A Teacher's Opinion and the Classroom Door
Twice this week the issue of teachers and their opinions cropped up, first in David Berliner's thoughtful piece at The Answer Sheet and again in Robert Pondiscio's reaction to a math teacher's tweet about the Kavanaugh hearings. Berliner was not wrong in answering student questions about how he would use his vote, and Pondiscio is not wrong to point out that a teacher's First Amendment rights are surprisingly limited inside a classroom.
I've thought about this issue a great deal in my career, my thinking propelled by three factors:
1) I had teachers in high school who spent time trying to tell us what to think, and I hated it.
2) For most of my career, I have taught American literature, and you can't teach about the literature without talking about the culture it's rooted in, and you can't talk about American culture without talking about religion, race and gender.
3) My teaching of writing has always been rooted in getting students to express themselves, and that's hard to do with a classroom policy of "Only some ideas are okay to express."
So as a way of working through all this one more time, let me walk through what that meant in a classroom, and how it was challenged in my last years of teaching.
My students over the decades heard some version of the following many, many times:
Okay. Before we start on these notes and discussion, I'll remind you that I'm not advocating this and I'm not attacking it. My job is not to tell you to agree with these people or to disagree with these people-- but my job is to convey to you as clearly as I can what they believed about how the world works.
And that was a prelude to laying out Puritan beliefs and Romanticism and Realism. In answer to questions ("How could the Puritans belief that material things didn't matter but that material things were a sign of God's favor?") my answers were prefaced with "I think they would give this as an answer..." And I committed to representing each set of beliefs as true-to-the-originals as I could, making sure I neither highlighted the problems inherent in them nor ignored them. It is not an easy Continue reading: CURMUDGUCATION: A Teacher's Opinion and the Classroom Door