The Intro, Yet Again.
I worked with a school director who had made a very keen observation. As he periodically moved from classroom to classroom to check in on classes, he noticed that the most dynamic lessons where kids were happy, excited, engaged, and enthusiastic were taking place in situations where the teachers were doing less “teaching” in the traditional sense, and having more “natural” interactions with students. None of these teachers were standing at the front of the class lecturing, yelling, or pleading for quiet. They were talking in normal tones and engaging students in conversations that were interesting and respectful. There seemed to be no hierarchy of “I’m the teacher and I’m in charge.” It was more of a shared experience, it was hands on, and joyful. The “vibe” in these classrooms, if you will, was comfortable and comforting, whereas the other classrooms were disquieting, even disturbing to be in. For my director this was always problematic in running the school and one of the major hurdles to get over: how do you get more teachers to “stop teaching” and just become more present. Of course, in these classes where the teacher was more integral and less obtrusive, there was a lot of teaching going on. It just wasn’t being forced upon their students.
Having these candid conversations with this particular director taught me a lot. First, I was able to see it from his perspective. When you’re a teacher you don’t usually have the opportunity to do what he was able to do – walk around to all the classrooms and just observe. Second, it made me look at my own teaching style and reflect. Which kind of teacher was I? His observation held me in check. If he were to walk into my classroom at any given moment – which he often did – what would he see, feel, hear, and come away with? As I became more sensitive and aware of this observation I extended it to include everyone who walked through my door, not just the director. What would any student see, feel, hear, and come away with on any given day, at any given moment? What would a casual observer or parent observe? I moved toward a more “open door” policy of absolute openness and transparency. I welcomed visitors and encouraged them to come in. I extended this openness to my colleagues and many of them took me up on it. We would then share thoughts and reflections and it would invariably help us become better teachers.
This book, then, is perhaps just an extension of that openness. I am by no means claiming to have all the answers in Education. I am just a teacher who has been at it for most of his adult life. I started reluctantly at this profession, then moved to love it. My progress has been met with the same daunting challenges that most teachers face: low pay, long hours, sometimes less than supportive administrators, a mountain of bureaucracy to climb, and the everyday struggles with less than cooperative students, to put it nicely. But the rewards far outnumber and exceed those challenges and detractors, and after learning how to survive the initial years (like most career teachers) I have established a pattern for how to do it, love it, and get better at it over time.
As the years have passed I have made the same kind of obvious yet profound observations that my director had made about teaching by not being so obviously a teacher. Every day that I’ve been in a classroom – which now exceeds twenty years – I’ve learned something new that has informed the art and craft of my profession. I am now much more myself and much less the archetypal teacher. My students call me by my first name, but I am not their “buddy” whose role can be taken lightly or for granted. I am still and always will be their teacher. We are separated by that distinction and it is clear in the way that I will always be my daughters’ father and don’t have to remind them of that fact. For me the classroom is still a hallowed place that should feel more like a sanctuary than a prison, more like a workshop than a waiting room. Everyone who comes through its doors should look forward to being there, and once they are there they should be able to look back at their experience as good, beneficial, fun, and yes, even exciting. I wouldn’t want anyone to look back at their experience as time wasted or, even worse, detrimental to their growth as a human being.
This being said, I have tried to write a book on my experiences as a teacher for years, and I haven’t been able to put it all together. There are many reasons for this. My most notable excuse or rationalization has been the issue of time, that we teachers just don’t have the extra time to put into writing. We’re so focused on trying to stay caught up with the demands of teaching that we can’t do anything as demanding as writing a book. But that’s rubbish. It can be done. Others have proven this to be true. In fact, I find the most interesting writers tend to be those who somehow manage to juggle an extraordinary amount of work and outside projects and still compose writing that is absolutely relevant and captivating. How do they do it? I’ve been trying to find an answer to that question over the course of writing this book myself. It has come in fits and spurts, I have trashed one draft only to start again from an entirely different perspective, I have deleted some portions only to have them come back in another form, and just when I thought that it would never get done I have found myself back at it with renewed enthusiasm. It has now taken me almost a year and half since I first told myself that it was time to start the task of writing this book in earnest. Before then I had started with a similar determination, had written several chapters (about ten years ago I had gotten up to thirteen chapters before shelving it). I have found this process to be immensely humbling and have increased respect for “real” writers who have gone through it not once but many times. Perhaps, like anything else, it gets easier the more times you go through it, but I can’t believe that writing a book is ever entirely easy. Writing is not easy, and most writers will be the first to admit that. Writing, because it’s a way of organizing your thoughts into coherent communication, is only as easy or difficult as your thinking process. Once you begin thinking clearly about what it is that you want to write, then of course it becomes easier. But getting to that stage of clarity has been anything but simple. And now I understand what people mean when they say that simplicity is one of the most complicated things to achieve.
I will briefly describe the progress of this book, describe what it’s about, and talk about how it might keep changing, but I have to mention that I’ve written a new introduction for it countless times. I have a whole series of introductions, so many in fact that at one point I toyed with the idea of making an entire book out of the introductions. It would be like Groundhog Day for the reader, just a repetition of starts that never seem to go anywhere.
When I first started this book it was going to be comprised of rigorous essays about Education. I had the intention of doing solid research into each topic and really nailing down some of the issues that have fascinated and frustrated me over the years. The problem with that – once I got about 200 pages into it – was that I was completely bored by my own essays. I never wanted to go back and re-read them, and when I described them to others or forwarded drafts of them to colleagues and friends, I would get no feedback. It was clear that nobody else wanted to read them either. This was a problem. I was writing a book that nobody, including myself, wanted to read. I was doing it masochistically the way one serves penance. When I realized what I was doing I stopped. I almost felt like ceremoniously burning that first draft and thus purging myself of it forever. But I didn’t.
I moved.
I uprooted my entire existence and went to Holland for nine months. I got a fresh start and continued to move forward with the book. I didn’t move there just to work on the book, but it was certainly one of the reasons for it. When I got to Holland I had a series of strange dreams brought about at first by jet lag and then became recurring as time passed. I had started calling the book “The Utopian Cow” and kept waking up and drawing images of cows in the middle of the night. I did a series of woodcuts where I morphed celebrities into cows: Johnny Cash Cow, Charles BuCOWski, Amy Winecow, and Justin Beefer, to name a few. After many drawings, dreams, and jokes about cows, I awoke one morning and furiously began rewriting the entire book from the POV of a cow, just like Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis. I thought that I had nailed it. My book was going to be a classic in the vein of symbolic children’s literature like Louis Carroll and Frank L. Baum. It was going to still be about teaching, but layered into a surrealistic journey as told by a cow. I even started illustrating this version and have several woodcuts and drawings of me as the narrator/protagonist. I enthusiastically shared these chapters and drawings with my daughters, but I think they just thought that their father had lost his mind. After several weeks I went from feeling that I had finally found it to realizing that this wasn’t going to cut it. I was getting lost in so many of the mad ramblings, and there was no way to describe to others just what this book was about. A book about Education written by a cow? No, I’m the writer, the cow is the narrator. Really? Why? Well, I don’t know. Exactly who was going to be my target audience? Barnyard animals, educators, or literary marginalists who would read just about anything – some of whom may champion such a book – but who would largely just dismiss it as being too weird and incongruent. I knew that for the most part it was going to be a losing battle, and one that I was growing less determined to fight.
So I quit writing from the cow’s POV and just started writing. I wrote essays, stories, anecdotes and had no idea where these would lead. The funny thing was that I loved writing them. And I loved sharing them. And I found that others were enjoying reading them. After years of trying to write something, of telling myself that I was working on a book on Education, of masochistically going about it more like a soldier than a writer, I had finally gotten to the point where writing was a pleasure rather than a chore and I could write with greater freedom and precision. The problem now was something entirely new: I had no idea how these writings were going to come together as a book, and I started to doubt that I would achieve what I had set out to do. So I eased off for a bit, continued writing, and turned this exercise into a blog. I lowered my expectations of having a book come from this, but raised my expectations in that each new story and essay was better than the previous one. In other words, I was going somewhere, but I had no idea where I was going. I was traveling without a road map, going city to city without a true destination in mind.
For a while this didn’t bother me in the least. I continued writing and blogging and enjoying the experience, but the nagging expectation of having a completed book in hand began to gnaw at me again. I felt that I needed to keep trying.
It was at this point that I decided to return to the United States. The resettling process meant that the writing process would have to take yet another backseat. I stopped writing almost entirely. No more blogging, no more stories except for the ones that I felt compelled to write. These stories were few and far between, but at least they served to make me feel that I was still in game, that I could pick up and do it when I was moved to do it. There was still a concept and a desire to see it through, no matter how long it took. And that is pretty much where I am now. I am at the point where I am exceedingly thankful that nobody ever read that first draft, that no one had to suffer through that false flag of academic rigor and that I didn’t have to suffer through those awkward sessions between friends and colleagues who danced around the issue of “hey, your book sucks (but I just don’t know how to tell you that to your face.)”
I am also thankful that no one read my cow memoir and had to struggle to make sense of it. The pictures are cute and funny, and some day I might have to put this out as a real children’s book, but it was not the kind of book that I would ever feel proud of, especially one meant to be more a tome on Education than a journey down a rabbit’s hole.
So just what is this book intended to be (now that you know what it is never was)? I believe now that it’s more of what it started out to be, but much less “teacherly.” It’s exactly like the observation that my director made, but only outside the realm of the classroom. I am less concerned with sounding like a teacher than of being one. And just like those students in the classes with a teacher who is calm and engaged, I hope that my readers move through these pages comfortably and are comforted by what they read. These are a collection of stories and essays that reveal lessons that happen for both the student and the teacher when the teaching is not entirely being demonstrated. Things are being learned, but they are more of the anecdotal life lessons that happen in between the lesson plans, outside of the planned outcomes. They are more in tune with John Lennon’s famous line that “life happens when you’re busy making other plans.” They happen over time. They happen when least expected. They happen because we’re human and we’re interacting within the charged atmosphere of human expectations. They’re happening because as Even Ensler said about raising teenage girls, “it is a pathway to your own liberation.” And because I’ve worked mainly as a high school teacher, and because I’m a single father who is now raising two teenage girls, I’ve come to appreciate what she means by that. Teenagers are special for many reasons. They are at a crossroads in life between childhood and adulthood, they are forming their true personalities, they are grappling with the big issues of family and relationships, and they are truly a breed unto themselves. And after so many years of working with them I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. They are wonderful, open, and funny. They are the population I seem to identify with the most, even though I’m long past my own teenage years. There are some psychologists who believe that we find a comfortable niche in our own development and we stay there, some more than others. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, unless you’re a fifty year old adolescent who’s trying to still look and act the part. I find that teenagers keep me young in other ways. They are forever hungry to learn and grow and they are always tapping into what’s really cool, what’s really false, and they for the most part are extremely intuitive about people who are “real” with them. If you pass muster with this you will have devoted trust and unfathomable possibilities as a teacher. You will come to work full of wonder for what the day may bring, and for what lies ahead. You will be forever astonished.
And that is exactly what this book is about. It’s about being astonished, surprised, touched, challenged, and trying to always do better. It’s about being true to who you are as a teacher and as a human being. It’s about doing your job and making it look easy, the way a seasoned, well-trained athlete can make the most impossible tasks look effortless. Of course it takes years of training and lots of sweat and tears, but that’s not what observers are supposed to see. They’re supposed to see only the joy and ease at which you perform your role, and not the years of arduous missteps that you took along the way. But that’s not all. I’m including all of those inglorious moments when you fall flat on your face and learn from being an absolute idiot, making the kind of mistakes that you either learn from or quit.
In the end I hope that reading this book is as enjoyable as walking into a classroom where everyone is smiling and happy, or when you walk into a classroom where something extraordinary is happening, something that may be poignant or difficult but is obviously teaching a profound lesson that will stay with everyone for a lifetime. Or not. It might’ve just been a lucky shot. You might’ve aimed for something lofty but fell way short of the mark. This is the real beauty of teaching and the real core of what it means to have the incredible opportunity to do this for years and be forever grateful for having stuck it out for that long. Just like writing a book that never seems to become what it was intended to become, I have become a teacher although I never intended for that to happen. I guess I just got a little lucky along the way.
Utopian Cow 