The Mute Anxiety

 For all the words spoken and written about education “reform” and all the bloviating about teacher benchmarks and evaluations, very little is said about what and how teachers feel.  And part of the reason for this is that teachers keep their most important feelings about what they do to themselves.  They will share these feelings sometimes with intimates and occasionally with colleagues…but only sometimes and occasionally.  The crisis for teachers is that they never, ever know their actual effectiveness, never know on a daily basis how what they say and do affects the individual minds in their care.  And this is why they express such outrage at the thought that this phenomenon can be quantified from test results or even professional observations.  This is the mute anxiety that no one without years of classroom experience knows.

I have a souvenir, a T-shirt tacked on the wall above my workspace.  It was a gift from some of the media studies majors in my department, each one signing some good wishes and thanks on my retirement.  Most are pretty much what one would expect, but a particular note haunts me even today as I look up at it.  It haunts me because I can never know what the student meant.  It reawakens in me the very uncertainty I’m trying to explain.  She wrote:

“Roger

Thank you for your wonderful insights and inspiring lessons.  I’ll miss you terribly!”

First, let me explain this student.  She came to media studies, a bachelor-of-arts program, as someone, new to higher education, who was not certain of degree initials.  For her, it was college, and the major seemed like it might be interesting.  In other words, she was not goal/degree focused; she was interested in learning something, preferably something that would engage her interests.  I think what accounts for the enthusiasm of her farewell was that she had never before realized that learning could be engaging, challenging and interesting.  I was initially impressed by her eagerness, then by her diligence and finally by her originality.  She developed from being very vague about what learning meant to a person for whom learning was critical.

Scan that paragraph.  What in it could be quantified?  What could be benchmarked?  What did I say or do that was so “insightful” so “inspiring” for that person?  What about those two words would have meaning inside some education rubric?  I don’t know, nor could any evaluation.  Only one person could know, and if she had not told me, I would never have known.

An unarticulated, seldom acknowledged experience of the person responsible for the learning in a classroom is the sense of guilt that comes from a feeling of inadequacy.  Simply stated it says, “I don’t know what’s wrong.  I’m trying everything I know, but she’s not getting it.  I don’t know what to do.” This is the feeling that comes from classroom teaching over a long period of time.  It expresses the feeling that the person responsible for the learning that’s going on is the person who has been assigned to the learning environment of that classroom.  No matter what other dynamics might be going on among that particular cohort of presumed learners, no matter what the test results show, the person “in charge” feels a sense of inadequacy, because someone in the room “didn’t get it.”  This is the ongoing anxiety of the teacher in the kindergarten classroom through the mentor in the graduate school seminar.  The person massaging the learning, the person who has used every thing learned over long experience doing it, that person knows from the look on one or two or three faces that something has been missed.  And that’s what she takes home with her.

The tragedy of this is that some teachers eventually weary of the anxiety and fall into the abyss of routine, the very routine that the quantifiers are recommending as the salvation of our education “system,” the reform of America’s “failed” education system—whatever that means.  These teachers who release themselves to routine are the wounded in the classroom ranks.  Some of them—too many of them—are shunned, perhaps even mocked by their colleagues, thus emphasizing how ultimately lonely the task is.  And critics and so-called revolutionaries within the reform movement have been doing their best to sustain this feeling of desperate isolation, to enhance the feeling of failure 

So this, then, is what might be called the tragic paradox of the classroom teacher.  She or he knows that only one professional person, the person doing it, can actually experience what is happening in the classroom.  And a certain amount of pride attaches to that.   But coincidentally that pride becomes the source of the anxiety attached to the uncertainty of whether or not each mind in the process has been inspired to learn not only that much but also to learn much more.

Nothing in what I have learned about the pedagogy behind the Common Core Standards or Race To The Top (that winner-take-all wrapped in Social Darwinism phrase) even begins to entertain the notion that this paradox exists.  Moreover, the local puppet masters who manage these programs represent an entirely new managerial class in American education, a class that gears education as a business enterprise, codified in their titles CEO, CFO, etc.   An approach to education as a business enterprise will discourage learning while it creates loyal, uncritical androids.  It assures the common, while it provides no time for and disparages the exceptional.  Just like in a factory.