In
this introspective article in The
Chronicle of Higher Education, English professor Douglas Howard (Suffolk
County Community College/Ammerman) describes his feelings when a former student
returned to tell him that she’d been accepted into a highly competitive nursing
program. “I have to admit that, for a while after she left, I felt pretty
good,” says Howard, “about my job, about my college and its mission, and about
the whole idea that education can improve and transform lives and that we, as
instructors, do play an important role in making that happen. Here was a
student with dreams, and we had helped her turn them into reality.”
But
Howard’s mood turned somber as he realized that he has no idea what happens to
the vast majority of his students. “That is the strange reality of teaching,”
he says. “For a few months, we are front and center in our students’ lives… And
then it all comes to an end. Students leave, move on, transfer, graduate, and,
quite often, we never see or hear from them again… Teaching, in this regard, is
the great open-ended narrative, the romantic fragment, the perpetually
unfinished symphony. And, like all great fragments, a good portion of it works on
and through our imaginations… Did Jim, who talked about becoming a therapist,
go on to graduate school in psychology? Did Jessica, who argued so passionately
in class against the death penalty, make it as a lawyer?”
There is the possibility, says
Howard, “that some students – maybe most of them – will leave our classrooms,
walk out into the world, and never give us, our lessons, maybe even our
subjects another thought. Years later, the point of our entire course, or the
concept that we drilled so repeatedly and emphatically, could be a
multiple-choice question that they will get wrong.”
But then his mood turns more
hopeful. Maybe some students “got the message and will put it to some use down
the road, whether or not they remember our names… Months or even years after
they’ve graduated, students may develop an interest in a topic that they first
learned about in our classrooms. Without even realizing or crediting us for it,
a student may understand some allusion, get more out of some film, contribute to
some conversation, figure out some mathematical equation, or make sense of some
scientific data all because of something we said or did – because of a paper
that they struggled with, an exam that they studied for, or a lesson that went
completely as planned or horribly awry.”
Howard concludes with an
analogy. His two-year-old daughter, he says, probably won’t remember most of
what her parents did with her in the early years – the birthday party, the kiss
goodnight, a family vacation. And yet all those things have played a part in sculpting
her as a person. “The same goes for my students,” he says. “I want to believe
that what I do in the classroom matters on some level, that it has helped to
shape their sense of the world and is responsible, in some small way, for their
sense of self and belonging. If teaching is an act of faith, then we need to
believe in order to do our jobs.”
“A Teaching Career
in Fragments” by Douglas Howard in The
Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 28, 2014 (Vol. LX, #24, p. A31-32),
No comments:
Post a Comment