Non Magical Thinking

Acting Upon the World/Constructing a Reality

My sense of failure in my first-year classroom is a shared one. As each of my NIWP fellows and facilitators confessed similar first-year experiences, I was quietly reassured that I was not alone in my regret. However, I am positive that the events of the year, painful as they were, and the faces of my students, many of whom I came to love, will never completely fade from memory. Then again, why would I want them to?

The challenge set before me now is to revisit those events and figure out exactly what went wrong, to pinpoint those particular issues and formulate a strategy to avoid repeating my mistakes. In the course of reading Alexandra Johnson’s Leaving A Trace, I am confronted with my failure to keep a journal and keep track of my activity in the classroom. Sure, I have some lesson plans and outlines upon which to look back , but I now wish I had been more actively reflective about my work. Perhaps I did not see myself as an observer and researcher as much as a “depository of knowledge.”

Again, I refer to Moffett’s work about sequence. I am now more desperate than ever to develop six months to a year’s worth of lesson plans for the secondary classroom, as well as to solidify my own philosophy of teaching (by solidify I mean it should look more like wet concrete than water, but should never harden cure—somewhere between “Readimix” and clay). Moreover, perhaps forming my philosophy based on my current research needs to precede lesson planning. Strangely, this idea was never addressed in graduate school. We spent the year frantically jumping through hoops in order to get into the laboratory of the classroom.

In facing the prospect of teaching English conversation in China this fall, I am especially anxious. I have very little training in helping non-native learners in speaking, much less in writing. Moreover, I feel more confident teaching writing than I do conversation, especially without quite knowing what is to be expected of me as a university-level TESOL instructor. I am almost expecting a Groundhog Day moment the moment I step into the classroom.

The idea of “acting upon the world” is a reality in an extreme sense. Not only will I be a teacher representing the discipline and craft, but as a stranger in a strange land, I will also be representing a political and cultural self, a single grain of America to be planted in Chinese soil. In this context, I will be acting upon the world through a different, perhaps more primary, medium—oral rather than written language. However, even through speech, one can still “write” upon the world albeit through the ear rather than the eye, the primary drawback being the more transitory nature of the spoken word. But I digress.

It’s difficult enough to act upon a world that is familiar. To act upon a world that is alien is a different matter. When I consider how long it has taken me to figure out even the most simple aspects of the world in which I live, I have my reservations about entering, much less acting upon, a world in which I will long be a stranger before I find my way.