Lessons I Learned as a Teacher

And what a school bus parked by the ocean inspired in me

School bus in Cardiff (photo by author)

In 1985, I performed at Madison Square Garden for the first and most probably last time.

I appeared there with 1000 or so others to mark the completion of my Master’s in Education. And to mark the beginning of my life as a teacher.

Teaching would take on many forms in the following years, starting in hundreds of classrooms. But it has always has always been a part of my life’s journey, taking me out of the classroom, into conference halls, corporate offices, and years in the remote workplace.

In all those years, I learned more about the art of teaching and learning, business, and life than I did as a student.

The biggest lesson may have been that teaching was what I was meant to do. But it may not have been all of who I was.

Realizing that teaching is a high-stakes occupation

A map of my first few years of teaching read like a New York City subway legend.

This is how things worked. Full-time university jobs were difficult to get. So you played the adjunct game, working for several different employers concurrently.

Although I taught in many different schools and locations, the populations were similar: immigrants striving for better job opportunities or working to get into American schools and universities.

Learning for these students was an essential tool to achieve very concrete goals. These people were not “dipping a toe” into some subject area that might interest them one day and lose all meaning the next. It wasn’t some existential exploration.

It is no exaggeration to say that teachers are invested in their students’ success. But that investment, or your relationship to it may vary depending on what their students need to achieve.

In my case, if a student failed a language exam, for example, that might have prevented them from getting a job or delayed their application to a full-time program of study and might have impacted their visa status.

The stakes were very high.

A rejection, a job, and a family

My teaching degree was my second choice after I failed to get into either of the two graduate schools for international studies to which I applied.

No matter.

I ended up teaching at one of them anyway, finally free from the hectic all-city marathon of my first year or so in the profession. I spent the next 15 years there honing my skills on teams of three teachers per class, sharing and critiquing materials and approaches to teaching and learning.

Whether it was the intimacy of the program's team-based design or the nature of the people present at the time, they became family. Not only did these colleagues teach me to excel at my profession, but they also coached me through some of the major events of my life.

Through potluck dinners, babysitting each other’s kids, celebrating marriages, and mourning loss, relationships were formed that have lasted a lifetime.

There were often kids hanging out in the office when someone couldn’t get a sitter or the child was not quite well enough to make it to school.

When I brought my daughter to It was “Take Your Daughters to Work Day,” in 1999, my students and colleagues fawned over her.

I was so proud to be her mom.

She came into the classroom with me, and although very little work got done that day, we all learned something.

The students got to see me in a different role. My colleagues got a better perspective on who I was as a mother. My daughter could better visualize me at work after that.

Years later, she would start blaming me for working too much. That was a lesson I never quite learned.

The journey continues

During a winter break in San Diego a while back, I saw a school bus parked facing the ocean at Cardiff Beach. It sat there as if there in homage to the sea.

“These are the optimal learning conditions,” I thought.

My kids entered the school system just as my professional role had evolved from teaching to the field of instructional design. I had a less active role in the classroom and was designing materials for digital learning.

This meant that I was focusing on the relationship between teacher and learner in a new way.

Observing my children, I saw how restrictive the public education system is and how that impacted the two of them over time.

Because of this, I focused my energies on and wrote about the K-12 educational system for a brief time. During that period, Paolo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Repressed” was front of mind.

I had been introduced to Freire in grad school and so admired his work that I incorporated it into my graduate thesis. He was a Brazilian-born educator whose work to eliminate illiteracy in Brazil eventually landed him in prison in the 1964 coup d’état.

He re-defined the relationships between teachers, students, and society. The antithesis of his approach was the “banking” concept of knowledge, in which “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing.”

The three concepts of Freire’s that have had the most impact on teaching and learning are dialog, problem-posing, and praxis.

Dialog demands an assumption that participants are equals; problem-posing is essential to moving dialog along; and praxis, the presence of action and reflection, is what makes dialog effective.

When students can become equal partners with their teachers in their learning journey, it’s nothing short of liberation.

I’ve never forgotten the importance of this concept, neither as a teacher nor as a writer. We must always involve our audience in our process as writers. Otherwise, our voices cannot be heard.

That is why seeing a school bus parked facing the ocean, seemingly lost in thought, stirred such deep feelings in me.

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Today’s post was drafted in the form of three separate notes, as part of an ongoing series of exploring the power of the Bite-Sized Storytelling Boost.