Teacher Talk: Social Anxiety & Titrating Conflict

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As a teacher with sometimes crippling social anxiety, I rehearse a demeanor that blends Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Mister Rogers. We have values and standards that make us members of this classroom, and we will show kindness to help people access it within their understanding. Most of my approaches to teaching derive from my pre-teaching experience in legislative drafting, neuroscience, and human evolutionary biology. A lot of my off-the-cuff responses were workshopped in the improv class inside my head. Sometimes I think improv should be required for training, even for teachers like me who dread that kind of seemingly disingenuous performative distancing. As shy as I am, even a few improv sessions trained my brain for public performance more quickly and effectively than anything else. I quickly realized the awkward struggle is the expected end product. That brings me to teaching.

Razy Lacism & Collective Action Problems

Before teaching, my mentees were usually law school or college students and I usually wasn’t their immediate boss. When I began to teach high school science, my students and I struggled to match up high school with the various workforce expectations I had departed. Was the struggle a notification of my own ability or understanding of either context? My student teaching program went through laborious lengths to passive aggressively imply (sans details) we lacked the desired total control over the classroom, and students had no idea what decorous, proper academic behavior was, or what the point of education was. 

This was directly at odds not only with my own experiences as a student, but also smacked of the lazy racism I had encountered in my own teachers. Many of my labeled “disruptive” students could articulate what was wrong in a classroom or school, and frequently expressed frustration at the waste of time in their own education. (Teachers usually snarked in response that they complete more work or perform better on grades or listen when the teacher gave instructions. Everybody has good and bad days, including students.) These “problem defectors” from the “self-described learner” model also expressed that adults had betrayed every attempt they’d made at contributing to a community culture, because they failed to remove and directly intervene with bad actors based on assumptions about those students’ abilities. Why should they take that risk again and again when the adults weren’t doing their jobs?

I have never heard another adult describe or report this view from a child. Only some adults have the freedom to leave a toxic workplace. Logic tracks that few students have the freedom to leave a toxic school. How do we expect adults to act or even self-advocate in that environment? How is that different from how we expect students to respond?

The teacher adjusts a concept’s framing for the world to meet a student’s level of challenge, then provides the menu of tools for a student to try, feel confident in, and apply to outside the classroom.

Eventually I realized that the curriculum, group work, and tasks rarely connected to genuine interpersonal working practices or content. I had assumed a teacher was a coach who titrates the level of cognitive load and mediates between the policy expectations of the real world and the collective resources of the student’s reality. I didn’t realize there was no narration linking the two, and further realized I’d never learned it in school myself, having been the one to walk off with the bathroom pass for two periods. I apologize to all the security guards who have chased me down halls and over bathroom stalls.

But no matter how many hours we spend on the seating chart, and no matter how many kids come to us from an overflowing Wellness Center, we teachers are still not trained or certified as clinical therapists or social engineers. We evaluate a student’s resources and find ways to bridge and complicate concepts. The learning process is inherently full of conflict between an old and new reality. 

Many new teachers worry about classroom management and how it interacts with the school culture. Sometimes in the chaos, we mislabel all conflict as bad, when it’s only the conflicts we haven’t designed or anticipated that require further consideration. 

I don’t know what’s out there that trains people in this. Maybe I haven’t found it yet. But I’m going to keep thinking and trying.

Teacher Talk: What I learned student-teaching all-ELL, all-newcomer, English-only biology

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When I came to the US in 1990, the sooner I could assimilate as an “American,” the sooner the daily bullying from peers and teachers would stop. My dad even gave me a book of American idioms to memorize. Thirty years later, Japan hasn’t replaced the US as the world power, the Y2K bug didn’t end the world, and globalization has changed every dimension of conversation and life. 

As a student teacher at an all-newcomer, all-ELL, English-only school, I learned from amazing teachers who balanced rigor, equity, and challenge. Some of our students had never held a pencil, or arrived fresh from witnessing violence against a family member, or were unprepared for the level of trauma in peers of the same ethnicity but different socioeconomic backgrounds. Their backpacks carried the complicated prejudices of the places they had left. 

We wrote demanding, scaffolded science curriculum every day, and often created 2 levels of differentiation based on fluency or confidence. I found myself looking for phrasebooks of obscure indigenous languages to enrich our collective learning experience and make students feel less isolated. I think the last time I learned so much so quickly was in law school.

Two things I will always remember from my newcomer ELL kids:

  1. “Teach us the advanced vocabulary from the start, not the “baby ELL” vocabulary. It’s all new to us anyway, so what’s the difference?”

    1. Scientists tend to be data-driven. In an international research community, labels are merely useful models for describing an aspect of an idea. English is often required for science journals, but rarely will you have a team where everyone’s first (and only) language is American English.

    2. You don’t need English to understand how the world works. You learn the English to express your understanding.

    3. Monolinguists often assume someone’s English fluency reflects their intelligence. Anyone who speaks or has learned more than one language understands the difference between understanding and explaining a concept or process, and the language you use to describe it.

  2. “It is sad and scary that Trump got elected, but it’s not that different back home.”

    1. There were a lot of tears and shouting in San Francisco after the election of 2016. Students who found other forms of expression inadequate took to the streets, calling on others to join and rally their dispirited confidence for the days ahead.

    2. Everything is the new normal for a child. As teachers, sometimes we can barely even advocate for our most vulnerable students, let alone ourselves, within a Kafka-esque educational system. I had a chaotic childhood, and I didn’t want to be another adult who had disappointed them, so I only promised my students things I had control over.

      1. I don’t need to like them or “be nice” to love or support them.

      2. When I am here, it is to be with them, to do the work of learning together.

      3. I would miss them when they’re gone.

      4. We catch each other in the safety of the classroom, because we’re in the same boat.

Those two quotes remind me regularly that all I have control over is how I convey my intentions to the students. Students brush up against limitations all the time, but the scope of their experiences defines what they can label as an outcome, or progress, or challenging help. Sometimes their teacher is one of many voices, and sometimes their teacher is the only voice that makes sense as the lens for the world. 

I did my best to offer them as many perspectives of the world as I could, so they could decide for themselves what they wanted it to look like long after I am gone. I labeled what I thought was a good challenge and gave them time and resources to choose from. So many of my students had seen poorly-resourced versions of trendy teaching innovations that some were allergic to the idea of “restorative justice,” which they understood as “saying what the white lady wants to hear so she feels like a better teacher,” as opposed to a way for feelings to be heard and shared. It felt familiar to my own K-12 experiences wishing the teacher would stop messing with my day. 

My mentor introduced the French cadre system of free creation within firm boundaries, as well as the competency-community-choice (pick 2) triangle of classroom satisfaction. I shared this philosophy with my students, described the system architecture of choices in each lesson, and afterwards, found classroom management to be much easier afterwards. Once students were able to identify a shared state of feeling safe (not determined by a huge list of difficult-to-remember “norms” the teacher was willing to write on the board), they could notify each other of those interruptions, and then agree on the challenge they wanted in the activity. 

Because of the nature of my promises, they could evaluate and decide that if I was there that day, I was going to stay. They could trust their own interpretation of their classroom reality using the tools and ideas I showed but not prescribed. Anyone not on their game today could be on their game tomorrow. What’s weak today is strong tomorrow, and only by risking our vulnerability can we get to that rewarding place where happiness becomes not only easy to trust, but feels true. 

I have so much more to learn still, and this personal reflection violates my own editorial rules about careful citation, but I wanted to challenge myself by writing about a detailed personal experience rather than yet another buzzword-y pedantic article about pedagogy. In trying to train my students to trust themselves and their own toolkit, I’m also trusting my own experiences more, and recognizing that I’m always going to be “on the way” but never there.

Reflection: Individual Professional Responsibilities vs. Institutional Standards

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A teacher wrote: “What is your logic in teaching high school biotech when this is not a direct standard or DCI. My department and I agree this is important. I feel this is a touchy "line."“

My response was off-the-cuff:

 If you and your dept think it's important, you can probably trust yourself to have the background to make a case for any NGSS std you want. Are you seeking matching phenomena/concepts or NGSS performance expectations? You could also try looking at HHMI for what NGSS standards they connect to their biotech topics.

Genuine curiosity question: What's the line here? What are you concerned about?

Personal view: I prefer to cover as many topics our students will encounter in *their* future, as difficult as it is to predict, through the lens of inferring from evidence & evaluating models (a main NGSS focus). The NGSS stds are basic guidelines, not the sum total of an HS science education. Whatever the science curriculum will be one day, Ss will be making the decisions about our world, regardless of whether we cover these technologies or not. Biotech is the future.

Standards: Most of these are covered in "HS. Inheritance and Variation of Traits" (LS1-4,LS3-1, LS3-2, LS3-3) and "HS. Natural Selection and Evolution" (LS4-1 thru 5) but it's great to use feedback loops from "Interdependent Relationships in Ecosystems" to talk about how these will aggregate in future population dynamics. Fun summative. Is this helpful?

Examples: For 9th grade heterogeneous Biology, I use these to discuss the increasing self-domestication of humans, adaptive eusociality and how classroom groupwork simulates cooperative strategies, biodiversity and the newest models for speciation, everything and anything about genetic diversity (including all possible human sex chromosome combinations, polymorphic traits, skin color, etc.).

Teacher Talk: 11 Frequent Phrases

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Every year a few of my students start a notebook full of interesting, weird, or funny things I say. Here are some phrases I find myself repeating in class, both to myself, and my students. If they are similar phrases, they’re lumped into the same bullet point. You can probably imagine the behavior or talk they respond to.

I don’t know if these are the best things to say, but I mostly get into epistemological arguments with my students (9-12), so they’re all things that have worked for me more than once.

At the end of the post, I include a few favorites from students, but I haven’t understood their explanation for why they like these yet. (Students & colleagues, feel free to correct.)

11 Frequent Phrases

  1. All models are wrong. Some models are useful.

  2. I’m going to start making weird noises until you get back to your seats. BRAWPP!

  3. Did you mean to say that? Let’s try again without the word. Rewind! [makes tape rewinding sound] Try a different way of saying it. What did we really mean to say, what were you trying to get? Let’s not use that word which might get us fired, and say what we mean instead. Helping or hurting? Uh, rude. Wow, excuse me. What the what now?

  4. How long do you want to feel this way? You sound upset. You sound like you’re not having a good time. I would not want to feel what you sound like you’re feeling. [repeat what student says, slowly, calmly, to check accuracy]

  5. Are you getting what you came for?

  6. Slow down. Breathe. Time out! Pause. Hold up. We have time for this. Can you help the rest of us out with some of that energy? Okay, carry us please, you look way more active than I feel, haha.

  7. If you’re the first scientist on the planet looking at something nobody’s ever seen before, is anyone gonna tell you if you’re right or not, or are you gonna have to figure it out for yourself?

  8. You’re in California, learn some Spanglish. I was made in China. Talking to a Spanish/Chinese/Arabic-speaking scientist, you’d say <term>. Why stop at just one language?

  9. Oh so I can’t change my mind? Some of us wanted to be dinosaurs when we’re five and some of us still want to be dinosaurs but I’m not going to feed you a live goat tomorrow.

  10. Lemme make sure I’m the most embarrassing one in the room first so we can get started.

8 Student favorites (excerpt)

  1. “No cannibalism.”

  2. “Make some human/alien/animal noises please so I know you’re alive.”

  3. “We’re all skin bags!”

  4. “Deep breaths. Strength in, bullshit out.”

  5. “You humans often <something scientific>.”

  6. “Wait, what century is this?”

  7. “And then we’ll have Sex in the spring, more feedback loops, maybe do Drugs if we have time…”

  8. “Are you okay?”

Advice for Students Entering College

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What advice would have been useful for me to take before I entered college? My college roommate's little brother is entering Harvard next year. As a responsible big sister, she's asked our friends what advice we could offer him. My answer boiled down to a few points that I realized are true about life as well.

1. People matter. Talk to EVERYONE. Classmates, professors, janitors, presidents, lecturers, museum curators, the people in the kitchen (very important for quality of life), campus police, people sitting next to you. Introduce yourself and ask them how their day is. Remember their names or something they find interesting about themselves. Share your dreams (your actual dreams, not what sounds nice to people) and listen to theirs. It'll go a long way in making you feel comfortable and at home on campus. There's something interesting about everyone, and having a strong sense of community will lend you confidence on bad days when you're trudging around the Yard.

2. "Requirements" don't matter as much as you think. Go for what you want. Don't listen to anyone telling you what the "rules" or "usual" path someone follows through a concentration or requirement fulfillment are. You can petition your profs, tutors, proctors, etc. for almost anything, so long as you show you are prepared, you've done your research, and they won't have to babysit you. Go for what you want, not what you think you ought to do or might find "useful" in the future, because Harvard's going to give you great peers and a great analytical skillset, so whatever you're passionate about, you're going to be awesome at it regardless of what "useful" classes you didn't take.

3. Regardless of authority or tenure, people who know you more intimately can be more helpful. Professors make the class, but sometimes, for larger classes like government, TFs make the class. Many of the TFs in gov't and law have awesome careers elsewhere; get to know them if you can, and they can hook you up with great gigs if they see you're passionate. College gives you a wild menagerie of options--sometimes you'll need direction more than you'll need "contacts."

4. Seek help. Find a mentor, any mentor. Doesn't have to be in your concentration, year, hall, House, class, whatever. Just find someone you can talk to, who can help you grow or sift through your whirlwind of experiences.

5. Take the time to indulge in curiosity. Shop classes you're interested in but probably aren't or won't take because you don't have enough interest or time. Grab the syllabi and check out the assigned list of readings, and if you're intrigued, go and read the books to give yourself a taste.

Good luck to all the prefroshies, and to the rest of us.