building a better teacher

This article is amazing and it makes me want to be a better teacher. For a long time I have believed this, from the beginning of the article:

"...successful teaching depends in part on a certain inimitable “voodoo.” You either have it or you don’t. “I think that there is an innate drive or innate ability for teaching,” Sylvia Gist, the dean of the college of education at Chicago State University..."

I have been traveling again for the past few days because of MCAS retesting in the library, where my class"room" is located. The other day I was wandering around during my prep period and saw a teacher as young and almost as inexperienced as I am, teaching chemistry to a class of 10th graders who were, to my amazement, LISTENING. This has happened on a handful of occasions in my classes, usually when half the kids are out sick and it's the day before the final exam. It depressed the crap out of me that I rarely command that kind of attention, respect, obedience, etc.

Then I was sitting and correcting papers in a quiet room where I could hear the class next door, freshmen in a language class. The teacher is way more experienced than I am, but her class sounded like a complete disaster. The kids were joking, yelling and audibly running around while she tried for over ten minutes to get through one simple concept that should have taken two minutes. Finally she lost her patience and started yelling, which I do far too often. The kids settled down momentarily but were back out of control in a few minutes. This also depressed me, because it made me think I could do this for 20 more years and still have the same issues.

So I often think the only explanation is that there must be some kind of teaching gene. There are some teachers that simply hypnotize the kids, while others spend most of any given class telling kids to sit down, stop talking, etc. Most days I fall into the latter category. It's soul-crushing, and I feel an incredible guilt towards the good kids who sit there and try to learn something despite the chaos surrounding them.

I thought I'd enjoy teaching Spanish because I enjoyed learning Spanish. I didn't anticipate that so little of my time would be spent teaching because so much time is spent on classroom management. It's definitely a science, and I'm always trying new methods that I've read about or heard from other teachers. Some days I feel like I'm getting better, but it only takes one bad interaction to make me feel like I'll just never succeed.

A lot of times I feel that if I were in a different district my life as a teacher would be much easier. The kids at my school bring a lot of baggage with them that we often can't even imagine, and it definitely influences their behavior. I think it might be more pleasant to teach at a school where the students have more "positive" adult role models at home. But I also have this masochistic drive to stay at this school until I can't go on one more day.

So I read the crap out of this article and the Taxonomy it talks about. The taxonomy is a list of "specific and concrete actions" that separate the hypnotist teachers from the shrieky ones like me. One action shown in the first video was a teacher making a "hands down" motion with her hands. The kids stopped writhing for a minute, and she taught them something. Magic! I tried it today, and I am shocked to report that it actually worked. This is only after I removed two very disruptive kids from the class and threatened a third with a visit to the dean, but still, a tiny success.

Well it's only Monday, so by tomorrow I may be right back to hating teenagers with a burning passion. But I'm going to try my best to maintain this positive attitude for a few more days and see if I can improve my hypnotist/shrieky ratio.