people in this program with me. I wanted to get to know Mississippi better, which is a fascinating and beautiful state, and I hadn’t had enough time to see it, I thought, in my awful first year. I had heard repeatedly that the second year is a lot easier. I had gone through a big break-up. I had put off deciding long enough that my options for what to do next would have been limited, and I didn’t know exactly where I’d go. I was reluctant to quit when I had started something and gone half way. I’m glad that I stayed. The second year is not easy, and I’m not always happy about going to school in the morning, but it is indescribably improved (as a result of both experience and a better environment, I think).
I wish that quitting weren’t so stigmatized in the MTC. Sometimes we all congratulate ourselves for persevering in such a difficult endeavor, but there’s sometimes also such ugliness toward those who leave. There is an ugly and patronizing and infuriating suggestion — which I’ve heard from every level of power in the MTC and even from the state superintendent of education — that if you teachers just do x, y, and z, then. . . as if those of us who follow their every advice and suggestion to the furthest extent that our mortal endurance allows will somehow not have immensely challenging first years. Some of the people who suggest these things have taught in these classrooms, but clearly not recently enough if they can say such patently offensive nonsense.
I’m pleased whenever a caring and competent adult decides to occupy these classrooms with these students. It’s sad when they leave, and they risk leaving their students as they may have been before — with no caring or competent adult — whether they do so after two years or two weeks. But this job is hard as hell, especially when you’ve never done it before, and this will be so no matter how conscientiously you weigh every move and follow every good suggestion. Nobody should feel bad for thinking about leaving. That’s normal. I encourage them to keep on if they have the strength. If they don’t, and continuing isn’t worth it to them, it’s sad but I can’t really blame them. I’m sometimes amazed that more don’t go.
Some time ago, while I was neglecting this blog, we were asked to write a bit either about ways to motivate students or to get students to turn in homework. Maybe they’re the same question, though. A fair and common way to solve the homework problem is not to assign it. Students who have parental pressures (like a lot of I.B. students, I find) are fairly good at working at home; most others won’t do it, and I doubt they can be compelled. Some teachers say that allowing students to start work in class and finish it at home increases the odds of getting it back, and I’ve done that many times. It’s either a way of somewhat increasing the odds of getting homework back, or of drastically decreasing the odds of getting classwork back.
So I don’t usually give homework. When I do, I try to make it a fairly simple task that is connected to what did or what will happen in class, like coming up with a topic for an essay to be written in class, or thinking of a word or a sentence that is an example of something discussed in class, or something else along these lines.
Motivating them in the most shallow sense is often as simple as getting their parents onto them, but more meaningfully has to be getting them to give a damn about what you’re doing, and that’s a lot harder. “Connecting it” to “real-world” concerns is overrated and minimally effective, I think. It may convince somebody to pursue drudgery as a solemn duty, but it will remain drudgery. Really motivating them requires convincing them that the thing is worthwhile for its own sake, that it’s beautiful. Being excited by it yourself helps a lot, especially with the ones who are still open to kind and responsible adults; with the others, I don’t know. I don’t think there’s any trick.