Writing about writing—by the Write Source staff

True Confessions

I started teaching middle school language arts at the tender age of 22. A few years later, I started teaching high school English. I went straight from being a student in one classroom to being a teacher in another one.

The only real-life experiences I had were my summer jobs: washing dishes and working in two foundries. To be sure, these were enlightening experiences, especially working in the foundries, but I worked for only a few months at a time and then returned to the shelter of school life. Nothing else had happened in my life—serious illnesses, sudden hardships, family breakups—that would have forced me to grow up. I would guess that some of my students were significantly more life-hardened than I was.

So how did I get a job? Well, I met the basic requirements. I had earned an English degree, although I wasn’t particularly well read or a great lover of classic literature. Writing literary analyses and research papers didn’t do much for me, and I was far from a significant contributor during class discussions. In hindsight, I should have majored in journalism, a course of study that matched up more closely with my interests. (Perhaps because it had a real-world element to it.) Then I completed the required methods courses, and I did my student teaching.

During my job interview, I don’t remember the superintendent asking me why I wanted to become a teacher or why I would be a good teacher. We didn’t talk about favorite books, philosophies or philosophers, personal goals, or personal strengths. I think it was all pretty superficial: “I’ve reviewed your transcripts and read your letters of evaluation. Everything seems to be in order. The position is teaching seventh- and eighth-grade language arts. The job also involves coaching JV football and middle-school wrestling.” I was eventually offered the job, probably because I agreed to the coaching.

So four weeks later, I started. To say that I was too young and too inexperienced is an understatement. I know that today, but at the time, I was much too busy trying to stay one step ahead of the students to reflect on my role as Teacher. I can also say now that effective teaching requires a level of maturity, confidence, and expertise that I didn’t have.

Teacher and author John Taylor Gatto says, “We’d have much better teachers if we didn’t allow anyone under the age of 40 to teach. No one should be allowed anywhere near kids without having known grief, challenge, success, failure, and sadness.” Gatto’s point is not to check birth certificates, but rather to determine if teacher candidates have reached a point in their life in which they can truly guide and lead young people.

A July 2008 blog entry in Teacher Magazine, “From Lieutenant Colonel to Teacher,” provides an interview with William Howey, who had served 32 years in the marines, including two stints in Vietnam. He left a job in the Pentagon to teach high-school social studies. He says that students in his classes learned about the government in two ways: what the textbooks state and how the system really works. His courses became so popular that they were attended by the superintendent, parents, other teachers, and students from study halls. Howey believes that too many teachers lack the type of experiences that can add so much to the dynamics of the classroom.

In an ideal world, new middle-school and high-school teachers would have the following qualifications:

• an expertise in a particular discipline (history, math, science, English, art, and so on),
• a love of that discipline demonstrated, if possible, in real-life experiences (history teachers who are historians, English teachers who are writers),
• a desire to continue to learn,
• a confidence to help students become excited about the coursework, and
• a level of maturity that leads to meaningful, productive teacher-student relationships.

Of course, it would be extremely rare for any young graduate to meet these qualifications (I certainly didn’t), yet almost all new teachers come straight out of college. If we are truly interested in improving education, we need to rethink the hiring process. Let’s, for example, do more to encourage, and to make it possible for, older members of the community to become teachers. Recent retirees, people ready for a career change, people who simply want to serve—they all might make a world of difference in the classroom.

We also must make sure that our young teachers have thoroughly and thoughtfully prepared for their chosen profession, and that they have mentors, both in school and in the community, that they turn to regularly for advice and guidance. Making education a community effort will help the cause for everyone involved.

Special Note: See my Web site, www.DaveKemper.net, for a series of prose poems about my first years in the classroom.

—Dave