I am applying for admission to the Master of Arts in Teaching in English at Montclair State University. A goal of the teacher education at MSU is “to educate teachers who understand how to prepare their students for democratic citizenship.” For this essay, we are asked to reflect on one of the aspects of MSU’s Portrait of a Teacher, for me, item six, “To understand principles of democracy and plan and carry out instruction that promotes democratic values and communication in the classroom.” We are asked to contemplate our personal experience in light of this standard, and to reflect on which aspects have been in harmony with it, and which have not, and to imagine ourselves as teachers putting this standard into action.
The idea of teaching has circled as a kind of chorus in the back of my mind for 25 years. Could I do it? Could I have the discipline, the strength, the empathy, the fortitude, the patience, the creativity, the energy? As a student, school was a trauma for me. How could I make it better for my students? What about the institutional issues, all the rules and regulations that made me chafe when I was in school? How could I model “good” behavior for my students if I disagree with the overall structure of the institution? And with the world changing at the rate that it is, how could I possibly profess to be an expert in any field? How could any of us? These questions persist, but lately my desire to try to teach is stronger than my fear that I will fail. I am 46 years old and I want to change the focus from me to others. I am not sure if it’s Obama’s call to action, the fact that my daughter is growing up (she’s in middle school), or, frankly, my lack of success in finding fulltime work in my field after an eight-year hiatus, but this seems to be a clarion moment for me. All my logic and intuition tells me that now is the time to put my energy into becoming a teacher, to work as I hard as I can to become the best one I can be, leveraging the perspective I have and the confidence that is borne of my long experience.
If I think about my personal struggle in the context of a greater goal, creating a democratic environment in the classroom, for example, I am able to reframe my experience, good and bad, as part of a process of growth. I can attempt to overcome my own failings and do better, and perhaps, in time, inspire others to this hard work as well. Obama is eloquent about this:
The true test of the American ideal is whether we’re able to recognize our failings and then rise together to meet the challenges of our time. Whether we allow ourselves to be shaped by events and history, or whether we act to shape them. Whether chance of birth or circumstance decides life’s big winners and losers, or whether we build a community where, at the very least, everyone has a chance to work hard, get ahead, and reach their dreams. —BARACK OBAMA, speech, June 4, 2005
To be active in the democratic process, we must be free, and to be free, we must be honest. We must not label or judge and we must be scrupulous in our dedication to the finding truth. To be a citizen in a democracy is to participate. How can you participate if you are not free or if you are thought to be someone you are not? It makes me think: how will I give each student the opportunity to exercise freedom without losing control of the room? If they themselves are stuck in a rut or believe the labels they are given, how I will help them to be free? How can we, when these children are often suffering in families whose dynamics do not let them be their true selves, much less, be free? I ask these questions as a direct result of my personal experience of being labeled an “underachiever,” a brand that stuck with me for years.
Here’s how it happened. In 1971, on the day before Thanksgiving when I was in third grade at The Dalton School, the head of the Lower School brought me to the office for a meeting with my teacher and my parents. They had concluded that I should skip into fourth grade, but would leave the choice to me. I considered the options. In third grade, I was still in Lower School, with a contained classroom and lunch served at our desks. In fourth grade, I would have a House Advisor, a book bag, a locker, a schedule with classes to go to, and lunch in the cafeteria. The only thing I could think of was that if I skipped I would be in the same grade as the girl I thought was the coolest girl in the world. So I said I thought I should go ahead and skip.
My new House Advisor was named Tessie Ross – an ancient, bemused Dalton institution who also taught Social Studies, a subject I loved. My Science class was held in a room with lab tables and sinks and I noted with pleasure the design of the work book, which featured a special bookmark with cut-outs that let you check your work on your own. In English class my first task was to read James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” which made me feel very grown-up. I was assigned to the highest fourth-grade math class, which included both fourth and fifth graders. To my dismay, this math class was more advanced than my sister’s fifth-grade math class, a horrible embarrassment to us both. The day we found out, when we got home, we had a full-out screaming, crying fight: “You are not smarter than I am!” “I never said I was!”
So there I was, the precocious new fourth grader, butting heads with my charismatic, popular, dyslexic bigsister. The truth was, making the move was a mistake. I could not have known then what an ordeal it would be to navigate the halls and elevators, scrambling to get the right books from my locker into my book bag, trying to find the right doorway to the stairwell to the gym. I didn’t know how intimidated I would feel by the older kids in the cafeteria, or that the girl I thought was cool definitely thought that I was not. Instead of asking for help, I decided to not care. I developed a new, snide personality and decided I would not compete with my sister. I vowed not to do my homework for the rest of my life.
Making this decision was particularly subversive given my family context. My maternal grandfather, Salo W. Baron, was a revered professor at Columbia University. My mother graduated from Barnard at the age of 18, and a year later married my father on the same day as she turned in her Master’s thesis. My father was an autodidact, a poor boy from the Bronx who escaped his social milieu through reading novels, using the GI Bill to go to college and medical school and becoming a psychiatrist. He loved the intellectual energy of my mother’s family, adored his precocious, verbal children, and he relished every chance to share his experiences about people and the world with us. I was born into the heart of the New York City Jewish intelligentsia.
My father’s office was two blocks from school so he would drive us. School started at 8:20 a.m. We were supposed to leave the house at 7:40 sharp. We rarely managed this. My big sister, my little brother, Daddy and I would get into the elevator and Daddy would bark, “Hit the One!” to prevent the elevator from being decoyed to another floor. Then began the search for the car. We didn’t know at the time, but Daddy would have parked the car while drunk the night before, so in the morning he would have no idea where the car was. We would run up and down the streets from 100th to 97th between Riverside Drive and Broadway, looking and looking for the car. When we finally found it, he would put the radio on and we would rock out until we got across town. As soon as we crossed the park, Daddy would start the hunt for a parking spot, and soon as he found one, no matter how far we were from school, he’d kick us out of the car and yell: “Run like hell, you little ingrates, run like hell!” And then he would be off, smiling and waving, in his camel hair coat and Johnston & Murphy shoes for another day at the office, and we would be off, knowing that no matter how quickly we ran we would be late, exasperating our House Advisors, including Tessie Ross.
I stayed true to my downward spiral, enduring the contempt of Tessie and the others, and as a senior, proving the point, received a Valentine from my friends that said, “We all have remorse’s ’cause Betsy failed three courses.” I scored well on standardized tests, and as a result of this disparity, my college list included a range of schools. Deep down, despite my tough-girl act, I desperately wanted to get away and do better. I got wait-listed at Emory University, went for a visit in the full bloom of spring, and begged to be admitted, even though I would be graduating 87th out of 90 in my class.
As a freshman it was a shock to find out that even when I tried, I was not assured of getting an A. I watched in wonder as my organized classmates made schedules for themselves and found ways both to study and go to parties. I struggled, and sitting in the library trying to get my work done became a torturous battle between perseverating and concentrating. (I haven’t even touched on my proclivity for perfection, the way I would, as one boss later put it, “generate complexities and get lost in them,” or how a professor would write, “Elisabeth, there is no telling what you could do if you would only focus.” Nor am I discussing my self-diagnosis, decades later, of sensory integration disorder, and how it manifested itself as a child and young adult.) Three steps forward and two back, though, I started to build a spine and learn how to turn on my brain for purposes of work. Throughout this process, I was continually aware of the pitfalls of being labeled either brilliant or underachiever. I was constantly struck by the different dynamics in my classes – the seminar where we would all participate, the lecture halls where people would smoke or fall asleep, the people who would cheat on science exams. I was attuned to the professors I thought were honest and those I thought were on automatic pilot, or hypocritical. I became aware of the issues of class and race. At Dalton, I thought my family was poor. At Emory, I realized how sheltered I had been in my Manhattan up-bringing, and where my family might more realistically fall in a continuum of class and wealth. As an English major, I learned to find my point of view and to try to tell the truth in matters both academic and personal.
Senior year, I took an introduction to education class, and wrote a paper about technology in the classroom. A light went on, and I could imagine a work life. I decided to learn about technology by learning how to teach technology. This was a new domain, where no one was labeled and where everyone would be free to invent the future. I realized I wanted to try to find my fourth-grade brain and remediate myself, start at the bottom, solve problems, do homework, and learn how to learn by learning how to teach (both humans and computers). I loved the idea of the privacy of the computer, so children could fail or exceed without incurring the wrath of their peers or siblings. I started to read more about “learning how to learn” in works by Seymour Papert, Nicholas Negroponte and Marvin Minsky. That fall I started taking courses toward my M.A. at Teachers College in Computing in Education. My advisor there taught me a wonderful mantra that stuck: “Think process, not product; think verb, not noun.” Too scared to attempt to teach, and too excited by the prospect of development projects, I went on to a creative corporate career that included making interactive educational materials, doing interface design, and working as an exhibit designer.
Years later, when I was “Class Mom” for my daughter’s first-grade class, I would often stop by in the afternoon to bring a surprise snack. I remember looking around the room at the 28 children and wondering who was a Meyers-Briggs ESTJ and who was an INFP. I also used to wonder whose Mom or Dad might have passed out drunk the night before, who had a big fight with a brother or a sister in the morning, who might have gotten teased on the school bus, whose shoelace wouldn’t stayed tied. (I honestly didn’t think of the other side, who might have gotten a special surprise or figured out something hard.) I used to wonder at the multiplicity of attitudes and proclivities going on in that room at any one time and be amazed at how smoothly things were apparently going. And I would think to myself, “Maybe one day I could have a classroom and truly know each and every one of my students, and help let them become the best they can be.”Here I am, at the beginning of that “one day,” determined to create an atmosphere of freedom, structure, and support in my classroom, no matter how hard it is going to be. I am determined to listen to the chorus of voices in the room, and hear them as one, at the same time separating them into individual strains. I am determined to listen, and not judge. I am determined to set a good example, and try hard. I hope it works out. I hope Tessie Ross will be watching.
