I took my first chemistry course as a junior in high school (Grade 11). I think that was pretty common in the U.S. for most people in my generation. I guess chemistry was still an elective in most high schools in the early-90s. But it was an entrance requirement at most colleges by then – and most of us were college-bound. I think. In any case, I was in a chemistry class with lots of my peers when I was 16.
It didn’t take me long to figure out the pattern of the course. My teacher would lecture about chemistry stuff for a few days and then we would go back to the laboratory benches at the back of the room to do lab stuff for a bit. The lab stuff would require some of the ideas and calculations our teacher had been telling us about in the lectures. Labs were never anything new in terms of the concepts involved though.
By “lecture,” I mean he would reiterate the important ideas from the textbook we were supposed to have read. I never read the book. I am not sure I ever opened it – or even picked it back up once I put it in my locker at the beginning of the year. Frankly, I never really understood the point of assigning readings if the teacher was just going to tell us, the next day, which bits were important to remember. But that was the ritual: assigned readings reviewed in lecture, punctuated with a few labs here and there to demonstrate some of those same ideas. This teacher had his unique style, but the basic format was very familiar.
I liked my teacher. He was funny. One of the most deadpan people I have ever met. He looked, dressed, and moved like he had been sent over from central casting to play the part of a circa-1980s nerd. His name even sounded like it belonged to someone with a pocket protector and polyester slacks pulled up to his sternum. I probably shouldn’t divulge his actual identity though, so I’ll just call him Mr. P.
I always liked science, so I was motivated to do well in science classes. (That was very much not the case in other classes, but that is a different story.) I also saw myself as one of the smart science students. I was competitive too, and more than a little bit arrogant, so I found ways to show off in science classes. I’m not proud of it. But I was only 16 at the time, so hopefully you will not hold it against me that I was a bit immature. In any case, I can’t change my history now.
Mr. P seemed to be impressed by my nerdy, teenage bravado.
I don’t remember much about his class.
I don’t think I learned much from him.
Actually, all I really remember from Mr. P’s class are 2 incidents in which I thwarted his plans. And this part, if I’m being honest, I have to admit I am a little proud of.
But I’m not proud that I am proud of it.
(Maybe I am a little…)
The first incident was a 2-page multiple choice test. I think I was seated in the row farthest to the right in the room that day. That detail is only a relevant, because it happened to be the row closest to Mr. P’s desk, which meant he started handing out the test on my side of the room. So I was one of the first students in the class to get a copy of it. I started working immediately as he padded along from row to row, passing out the test forms, answering questions from other students, and tending to whatever logistical stuff came up as the rest of the class got started. It was all normal test-day stuff – and he was an experienced classroom manager, so it only took a few minutes. But so did the test. It was composed entirely of multiple choice questions – and they weren’t particularly well constructed. Most of the wrong answers were so obvious, I could eliminate them straight away. Even if he hadn’t telegraphed all of the phrases that would show up as right answers on the test by his cadence and tone-of-voice in lectures, I could have quickly gotten to most of the right answers through process of elimination. I think I only had to calculate a couple of things – and he had made the numbers easy enough I could do those calculations in my head (I am fairly certain he did that purposely, to minimize math anxiety). So, about the same time he was getting back to his desk after he finished handing the test out, I was getting to his desk to hand it in.
I set the test form on his desk and he looked at me expectantly. He assumed I was there with a question. After a beat, his expression changed to one of surprise and he said “oh, you’re done already?” Then he laughed in his deadpan way and said something about it being a record. The next day, he handed the test back to me in a protective, plastic sleeve, explaining that was his way of framing it. In my haste, I had made one silly error and gotten one answer wrong. But I had gotten all of the rest correct – including the extra credit question. So my total score on the test was 100%.
The other incident I remember came shortly after my speed run with his test. His laboratory exercises were the epitome of cookbook labs. They were essentially worksheets, with each step of the exercise described in detail, and they included actual blanks to fill-in with the necessary measurements. ‘Measure x grams of this. Dissolve it in y mL of that.’ And so forth. Sometimes he would demonstrate particular lab techniques, but for the most part, his written directions were complete enough for us to follow on our own – like robots.
I don’t know that we ever knew, in advance, on what days we would be doing lab exercises. I think we would just show up, like any other class day, and he would hand out the laboratory worksheets. We would each get a pair of goggles and head to the benches at the back of the room to start doing what it said on the sheet.
The final step of every one of his lab exercises was to calculate our error. He would give us an accepted value for whatever the final measurement was supposed to have been and then we would calculate how far off our actual measurement was (as percent-error). That is actually an important thing to be aware of in science. Sources of error are always present when you are science-ing in the real world. He wanted us to be aware of this part of the nature of science – which is a good pedagogical ambition and I genuinely think he deserves credit for that. But it wasn’t well executed. He just opened the door for more of my shenanigans.
After a few weeks of doing these sorts of labs, I had a sense for what Mr. P considered to be an acceptable ballpark for percent-error. So when he handed out the lab worksheet one day, I just started at the end and reverse-engineered the exercise. I started with the accepted value and figured in what seemed like an acceptable amount of error. I had to think a little bit about whether the actual measurement was more likely to be larger or smaller than the accepted value, but that was the only real challenge in the exercise. I punched a few numbers into the my calculator and quickly had a value to scribble into the last blank on the sheet. It was a completely fictitious measurement for the final step, but that was all I needed in order to calculate how much of each reactant I would have needed in the previous step. And so on from there. I filled in all of the blanks on the worksheet from the end to the beginning, with invented values.
At some point Mr. P noticed I hadn’t left my desk and came over to see what I was up to. I told him exactly what I was doing. Again, he laughed. He said something like ‘well, if you know how to do all that then you understand the material.’ When I finally got up from my desk, it was to go hand in the completed laboratory worksheet – not having gotten anywhere near the lab. I’m not sure what I did for the rest of the classtime. I was done long before the suckers at the back of the room who were carefully measuring chemicals and whatnot.
Four months in Mr. P’s classroom. That is all I remember.
As a 16-year-old, I was pretty impressed with myself – and Mr. P’s recognition affirmed my impression. As an educator now myself, my perspective is very different. I have some regrets about missed learning opportunities. But more than that, those two incidents strike me as odd things for a teacher to celebrate. Mr’ P’s test measured so little about the subject he was teaching that it was possible for a student to achieve a perfect score with less than 5 minutes of effort. And his laboratory exercise was of so little value, students did not even need to visit the lab to obtain the information needed to secure credit for it. He thought it was neat that I could get the right answers without doing any of the hard work of learning – and so did I (at the time). But what was he really assessing? I wonder what he thought students were getting from him. I wonder how he would feel knowing what I remember from my experience with him.
Instead of stoking the ego of an adolescent boy who already tended toward arrogance (especially when it came to science), a reflective teacher might have rethought his instructional approach a bit.
You know what? I take it back. I said I didn’t learn much from Mr. P, but on further consideration, I don’t think that is true. I think I learned something significant from him. It just wasn’t a very good thing to have learned. It was something like Fatima’s rules. I learned strategy for doing school – for “dealing“. I learned how to get the points without doing the learning. It wasn’t even that I had a reason not to learn the thing. I liked chemistry fine. It had just become a game for me to evade learning – just for the sake of evading learning. And I prided myself on how well I could do it. That was a problem when I eventually found myself in a position in which points were irrelevant – and other people knew stuff I didn’t. Once I got to a place where people took pride in doing the thing, rather than just answering test questions about the thing, no one was impressed with how far I could slide under the bar. And it was a lot of work to catch up.
I also take back what I said about non-science classes being a different story. It was actually exactly the same story. I evaded learning stuff there too. I just didn’t like many of those other subjects, so I didn’t care about getting the points. So it was just more apparent I wasn’t learning stuff in those classes.
To be clear, Mr. P was not the only educator from whom I learned about “doing school.” I was 16 years old when I first set foot in his chemistry classroom, so I had had a decade to learn those skills prior to that point. His class just stands out, because he had set up an ideal context for my half-assery to shine – and he was just as impressed with me as I was with myself. He had meticulously created instructional materials that short-circuited critical thinking – and I had short-cut his instructional materials. I suppose it is a testament to how skilled I was at evading learning that I didn’t make any secret of it. In fact, I was clearly under the impression I was having an MVP season. And so was Mr. P.
I am not sure that the things the other students in that class learned are any better than what I learned. They surely got the points too. The instructional materials lead them through all of the steps and made it very clear what blanks needed to be filled in. They slogged through it, so I suspect one of the things they learned was that it paid to be compliant – to follow along dutifully and do what the instructions told them to do. They also had more than a decade of schooling by that point to have taught them compliance, so it is not a surprise they were good at it. I suspect the experience also taught them that they didn’t like chemistry – which is too bad. I’ll bet some of them would have liked the subject if they had gotten a chance to see what it is actually like. Perhaps most problematically, their teacher promoted a definition of “smart science student” that didn’t include them. I use that phrase intentionally, because my friend Heidi studies it – and it turns out that what teachers do in their classrooms makes a HUGE difference in who gets to be seen as “smart.” Mr. P never said it overtly, but surely they saw that he didn’t make me do all the work. And they did have to do the work. That was a pretty strong, implicit message about who did and who didn’t belong in the category “smart kids.” That, unfortunately, is another common lesson – perhaps the most common one that schooling teaches
It’s a flawed system.
There are counter-examples though. There were several teachers along the way who saw me as something more that a 1-dimensional kid who only worked “up to his potential” in science classes. We’ve all had teachers like that (I hope). They are the reason any of us gets through public schools with humanity intact – as something more than compliant widgets on an assembly line. To be clear, I am not suggesting they are rare. They are the good teachers. And there are lots of them. The ones we point to as that teacher who “saw something in me”, whose impact lasted long past our time in their classroom, who profoundly shaped who we became. They teach students, not subjects. But they are working against a system that is built to function like a gravel-crushing machine.
Mr. P was well-intentioned. I think he cared about his students and he cared about teaching well. He was not intending to create barriers that omitted most of his students from science. He was just doing what he had been socialized to do in the rationalist, Tylerist tradition of education. He was organized, efficient, and meticulous. His lessons were logical. His assessment criteria were clear. He was the picture of a textbook teacher. But the sterilized picture of teaching that appears in textbooks is part of the rock-crushing institution. The rational, Tylerist approach is rooted in principles of industrial management – in the logic of efficient assembly lines. And the way he went about his work made him complicit in significant, if subtle, ways in a process that is inherently dehumanizing: treating kids like widgets on an assembly line.
There is part of me that worries about the role I played in helping to erect barriers in classrooms like Mr. P’s. My adolescent ego enjoyed being the one who got his test back in a frame and I performed the role of “smart kid” enthusiastically. It would be a fallacy of presentism to put too much of the responsibility for that on my former self, as an immature kid who was dealing with school in the way I had learned to do it. The teenager I was certainly is not innocent, but neither could I have been expected to be capable of reflecting as deeply as I now can on consequences of my behavior for my peers at that age. Much of that responsibility is borne, I think, by the educators who crafted the schooling environments in which I developed skills of dealing by evading learning.
I don’t want to just lament the negative, ideological effects of schooling here though. Because, like I said, schools are full of good teachers who are importantly formative for kids. I could mention several good teachers who mattered for me, but there are two whose influence was particularly profound.
My second chemistry teacher, Mr. Kologi, could not have been more different from Mr. P. I joined his class mid-year. I had one semester with Mr. P and then moved to a different state and started at a new school in the middle of my junior year. I didn’t know what to make of Mr. Kologi at first. It was hard to find shortcuts in his class – and he was unimpressed the few times I did. I remember a comment he put on one of my lab reports saying I might do better if I focused more on the content and less on pasting in silly clip art or finding weird fonts (ouch). He also let me sit in the embarrassment when my attempts at short-cutting left me as the only one in the class who didn’t know the thing. He wasn’t a jerk about it or anything. There just weren’t any fill-in-the-blank worksheets or other shortcuts in his classroom – and he didn’t make any attempt to save me from myself. He also used a much older textbook and his materials were all handwritten (mostly on overhead transparencies). Nothing like Mr. P’s typed and photocopied stuff. I mistakenly thought newer or more expensive = better, because they seemed more current or up to date. That snobishness didn’t last long though.
Eventually, my competitive side got fed up with the other kids always seeming to be a step ahead of me, so I started reading the book, doing the homework, and generally putting effort into learning rather than goofing off. Mr. Kologi took notice. And when he saw that I did have aptitude for science, he raised his expectations for me rather than letting me off the hook. Consequently, I think I learned more during the year-and-a-half I was in his classes than I did from a whole bachelor’s degree in chemistry. His class is really the only reason chemistry was on my radar as a possible college major – and why I opened myself to the possibility I could be a teacher. In fact, I dedicated my Master’s thesis (in chemistry, of course) to him.
The other teacher who I want to call-out for his positive influence taught one of those… er… other subjects. English. I hated English. I hated spelling. And grammar. And judgment about my poor penmanship. I hated reading, because it was such a slow and grueling process for me. I am not sure why I was always such a slow reader (I still am), but my eyes could never get the text into my head fast enough, so I would start daydreaming about something else while my eyes kept plodding along, Eor-like, through the words on the page. Eventually, I would realize I hadn’t taken any of it in for a while and would start tracing back through the text to find something I remembered. Often, I would have to trace back multiple pages. Sometimes I would re-read a paragraph only to get to the end and realize I hadn’t taken in any more of it the second time through. Or the third. Or forth. I hated having to force myself to read stuff that didn’t interest me. And I especially hated the prescriptive templates for writing – like the 5 paragraph persuasive essay. I fancied myself a creative person and resented formulaic approaches to that kind of work.
If I was obnoxious in Mr. P’s chemistry class, I was an order of magnitude worse in Mr. Holm’s English class. On spelling tests, I would intentionally mis-spell the word “spal’n” at the top of the page. He would assign us to read a book each quarter (maybe each semester? or month? I can’t remember the exact periodicity) and write a book report. He gave us a long list of novels to chose from, so there was a lot of freedom. I, instead, figured out which was the shortest book in the Bible and read that – claiming I had met the requirement to read a “book.” I think I spent more time confirming which was shortest than I did reading – or writing the report. Incidentally, the shortest book in the Bible (Habakkuk? Malaki? It is one of the minor prophets) is only about 1 page long, so doesn’t have much of a plot. That makes a book report difficult to write. (Now that I think about it, I was reading Douglass Adams’s novels of my own accord at the time. Why didn’t I just write my reports about those? Huh, I actually created more work for myself with the book-of-the-Bible ploy.) I didn’t even pretend to have read any of the literature that was assigned for class – and if I contributed anything to class discussions, it was only to be dismissive or to try to get a laugh from my friends. Most of my other English teachers had just ended up avoiding me in class (I was happy to sit quietly and daydream). I’m not sure how Mr. Holm even put up with me – let alone tried to teach me. But he did.
Mr. Holm saw potential in me too and he worked really hard to draw it out. And he succeeded a bit in spite of my resistance. He took time to go talk to my other teachers, the ones who taught classes I did well in, to find out what they did to engage me. I remember my shop teacher, Mr. K, telling me about it one day (Mr. K was another of the good teachers and gently admonished me to put the same effort into other subjects I did in his classes). He talked a lot with my mom – not in the sense of sending home negative reports, but in the sense of collaborating to figure out how to help me learn. I think he was the person who suggested she have me assessed for ADD (it wasn’t a thing many people had heard of back then).
There were a few assignments in his class that gave me space to be creative – and when I took those opportunities, he recognized me for it. There were a couple pieces of my creative writing that he read out to the class – celebrating something I had done well and positioning me as one of the smart kids in his class. To be clear, he didn’t single me out. I am pretty sure he found ways to position all of his students as smart at one point or another. And that may be why I am so attuned now, in my own teaching, to positioning my students to be seen for their insights and expert-ness.
One of Mr. Holm’s assignments had an option to compose a story that mimicked the writing style of the author we had been reading in class. The story I composed for that assignment was one he praised publicly, which was powerful affirmation – but the longer-lasting impact is that it got me to pay attention to stylistic nuances of good writers and to think about how those nuances aided communication and impact. It has become a habit for me to intentionally mimic the writing style of other authors when I find them to be particularly compelling or accessible – or entertaining. I have written elsewhere about intentionally experimenting with elements like Jerome Bruner’s tendency to begin sentences with conjunctions (surely anyone hung-up on rules of grammar must be itching with how frequently I’ve violated that convention already in this essay). In fact, it is what underlies my conviction about developing my craft by writing this blog. I am playing with stylistic elements in order to become more myself as a writer. So I am still working on an assignment Mr. Holm gave me 30 years ago.
Like Mr Kologi, Mr. Holm never lowered expectations for me. When I submitted my shortest-book-in-the-bible report, he smiled and said ‘nice try’, then gave me neither points nor judgment for it. When I did poorly on all of the spelling tests, he scored what I gave him fairly – and also caught me in the hallway one day to say that, while there may soon be technology to compensate if I didn’t develop more capability in spelling (spell checking features were just starting to appear in commercial word processing software at the time), the same would not be true for vocabulary. He pointed out I would limit my ability to express myself if I didn’t broaden my vocabulary – adding that there was no short-cut but to be widely read if I wanted a robust vocabulary. (Incidentally, he was only partially correct about spell-checkers: they do usually keep me on the right track when I am using a word processor – but when I am in the front of a classroom, writing on a dry erase board, I sometimes wish I had put a little more effort in to learning to spell. Fortunately, my penmanship is still poor enough I can cover up misspellings with illegibility.)
I am not sure I ever got a grade higher than a C from Mr. Holm. But I earned that C. He knew I was capable of more – and I knew he knew it. I also knew he genuinely cared about me – even when I was an obnoxious little, mid-teens jackass. He was a model of unconditional positive regard – and I appreciated that he cared enough to work so hard. And I respected him never giving me anything I didn’t earn – even though we both knew I could have done better.
And that, I suppose, is what stands out to me as a fundamental difference between great teachers like Mr. Kologi and Mr. Holm versus ones who perpetuate a compliance-oriented system, like Mr. P: their expectations. Mr. P’s expectations were calibrated to external standards. There was stuff his students were prescribed to learn about chemistry and he built his teaching practice to convey that stuff. That is not inherently bad – but there are two things about the way that orientation played out in Mr. P’s class, which are common to so many other classrooms, that I find problematic. One is that it means he was teaching content rather than students. (He was also not teaching us chemistry so much as he was teaching about chemistry – but that is a side-track I won’t follow right now.) The other problem is that he was being accountable to external standards – and one of the dangers of persistent accountability systems is that they normalize working down to the threshold. When I demonstrated that I knew the content he was trying to convey, he put a “check” in that box – and that was it. If I demonstrated understanding before all the other students had, I was left to entertain myself until he was ready to move everyone on to the next thing. The bar was set and never raised. In contrast, Mr. Holm and Mr. Kologi made it their business to see what I was capable of – and then to create space for me to achieve it. I didn’t always make the best of those opportunities. But they made them none-the-less. They were working to standards internal to the task of teaching – of teaching me specifically. They took responsibility to see me as a whole person, to find out what I was capable of, and to find ways to call that possibility into existence. And I am just one of thousands of students for whom they did the same. I am sure they had external standards imposed on them too. For a century, the growing surveillance of U.S. teachers has been eroding their autonomy. But great teachers do not calibrate their expectations to the demands of externally imposed standards. The mark of a person who excels at their craft – at any craft – is a drive that arises from within them to search out possibility and reach for it in ways that satisfy the standards internal to their craft.
The difference between taking responsibility versus being held accountable is right there in the verbs. To take responsibility is to extend one’s self in the interest of another. To actively reach for the possible. It is volitional. To be held accountable is a avoid consequences from insufficiency. It is imposed from outside in an attempt to ensure one’s work does not fall below a threshold. Certainly there are times when accountability systems are necessary. But they can never substitute for lovingly crafted work – for Arete.
To be very clear, I do not mean to denigrate Mr. P or his character. He was doing what he had been trained to do – in good faith – and he was meticulous about it. By most measures, he was a good teacher. But most measures answer to external standards. He was more focused on learning targets (standards, objectives, outcomes… whatever you want to call them) than he was on the learners. He wasn’t uncaring. His concern for students showed up in some of his planning – like making the numbers easy when calculations were required, so that struggles with the mathematical operations would not be an extra barrier for some students. Unfortunately, they also showed up in patronizingly prescriptive lab worksheets that short-circuited critical thinking and likely did more to reinforce misconceptions about science being boringly formulaic than they did to convey what is compelling about chemistry. But in a system based on industrial management principles, that seems like the right thing to do. And I think he worked hard to do what he thought was right.
I also don’t want to imply that great teachers are unconcerned with content. Indeed, part of what it means to understand the standards internal to the task of teaching is to be mindful about what learners need to know in order for the subject to open up for them. Furthermore, it takes robust understanding of that subject to recognize where a particular learner’s understating is in relation to what can be known about it. For great teachers, the external standards related to any particular bit of content can be a useful audit trail, but they are a minimum threshold or a secondary consideration – one so basic it can be assumed it will be met if they carry out their primary responsibilities well. The much more relevant question is ‘how much farther can this learner stretch?’ – and the answer is different for each learner, for each subject, at any given time. I learned the content I was supposed to learn in Mr. Kologi’s and Mr. Holm’s classrooms – often in spite of myself. But I learned well beyond the threshold, and I continue to learn on paths they set, because they believed I could. And I learned all sort of things that were not part of any external standard – like how to be a teacher who works at seeing my students and looks for ways to draw out my students’ potential. The more I reflect on my experiences in his classes, the more I realize how many of the things my students say they appreciate about me as a teacher are echoes of Mr. Holm.
My family continued to live in the same town where Mr. Kologi taught, so even after I graduated, even after he retired, I got to reconnect with him a few times before he passed away. I also wrote a song about him, which won the high school talent show. So I did get to let him know at least a bit of my appreciation for his influence – and I am happy for that. Generally, teachers don’t get to see most of what comes of their work, because it takes much longer than a semester – or even a few years – for the most important seeds they plant to germinate.
I lost touch with Mr. Holm when I moved in the middle of that Junior year. For a while now, I have been reflecting on Mr. Holm’s impact and thinking I should send him a note of thanks – and let him know his work did eventually bear fruit in me. Perhaps he would even delight in the irony that I am now the one teaching people to write persuasive arguments amid stifling conventions (aka dissertations). I’ll have to see if I can track him down and send him this link so I can say it properly:
Thank you Mr. Holm. Thank you for seeing me. And for making space for me in a system that was built to crush me, like it does so many other kids. Even when I was an obnoxious little prick.
It mattered.
It matters.