Student reviews and the way I talk

This week I’ve been walking around as if I’m a little out of my body. I feel like I’m second guessing how I’m being seen by everyone I meet. I feel self-conscious about what I’m wearing, how I stand in front of class, and mostly, how I talk. I’m gently rebuilding my identity that has been a little shaken. What brought on this week of uncomfortable self-awareness? Student reviews. Any teacher thinking about asking their students to review their classes or theirs teaching: rethink. Or make sure you’re prepared for a week of potentially rebuilding yourself.

I usually love hearing back from my students about how they enjoyed or didn't enjoy the class. I take their feedback very seriously and have used it to tweak my classes and grow in my own teaching after every year because not only do I ask them to critique the class, I ask them to critique my teaching. I've been doing this since my student teaching and value it as an important part of my development as a teacher. Of course, there is always some negative feedback (too much work, lessons I thought were great that they hated, afternoon lessons) and I take it with the positive and work with them both. I am always slightly down after reading these, somehow the negative comments dig much deeper than positive, encouraging ones – much like any kind of criticism, I suppose – but I reread them after a few days and things look better, I’m able to take in the positive comments a bit more and accept the negatives with a cool and calm head. And I’m okay with who I am as a person and a teacher. This year I’ve had a particularly hard time with one class. I haven’t even got to the rereading stage yet.

In between watching myself from outside myself and second-guessing how everyone is viewing and thinking about it, I’ve been pondering why this class’s comments have bothered me so much this year. It was a difficult class to connect with, I struggled all year. However, in my mind we had connected. Apparently not. That bothered me. But I think what has made these comments particularly difficult were a few comments about my voice. I have gone through a lot with the way I talk. From high school when I first picked up a mashed up accent from hanging out with American missionaries to college where a rude American student mocked the way I said “Monster” to coming home to people who couldn’t get over my “American” accent, I have continuously wrestled with the way I sound and the way I would like to sound. I have accepted it now, I kind of sound American, kind of something else. I sound different. And that’s okay. I’ve been in different places, had different friends and I’ve picked up aspects of both. Being called American used to bother me intensely because I desperately want(ed) to be allowed to be Zimbabwean. Today, I’m okay with sounding different and accusations of an American accent roll over me in ways that would make my mother (who usually had to deal with the flood of emotion after someone had accused me of an American accent) proud. But, the two comments that I can’t get past just yet – by a couple students in this class – are about my voice. Obviously I’m still dealing with it and my insecurities about it.

I’ll get over this set of reviews. The second reading, reminding myself of the positive comments (one student said it was her favourite class), will help.

I suppose I don’t have to ask for feedback. But I think it is healthy. I’ve got to find my identity outside of the opinions of the people I teach. And sometimes it’s good to be reminded that not everyone loves me and my teaching.

How to learn humility: 1. Teach a class of teenagers for a year. 2. Ask for their honest feedback about you and the class at the end. 3. Read the feedback. 4. Get upset, and then, get over it.

Dear student, as you leave my class

Dear student, as you leave my class,

allow me to share

some advice and some hopes, I have,

for you.

Don’t leave the words

and their power

Here

As you go

There.

Don’t be so fast to walk away from them,

from it.

I hope for you

that poetry continues to

confuse and delight

with ideas that

challenge and frighten

lift and flood

you.

that stories give you eyes

into spaces you cannotwillnot go,

and force you outside and into parts

of yourself,

of places you are safe.

that characters make you weep

and exalt

and want to be more

than you were before you met them.

I hope for you

--all your life--

that words

make you laugh and cry,

take you to depths and heights of

love, and joy, and pain.

make you wonder

with eyes wide open.

make you better.

Because they are so much bigger than

that exam you’re taking

that essay you failed

Because they will

--if you let them, dear student,--

set fire to your world.

Miss Bell, October 2012

Non-sooty kettle days

And then there are days I want to cry for other reasons

Student A to Student B as I was walking out:

“Do you know what I love about English? ... No tests.”

Upper 6 student – yes, of the ones I love, who has been doing English for 6 years and who chose the subject for A-Level as one of her 3 subjects to study for 2 years:

“Miss Bell, something has been bothering me. What is Literature? I know what Accounts is, but what is Literature?”

Me: --------.

Me: “I know you’re tired and its hot and it’s after lunch [who ever thought that lessons after lunch in Zimbabwe were a good idea?] but I have to teach you and you have to learn.”

“Can’t we all just sit? We can learn communication skills.”

Written on the board by Form 2 teaching her new vocab word to the class: “willy”.

Me: [hmm… student teaching never quite prepares you fully. What would Mr Vande Kopple do?]

Student on board: "Definition: cunning.”

Me: [Phew.] “Ruth, there’s only one L.”

Me: “And that is the end of the lesson.”

Class: Applause.

But I suppose you can’t have the sooty-kettle days without a whole lot of non-sooty kettle days in between.

A sooty kettle

I have a post in my "in progress" document about how much I love this place and my students and how hard it is going to be to leave when I have to but it is proving hard to write... so for now, there's this.

Today two of my L6 (12 Grade/Juniors) students arrived at the staffroom door holding two pot plants.

I said, "Oh thank you", facetiously, ready to call the Biology teacher for them to hand the pot plants to.

Oops. Turns out one of them was for me.

Last week another teacher and I organised a "Sixth Form Evening: a night of poetry and drama" that included some creative presentations of the texts (drama and poetry) that they are studying. We invited other schools who are studying the same ones and after a week of stress and panic managed to pull off a not-technological-hitch-free but eventually-smoothish evening. I enjoyed it and the girls involved made me so proud with their work, enthusiasm and passion. It was one of the triggers for my how-to-leave-this-place post.

Enter flower pot. Not just any flower in any pot. A purple flower in a sooty kettle. I almost cried. Here's why.


Time's Fool
by Ruth Pitter

Time's fool, but not heaven's: yet hope not for any return.
The rabbit-eaten dry branch and the halfpenny candle
Are lost with the other treasure: the sooty kettle
Thrown away, become redbreast's home in the hedge, where the nettle
Shoots up, and bad bindweed wreathes rust-fretted handle.
Under that broken thing no more shall the dry branch burn.

Poor comfort all comfort: once what the mouse had spared
Was enough, was delight, there where the heart was at home:
The hard cankered apple holed by the wasp and the bird,
The damp bed, with the beetle's tap in the headboard heard,
The dim bit of mirror, three inches of comb:
Dear enough, when with youth and with fancy shared.

I knew that the roots were creeping under the floor,
That the toad was safe in his hole, the poor cat by the fire,
The starling snug in the roof, each slept in his place:
The lily in splendour, the vine in her grace,
The fox in the forest, all had their desire,
As then I had mine, in the place that was happy and poor.


It's one of our poems.

Darn you, students.