The Living Rockumentary

Since all of our readers will be reading tonight at 7 PM, here's my contribution. I know I don't write much bloggishness these days but it's because most of my computer time is spent doing other things, such as writing reflections for courses, like the following one. But it is musically related...

I’ve been playing music in front of audiences for twenty-five years. It’s a juggling act: voice sings, one hand strums, another fingers notes, ears are attuned to the sounds being produced by my band mates, mind is synthesizing rhythm, melody and lyrics, and eyes perceive the smiles and bobbing heads of the audience members. From years of experience, I’ve become a pro and I know this routine well.

And yet one Saturday night in December 2004, I became conscious of a new awareness. All of a sudden, while playing the fourth song in the set, I sensed people in the back of the room were beginning to tune our band out. We may have had these peoples’ attention for the first few songs but now it was time for them to talk to the other folks at their table, see to ordering more drinks, check their cell phones, etc. Somehow, a heretofore undetected level of consciousness made this apparent to me, whereupon I positioned myself onstage directly behind our lead singer for no other reason than it was an odd thing to do. Standing behind my band mate, I couldn’t see whether that table in the back started paying attention to us again but my new third level of consciousness told me that they noticed. How is it that in twenty-five years I’ve never felt this level of super-consciousness that is not based on sensory perception but rather on an awareness of how effective I am as a figure to be watched and paid attention to in a room? Simple- I became a teacher.

Kids don’t hide their waning interest. Heads on desks, glazed expressions, sighs when instructed to turn to page 78. It’s obvious. Only now the new teacher doesn’t address these telltale sings of boredom, focus loss, disengagement. The new teacher tries not to even let it get that far. He has discovered his third level of consciousness. The man who previously had trouble talking on a phone while simultaneously putting away the dishes is now prowling a room of thirty adolescents, aware that there are twenty minutes left in class and he’s covered eight of the fifteen passages chosen for explication in his lesson plan for today, aware that this idea of the prisoners who are characters in the novel connects to the in-house detention punishment experience that some of these students will relate to, aware that this passage connects to the theme of loss of humanity we talked about last Friday, aware that Tashika is writing something while he is speaking but recalling that Tashika rarely takes notes so while his mouth is still talking and asking a leading question and listening for an answer or keeping the third eye (the one in the back of the head) open for a raised hand, his body has moved to Tashika’s desk, his finger is lightly tapping on Tashika’s notebook, his eye perceiving that Tashika has been writing out her Christmas list, message gets through to Tashika but not to any of the other students that teacher knows she’s off-task. Meanwhile, awareness kicks in that Patrick and Jonathan are facing each other, so the prowl resumes, off to another corner of the classroom; along the way, ear catches Janelle’s whispered answer to the leading question, eye glimpses Leah’s heavy eyelid blink and mouth acknowledges Janelle’s answer, repeats it for the class, utilizing some dramatic voice modulation in concert with the body swooping past sleepy Leah’s desk heading towards Patrick and Jonathan. Did I mention that third level of consciousness? It is one of twelve one needs to perform successfully in this occupation known as teaching.
Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? It is. Sincerely, it surely is, no sarcasm meant whatsoever. After years of juggling my artistic pursuits with day jobs that paid the bills but left me feeling like the daylight hours of my life amounted to little more than adding to a company’s bottom line, I’ve found that teaching synthesizes the very things that appeal to my personality, my interests, my energy, my soul. Reading, writing about, discussing, and teaching kids to love literature, writing and language five days a week speaks to the core of my being. The teaching profession encompasses my love for learning, the charge I get from being “onstage,” the spiritual fulfillment I feel knowing I’m helping teach children how to use their imaginations and exercise their minds, and most importantly helping children achieve their goals in ways that I can best aid them. Allow me to explain the latter.

Although I entered the field of teaching convinced it’d make me a better person based on my recent positive experiences working for a company that stressed community outreach goals over profits (and nearly went out of business in the process; at any rate, my position was outsourced) and becoming a father (and all the educational experience that entails), I’ve learned in these few nascent months of teaching that it’s not even about me anymore. Almost everything I do regarding teaching is done with my students’ interests in mind.
At the moment, I teach primarily seniors, several of whom (and most likely more to follow) have submitted to me their drafts for college entrance essays to read through and comment upon. In each of the six I’ve read so far, I feel I was able to make suggestions beyond grammatical corrections that will significantly enhance their essays and improve their chances of being accepted to the colleges they’re interested in. In other words, I’ve suggested ideas that will help my students inspire these colleges to accept them, to make the schools realize how wonderful they are as human beings, to reflect the things that endear me to them as their teacher. I possess this power of helping these students on their next crucial step in life towards higher education in a way that they, their parents or other teachers who might not be so attuned to the power of composition as I am possibly might not have. And this is something I do outside of our classes. If I tried to express the amount of thought and work and concentrated energy I devote to unit plans and lessons and how to present them, I would expand this essay to an unreadable length.

That said, I take very seriously all aspects of education in the 21st century. As I detailed in the opening, I’ve developed classroom management skills that entertain my students (as well as me) but serve to keep them focused on the lesson at hand, which is carefully constructed to make sure that the students are thinking themselves as much as possible (my “lectures” consist mostly of asking questions, then asking those same questions in different ways and providing examples to explain ideas in the literature we’re reading that relates to their own lives, as well as incorporating anecdotes, silly voices and drama that underscore the points I’m trying to make). I prepare my lessons so that the goals of the curriculum frameworks and the various needs of my students are taken into consideration. Whether students need special attention due to I.E.P.s or taking into account the fact that students learn in different ways, I find myself presenting ideas in several formats. The repetition in itself helps get points across but when I find that I verbalize an idea, write it on the board, relate it in terms an adolescent will comprehend more easily, use the idea in a joke, and assess the idea by reviewing it in another class session, testing it verbally as well as compositionally and returning to it in the future as we take on additional works of literature, I find that my students learn. For example, how much do my students love irony? Let me count the ways. They’ve seen examples of it in all three books we’ve read, encountered it in an article from the syndicated column News Of The Weird I shared with them, understood it in a ballad I played on my guitar and sang for them that I wrote myself, acknowledged its presence in several current movies many of them have seen and finally in a short-answer assessment on a test I gave them, where they had to come up with their own examples of irony and explain them to me in their own words. Can every high school student define and provide their own original examples of irony if asked? I couldn’t say for sure, but I know mine can. So there! Ya cain’t tell me I ain’t a good english teecha.