The teacher
is only human, after all. The repeated emphasis on students’ needs indirectly
encourages forgetting about those of the teacher. Male or female, the human ego
feeds on reward and recognition, and your teacher ego perks right up when a
student loves to respond, laughs at your jokes, asks you for help as though you
were the last life-saver on the boat.
You use your instructional energy
generously and it doesn’t really take much to – in return – make you feel like
a good looking genius. Therein lies the cyclical danger. The teacher’s well-known
duty is to pay equal attention to all students - to prevent the guilty recognition that the
girl in the left-hand corner never says a thing because she is not spoken to;
to avoid having to admit that most of your lesson moved energetically along with
lots of participation but – come to think of it – not from the left-hand side
of the room. Why can’t you remember the face of what’s-his-name who always sits
by the door (and who eases smoothly out of that exit as soon as the bell
rings)? Even the trouble-makers are more appealing, testing your patience and
your class management skills; victories with these in-your-face challenges can
make you feel especially self-congratulatory….while the “escape artists” shroud
themselves in a cloak of invisibility as they look for a dropped pen, a
misplaced paper, a book in a backpack, and successfully evade the teacher’s
attention (which is inevitably on the eager beavers with their hands in the
air…).
The skilled fugitive knows how to keep his head down; the wave of
willing responses will satisfy the also needy elicitor… Every teacher should
have a fool-proof system of checking production frequency among all 12 or 16 or
20 students – who spoke, how often, how much – and making sure they know who
you are and that you care. In ensuring uniformity and truly collaborative
direction in your work in the classroom, your heart-strings are not as
consistent a guide as your intellect and your eyes.
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| Katy Cox |
