Go to a crowded public place (not one
of your classrooms though) and be a fly on the wall. Just watch.
What's going on? Set that scene.
My sister is taking part in an English
thing, where she reads one of her best papers aloud to a group of
other English students and teachers and such. And she has asked me to
take pictures of it. First of all, I get to see the mysterious Mr.
Goldfine, who I had heard so much about. He is talking to her about
her Xanthe paper. We entered the area. I felt a little in the way,
seeing as I was not a student in any English class yet, so I pretty
well stayed way off to the side where no one would see me, and
plastered myself to a large plant. And it turned out that Felicia
went pretty close to last, so I sat and I watched as students from
other English classes read their English work. And I listened to all
of it. I heard their revenge poems, their where I am from papers. I
watched and waited, until Felicia read hers, then I took a couple
pictures of her reading and cleared out. And from watching all of
this, I arrived at I a definite conclusion. I would never be able to
teach an English class. To me, most of the writing was hideous,
distasteful, and poor. I knew that I would never be able to read
things like that and say "This is a good start," or, if
something was halfway decent "I like this." I just would
not be able to do it, just because apparently from reading so many
classic books and such, my level of reading tolerance is not normal
enough to accept anything that isn't exceedingly high quality. Which
is why if I look at my writing I generally dislike it. So I watched
her little English recital, and I watched my own reading standards,
and I was convinced that they are far too high to be realistic. But I
am quite content with them as they are, and always will be.
I remember the reading, but not the photographer!
ReplyDeleteI never thought I could teach because I had crippling stage fright, but here I am 40 years later. I deal with the stage fright by creating a character known to the world as 'John A. Goldfine' to go in to school and do the damn work for me.
Here's the thing about standards: I'm not measuring student work against my own ideas of quality. Most students I could confidently flunk all semester and every paper, and wouldn't that be a time-saver!
My job is not to say how well a student paper measures up to my private tastes, but to figure out how it can better do a few simple things that most writing ought to do: offer detail, be clear, be worthy of the writer, avoid confusion, and so on.
That's a pretty low bar and has nothing much to do with things I read outside of work. So, now you know that if the GIS thing doesn't work out, you can always become an English teacher!