A loss for Words

While I was reading to prepare of my first official blog entry, I was highlighting the chapters like mad so I would have sufficient things to discuss in hopes of receiving full points…especially since I missed last week’s blog post. However, after reading the story of the boy and the fox, and being incapable of focusing on anything thereafter, I have decided to take a risk by discussing the story and how it relates to events that are currently plaguing a close friend. Ironically, just before deciding to finally read the assigned chapters, I was catching up on my friend Jaremy’s blog that is all about his adventures, or rather misadventures in the far-away state (in more ways than one) of Mississippi, where he currently resides as a valiant new candidate for “Teach for America.” As a recent college graduate in nutritional science, with little teacher training and experience, he is teaching high school biology and chemistry in a school where he remains the only white person on campus, and where many students cannot read past an elementary age level or properly subtract double digit numbers. While I was reading the chapter, and having just read a recent experience of his when his students were…less than responsive, my thoughts kept wandering back to him and how I was unable to even respond to his last blog entry. I was completely speechless, at a loss of any words of encouragement. While the story of the fox and the boy had a happy ending, how much does it really mirror that of a real-life classroom situation? The roles seemed a little reversed to me. The fox, a.k.a.: the student, was somewhat eager to learn, while the boy, meant to be the teacher, had to be persuaded to “tame” the fox. The way I see it, us teachers, go into the classroom bright-eyed and enthusiastic to change the world! While the students, on the other hand, could use some convincing. One could argue that this is simply not the case for most students, but rather students, for the most part, are eager to learn and be “tamed.” But when I hear this, I think of my poor friend, who once romanticized about changing the lives of these disadvantaged students, instead faces the daily reality of a classroom full of solemn faces, constant insults, and physical fights. So while he continuously strives to reach these students, to take those “risks,” his efforts are constantly rejected. So in reference to the “cogs of differentiation,” what happens when the “student” cog is stuck and no amount of trying to adjust and fix the other two cogs, that the teacher indefinitely has control over, has any effect on the unresponsive “cog?” What if the student never allows the teacher to penetrate the wall they so fervently protect? It just can’t be as simple as having patience, or “seeing the invisible” or showing up everyday with the “intent to listen.” What will happen one day I find myself in the most difficult of classrooms, where the students rebuff any effort I make to create a personal connection to them? I hope this does not seem like rambling, but even after all my classes in education, all the preparations I have had the opportunity to experience to prepare me for teaching (that my friend never had) my response to this particular assigned reading, is that I still have no words of encouragement for Jaremy. That as much as I hoped to find some golden nugget of extraordinary, life changing information that might be of use for him out there in the real world…I remain to be at a loss for words.