A few years ago, during my first year as an eighth grade teacher, I read Zen and the Practice of Teaching English by my college professor Bob Tremmel. I have returned to it, and while I read about ten other things, I’m reading it as well. Today, these words resonated with me (At this point, Tremmel has just finished two years of rough teaching and is about to leave teaching to get an MA in English):
At that point my failure might have been complete an the teaching part of my life over expect for the linger results of my previous actions and their effect on my own noisy and persistent mind: taking a teaching job and then leaving it without ever feeling I had mastered it created serious questions for me that followed me into graduate school and dogged me for years. What had happened to me? What did those two years out of my life mean? Why, really, had I failed? What was it I needed to know that I hadn’t known? How could I find it out? (6)
That feels very familiar. I, too, feel incomplete for leaving teaching middle school before having mastered it, not that I feel one can every completely master teaching, but I definitely feel at times that I left it too early. I like the questions that Bob asks.
Tremmel, Robert. Zen and the Practice of Teaching English. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999.
This sounds like a book I should read. Have you read Parker Palmer’s Courage to Teach? It’s good, inspirational, one of Chris Anderson’s favorites.
Are you missing the idea of teaching in the fall?
Yes – I’m in the middle of Courage to Teach, and I like it a lot. And yes, even more, I am missing the idea of teaching in the fall…