History of My Teaching: The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

We inhabit real institutions where very little seems to be changed, where there are very few changes in the curriculum, almost no paradigm shifts, and where knowledge and information continue to be presented in the conventionally accepted manner. (hooks 1994, p. 143)


I have been teaching for eighteen (as of 2006 when this was written) years; little has changed with the teachers I work with besides being in a different building with different people. As bell hooks writes, “In the institutions where I have taught, the prevailing pedagogical model is authoritarian, hierarchical in a coercive and often dominating way, and certainly one where the voice of the professor is the “privileged” transmitter of knowledge.” (hooks 1194, p. 85). Every year I have to unteach my students; convince them that they really can write and read what they wish, that they will not be completing worksheets or writing formulaic essays, nor will I beat a poem to death by explaining it all to them.
Before I hired on to my first teaching job, I attended the Hill Country Writing Project. The following fall I was hired in Beeville, Texas. The state of Texas had just instituted a writing test, the TEAMS. Districts across the state were scrambling to figure out how to teach writing. I was told to teach writing. The other three English teachers at Thomas Jefferson Junior High taught grammar with lots of worksheets, where the students filled in the blanks with nouns and verbs. That first year I taught, what I had learned in the writing project provided me with a curriculum: my students wrote, and wrote and wrote. The idea is, if students are to learn to write, they must write; if they are to learn to read, they must read, not be drilled on the subjunctive, nor read to, either by the teacher or round-robin as a class. The students must do what you want them to do in order for them to learn how to do it. So that first year my students wrote, using themselves as the source for what they wrote about. They still do.

As Ladson-Billings writes, “Rather than chastise them for what they do not know, these teachers find ways to use the knowledge and skills the students bring to the classroom as a foundation for learning.” (Ladson-Billings 1994, p. 124). It wasn’t that I was such a great teacher, but the only thing I knew to do with my students just happened to be effective, despite me. I was uncomfortable being the expert, because I did not feel like I knew anything about grammar, or teaching for that matter, so I fell back on the one thing I did know from the writing project.

I was hired in Austin, for my second year of teaching, two weeks before school started. I was in Vermont going to graduate school and the principal, who I had interviewed with in May, hired me over the phone. I found out after I went up to the building to set up my room that the teacher I was replacing had committed suicide over the summer. I was the second teacher hired for the position. The first teacher took a job as a school counselor before he could start as the English/journalism teacher.


“Institutionalized turnover: “they could deal with the steady loss of experienced teachers without severe organizational shock. Assuming the teacher left at the end of the school year (and norms developed which made it reprehensible to leave during the year), new teachers could readily be placed in the former teacher’s classrooms with new groups of students. Such flexibility was possible as long as teachers worked independently but had their tasks been closely interwoven, the comings and goings of staff members would have created administrative problems.” (Lortie 1975 p. 16).


I was just another (albeit secondary) solution to an administrative problem. But I had a job.

I was clueless as to what to do. My first year in Beeville had been a disaster; my student wrote and did well on the TEAMS, but I did not know how to run a class. In my first meeting with the other eighth grade teacher, a fifteen-year veteran, I asked what I was supposed to teach. She pointed at the textbook and said, “That.” The meeting was basically over at that point.

“Fully responsible for the instruction of his (sic) students from his first working day, the beginning teacher performs the same tasks as the twenty-five year veteran . . .the beginner learns while performing the full complement of teaching duties. The anxiety so induced is exacerbated by his probationary status . . .if it is true that too much anxiety retards learning, some beginning teachers will have difficulty making accurate perceptions and thoughtful decisions as they learn the job.” (Lortie 1975, p. 72)


I was thrown to the wolves. I was a white “tweeny” (moving out of the working class into the middle class and comfortable in neither), teaching in a lower SES minority school. Although I had attended a majority Hispanic high school as a student, I had been in accelerated classes, de facto segregated classes, where the number of minority students could be counted on one hand. Ladson-Billings writes that a culturally relevant teacher should “have prolonged immersion in African American culture” (Ladson-Billings 1994, p.134); by way of introduction to my students at Dobie Middle School, my “mentor,” the English department head, simply told me what it meant when a child was “ashy.” I was not prepared for my students.

After the first couple of weeks, I had lost control. I gave up on my workshop approach to writing and taught the textbook, as I had been advised. I was the one who was in charge: we all read the same thing at the same time; they answered questions at the end of the story to which there was only one answer; they completed worksheets that taught specific “skills;” and, when they wrote they all wrote on the same topic with a predetermined structure (the five paragraph theme). The students sat docile in their seats and filled in the blanks; I knew, instinctively, it was wrong. The students had been writing wonderful thoughtful pieces; but because I could not control the class and was afraid, I stopped. “Even when students are desperately yearning to be touched by knowledge, professors still fear the challenge, allow their worries about losing control to override their desires to teach. (hooks 1995, p. 199)

Every year for the next five years at Dobie Middle School, I slowly transformed my class back into a reading/writing workshop where the students’ interests and experiences became an essential part, if not the driving force, behind the class. I became immersed in the culture of my students; as much as a working class male from south Texas could. My classes were noisy, chaotic spaces; and because of my sad teaching that first year at Dobie, I maintained a reputation with the traditional teachers for having little or no discipline. “Discipline seems to be a preoccupation for many teachers (Ladson-billings 1994, p.47).

But my students were writing again; they scored better on the writing test than the other eighth grade teacher’s class, so I was left alone. As a principal told my team leader one year, “I’m not sure what he is doing in there, but something is happening.” They might have been loud, but they were engaged with the task I had set for them, which was to write, and think.

Sixteen years later, what I do is still considered to be “radical” (by those who disapprove) and “innovative” (by those not quite sure what it is I do, but like me personally). Even my students every year, at first, view my class with suspicion. “The urge to experiment with pedagogical practices may not be welcomed by students who often expect us to teach in the manner they are accustomed to.” (hooks, 1994, p . 142-143) My students are troubled by freedom. They gripe about what they are expected to do in my colleagues’ classrooms; yet, when I tell them during the first week of school that they have to come up with their own topics, I am met with cries of frustration: “I can’t think of anything to write about,” or, “I don’t have anything interesting to say, nothing has ever happened to me.” Yet when they sit and talk to each other, and are unaware that I can hear what they are saying, my students tell incredible stories: full of import, meaning, depth, and humor. “Occasionally students feel concerned when a class departs from the banking system. I remind them that they can have a lifetime of classes that reflect conventional norms.” (hooks 1994, p. 203). However, the prevailing attitude is that what they have to say, because it is about them, cannot be of any value. So they write simple narratives that lead the reader through a series of fairly inconsequential events: “and that was my day at the water park,” “. . .my new car made me so happy.” They have had the native sense of storytelling beaten out of their writing by teachers who demand their students follow a formulaic writing style which the teacher and the student thinks is the correct way to write an essay. From the time I went back to become certified to teach in the mid-1980’s, the “five-paragraph theme” and its permutations has been derided, yet it still thrives like kudzu in the high school classroom and beyond. Like bell hooks, ”My point is that it takes a fierce commitment, a will to struggle, to let our work as teachers reflect progressive pedagogies. (hooks, 1994, p . 142-143)

In 1975, Dan Lortie, making predictions about the future of teaching wrote, “The most obvious consequence is that teachers will have to adapt to a context where conservatism, particularly reflexive conservatism, becomes increasingly suspect,“ and “groups of teachers who openly resist change will run the risk of being labeled ‘reactionary’ and ‘obstructive’.” (Lortie 1975, p.219). Sadly he was wrong; it is not the teachers who resist change who are suspect at all, it is any one who deviates from a transmission or “assimilationist” (Ladson-Billings 1994, p. 55) manner of teaching.

Last spring at lunch as I sat eating my frozen vegetarian loaf, a colleague came into the English workroom with a multiple choice test in her hand. “I have a question, Kelly,” she said as she shoved the test over my shoulder, pointing at one of the questions. “Is this correct, ‘could’ here?” The part of the sentence she was pointing to was not part of the possible answers on the question of the test, which are usually underlined; it was just part of the sentence. “My students always ask about this kind of thing.” A statement I doubted but refrained from commenting on.

“You’re asking the wrong person,” I said taking a last bite of my lunch, “I’m not a grammarian.”
“Aren’t you an English teacher? How do you get to pick and choose what you teach?” she asked, pursuing me as I stood up from the table.
“I’m a composition and reading teacher,” I said, throwing the remains of my frozen dinner in the trash.
“How do you teach them the rules if you don’t teach grammar?”
“Every study since nineteen hundred has had one thing in common: there is no connection between the teaching of grammar and the improvement of writing,” a piece of trivia I picked up at the Hill Country Writing Project site in 1987.

At that point I felt as if a pit bull had latched onto my arm. My colleague latched onto the argument I had not been involved in, or rather avoided as futile, for at least ten years: Why is the teaching of grammar irrelevant? A few days later the twelfth grade grammar workbook appeared in my box. Because I did not teach the way she did, I was the one accused of not teaching what the kids needed to know.

Far from being labeled reactionary as Lortie predicted, teachers who resist change are seen, at least by each other, as teaching the correct way. Although a reading/writing workshop model is mandated by the district for K-12 English classes, I am the only secondary teacher teaching this way. I have often been accused of teaching nothing, because I do not stand at the front of the room and lecture.

A few years ago, a history teacher walked by my room. My students and I were scattered about the floor, all reading different books. I had just finished talking to one girl about the book she had finished and had helped her to find another. I was sitting in the doorway reading when the history teacher walked by and said, “I wish I could just sit around, read a book and not teach.” My class erupted in indignation. They had by that point in the year realized they had been reading and writing more than they had their entire high school career. It took several minutes to calm my students back down; they were offended that she thought I, and by extension they, were not doing anything. “The choice to work against the grain, to challenge the status quo, often has negative consequences. And that is part of what makes that choice one that is not politically neutral. (hooks 1994 p. 203)


Works Cited

hooks, b. Teaching to Transgress. New York, New York: Routledge, 1994.
Ladson-Billings, G. The Dreamkeepers. San Francisco, Ca. Jossey-Bass, 1994
Lortie, D. Schoolteacher, 2nd Edition. Chicago, Il. The University of Chicago Press, 1975.