Tuesday, June 20, 2006
The Visible Ben
Invisibility can be a beautiful thing. There have been many times during my teaching career when I enjoyed being able to sit back and watch how things worked in my school without being an active participant. If students knew I were observing them carefully with the intent of recording their behavior later in a public forum, I strongly doubt I would have very much content for this blog at all. The same principle applies to my school's administrators, who generally continue to act in an incompetent fashion unless they get called out for it. And this discounts all of the times I have had the disquieting experience of encountering students outside of school, at a movie theater, restaurant, or during an evening out with friends, and longingly wished that my chosen web-moniker actually conveyed a measure of immunity from their perceptions. Yep, if I had to pick a superpower...invisibility would be right near the top of the list.
But as Ellison's most famous protagonist suggested, invisibility also carries with it a few drawbacks. Avoiding scrutiny can allow for a measure of freedom, but it also prevents one from fully integrating into a social system. For example, during my time at Underwood, my primary focus when I was in the classroom was on teaching. I considered my primary role to be an educator, not a friend, and consequently I ignored most of my students' attempts to pry into my personal life. This was not always a flat out refusal. Frequently, I parried their questions with a well-timed quip or an exaggerated falsehood. When asked how old I was, for example, I typically said I was seventy and that a lifetime of working with chemicals had kept me looking young. Yes, I drive a green Lamborghini Diablo. Yes, I really do have a laboratory in my basement. And yes, I'll be around next year.
Ok, that last one wasn't so much hyperbole as a blatant lie. I've known for quite some time that this would be my last year at Underwood, but as the summer drew nearer, I found myself torn as to how best to broach the subject. I asked a few different people for advice. Some said that the best way to handle situations like this was to be open from the get-go and explain my plans and the rationale behind them in an honest and candid fashion. Others suggested saying nothing. After all, why should it make a difference what happens after this year? They wouldn't be my students next year anyway!
Ultimately, I went with the latter option. I felt like revealing my plan to depart would only bring up a wide array of uncomfortable questions...or reasonable questions with uncomfortable answers. Questions like "Why are you abandoning us?" or "Don't you like us?" and of course, "If you do like us...then why are you abandoning us?!?" For someone who prefers to maintain a level of distance between the students, such inquiries could be rather awkward, not to mention the fact that they could further disrupt my already chaotic classroom near the end of the year. So I adhered to silence and invisibility once again, and the end of the year drew closer.
Today was the last day I would ever have to deal with students. Yet again, the school couldn't determine exactly how the schedule was going to work for the day, so I ended up seeing approximately half of my chemistry students first period before walking down to the gym for two and a half hours until the principal felt like handing out report cards. After finishing two cryptograms and a crossword puzzle, it was back to homerooms to pass out final grades. As I had no homeroom, I went upstairs to the honors program main office to see how my top chemistry students final reactions...an invisible observer, as always. Their grades were good, so generally they were pretty happy. They hovered around each other, swarming around and calculating their GPAs. Then one of them asked me if I would be teaching physics next year.
Now they've posed this one to me before, and every time I've evaded the question. But these are my good kids. My honors students. The ones who actually have cared about what I had to teach them and did well in my class. And this was my last chance to tell the truth.
So I told them the truth. I admitted that I would be going to graduate school next year and that I would no longer be around next year. Some of my freshmen from last year, who expected to have me next year as their chemistry teacher were also in the room.
Their reactions startled me...jaded, cynical, invisible Ben. They seemed genuinely disappointed that I would be leaving. A few of them may have suspected that I was leaving thanks to a few blabbermouthed members of the faculty, but this was the first real confirmation. While they didn't cry, a few of them seemed just on the verge. One student told me that I was her favorite teacher and that she fully expected to be in my class next year. (Never mind that when asked who her favorite teacher was when she was honor student of the month, she had said "all of them," it's the thought that counts!) Some of the students asked for pictures. Most of them asked for my e-mail address so they could contact me about college recommendations.
This rather touching display took me by surprise. Teachers in today's schools, and especially where I teach, get so little respect on the whole, that this sudden outpouring of praise and friendship was a shock to the system! After all the years of secrecy, sarcasm, and solitude, the connections I formed with these students, the ones I had tried to distance myself from...they were real, and not just something I might write about here, or for an ed. school paper, but to my students. Only on that penultimate day at Underwood High School did my students confirm that I had left a lasting impact, that I didn't just stay up late every night lesson planning for nothing, and that I would in fact be remembered and remembered positively as one of the better science teachers...hell, one of the better teachers they ever had. Even if I didn't reach all of them, or even most of them, at least I had done some good.
That single moment, right before noon that Tuesday confirmed once and for all that I was not invisible to my students, and despite all my previous doubts on the subject, I really could not have been happier.
Invisibility can be a beautiful thing. There have been many times during my teaching career when I enjoyed being able to sit back and watch how things worked in my school without being an active participant. If students knew I were observing them carefully with the intent of recording their behavior later in a public forum, I strongly doubt I would have very much content for this blog at all. The same principle applies to my school's administrators, who generally continue to act in an incompetent fashion unless they get called out for it. And this discounts all of the times I have had the disquieting experience of encountering students outside of school, at a movie theater, restaurant, or during an evening out with friends, and longingly wished that my chosen web-moniker actually conveyed a measure of immunity from their perceptions. Yep, if I had to pick a superpower...invisibility would be right near the top of the list.
But as Ellison's most famous protagonist suggested, invisibility also carries with it a few drawbacks. Avoiding scrutiny can allow for a measure of freedom, but it also prevents one from fully integrating into a social system. For example, during my time at Underwood, my primary focus when I was in the classroom was on teaching. I considered my primary role to be an educator, not a friend, and consequently I ignored most of my students' attempts to pry into my personal life. This was not always a flat out refusal. Frequently, I parried their questions with a well-timed quip or an exaggerated falsehood. When asked how old I was, for example, I typically said I was seventy and that a lifetime of working with chemicals had kept me looking young. Yes, I drive a green Lamborghini Diablo. Yes, I really do have a laboratory in my basement. And yes, I'll be around next year.
Ok, that last one wasn't so much hyperbole as a blatant lie. I've known for quite some time that this would be my last year at Underwood, but as the summer drew nearer, I found myself torn as to how best to broach the subject. I asked a few different people for advice. Some said that the best way to handle situations like this was to be open from the get-go and explain my plans and the rationale behind them in an honest and candid fashion. Others suggested saying nothing. After all, why should it make a difference what happens after this year? They wouldn't be my students next year anyway!
Ultimately, I went with the latter option. I felt like revealing my plan to depart would only bring up a wide array of uncomfortable questions...or reasonable questions with uncomfortable answers. Questions like "Why are you abandoning us?" or "Don't you like us?" and of course, "If you do like us...then why are you abandoning us?!?" For someone who prefers to maintain a level of distance between the students, such inquiries could be rather awkward, not to mention the fact that they could further disrupt my already chaotic classroom near the end of the year. So I adhered to silence and invisibility once again, and the end of the year drew closer.
Today was the last day I would ever have to deal with students. Yet again, the school couldn't determine exactly how the schedule was going to work for the day, so I ended up seeing approximately half of my chemistry students first period before walking down to the gym for two and a half hours until the principal felt like handing out report cards. After finishing two cryptograms and a crossword puzzle, it was back to homerooms to pass out final grades. As I had no homeroom, I went upstairs to the honors program main office to see how my top chemistry students final reactions...an invisible observer, as always. Their grades were good, so generally they were pretty happy. They hovered around each other, swarming around and calculating their GPAs. Then one of them asked me if I would be teaching physics next year.
Now they've posed this one to me before, and every time I've evaded the question. But these are my good kids. My honors students. The ones who actually have cared about what I had to teach them and did well in my class. And this was my last chance to tell the truth.
So I told them the truth. I admitted that I would be going to graduate school next year and that I would no longer be around next year. Some of my freshmen from last year, who expected to have me next year as their chemistry teacher were also in the room.
Their reactions startled me...jaded, cynical, invisible Ben. They seemed genuinely disappointed that I would be leaving. A few of them may have suspected that I was leaving thanks to a few blabbermouthed members of the faculty, but this was the first real confirmation. While they didn't cry, a few of them seemed just on the verge. One student told me that I was her favorite teacher and that she fully expected to be in my class next year. (Never mind that when asked who her favorite teacher was when she was honor student of the month, she had said "all of them," it's the thought that counts!) Some of the students asked for pictures. Most of them asked for my e-mail address so they could contact me about college recommendations.
This rather touching display took me by surprise. Teachers in today's schools, and especially where I teach, get so little respect on the whole, that this sudden outpouring of praise and friendship was a shock to the system! After all the years of secrecy, sarcasm, and solitude, the connections I formed with these students, the ones I had tried to distance myself from...they were real, and not just something I might write about here, or for an ed. school paper, but to my students. Only on that penultimate day at Underwood High School did my students confirm that I had left a lasting impact, that I didn't just stay up late every night lesson planning for nothing, and that I would in fact be remembered and remembered positively as one of the better science teachers...hell, one of the better teachers they ever had. Even if I didn't reach all of them, or even most of them, at least I had done some good.
That single moment, right before noon that Tuesday confirmed once and for all that I was not invisible to my students, and despite all my previous doubts on the subject, I really could not have been happier.
