Throughout this class, without pause, I have been consistently challenged to apply my not-yet-put-to-the-test and highly idealized theories on what it means to be a good teacher to hypothetical situations in which real students – and plenty of them – present their objections and struggles with specific material or assignments, with reading at all and with English as a discipline. In a variety of situations, you all have presented what will be real obstacles to my desire to be a good teacher – to be the “open-minded” teacher I asserted that I wanted to be in the very earliest days of class.
I am thankful to all of you for this. The course has fostered some very real growth and self-reflection for me, and has given me a “box of tools” of sorts, with which to approach the multitude of problems which will inevitably – and repetitively – need to be solved.
We have engaged in such a variety of activities within which to engage with a text, as well as with such a variety of texts through which to engage a subject matter, and these have all permeated my teaching being. Graphic novels no longer frighten me, technology has been welcomed into my repertoire for approaching even the most classical of literature, and I have been enriched with a litany of teaching techniques and approaches that will keep students actively engaged and able to find one of their own strengths and best ways for interacting with our own material. Ideally, no one will be bored, and no one will hate or fail literature courses that I teach.
Dr. Mortimore has done an excellent job of modeling – which we ourselves will surely replicate in our classrooms, as we strive to create appeal in the act of reading and analyzing literature and in the arts of writing, of critical thinking, and of being a student and a learner. If we are doing as good a job as she has done, our students will be active participants in the construction of their learning. They will willingly engage in dialogue, they will both posit and respond to questions, they will display genuine sensory interaction with what is going on in the classroom (introducing all of their senses honestly and never just seeing words on a page), as well as genuine emotional reactions to texts and topics and activities in the classroom, and they will actively, and of their own motivation, seek out projects that channel their unique interest(s) in aspects of the material we cover and reflect on the personal connections they have made and meaning they have created. We have done all of this in our journey this term, as we have learned to think about problems of, and techniques for, and approaches to Teaching Adolescent Literature. We have learned. We now have tools at our disposal, in a figurative “box” that should remain always and forever open such that new tools can be added and old ones can be either disposed of or recycled.
When I reflect back on that first day of class, in which we were allowed to choose one word (or term) capture the quality we wanted to define us as teachers of adolescent literature, I am deeply satisfied with my progression over the course of the last few months. That day, I chose “open-minded” and already, in just the course of these few months, my commitment to that word has been challenged. You all have contributed such different – and equally strong – ideas for how to teach, and it was this quality in each of you that kept me so challenged. You were models yourselves: of other ideas, of innovation teachers, and of the diversity of students that will appear in my classroom(s) over the years. My commitment to remain open-minded has already been given some exercise and, as a result, it is stronger. This means to me that learning has taken place, and therefore – and moreover – that I have cultivated the knowledge and the experience necessary to continue to craft myself into an open-minded teacher who considers and responds to the needs and wants of all of my students – and continues to be open to their individual abilities to succeed in learning to learn, and learning to like to learn.
