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I have a confession to make. I was a bad teacher.
I was not mean or abusive to students, and I didn't make capricious demands, ignore my syllabus, grade while under the influence, or test students on material I had not taught. Students learned some sociology in my classes, and some even enjoyed the experience. Once in a blue moon, an effusive statement such as “one of the best classes I've had at this school” would appear on a student evaluation form. But two things in particular convince me that I was a bad teacher.
First, my course evaluations were fair to middling, which was a terrible return on the enormous investment of time and anxiety I was making. I spent hours upon hours preparing material and sleepless nights agonizing over it before and after it was delivered, yet the feeling we all had—students and instructor alike—after it was all over was, “Well, that was okay.”
But what was, in retrospect, an even clearer sign that I was a bad teacher was how I thought about and engaged with my students. I felt an enormous distance from them, even though at the time I was very close in age to the typical student. They were enigmas to me, and I didn't know how to deal with the varying levels of interest, commitment, and ability they brought to class. All I knew how to do was to expect of them what I had always expected of myself—not perfection, exactly, but something close to it.
I had earned an undergraduate degree in English literature before converting to sociology for graduate school, and years of close readings and obsession over the intricacies of grammar, voice, perspective, and proper formatting had taken their toll. I arrived at my first teaching assignment as a full-blown, unrepentant (and unreflective) “critic.”
The critic was a harsh instructor because his primary mode was judgment. He had the virtue of high expectations, but he lacked the compassion, patience, and power necessary to help students meet those expectations. As his student, the message you received most consistently was, “You're not measuring up.”
Truthfully, it was I who was not measuring up: I was not practicing the craft of teaching at a high level and, more importantly, I was not taking full measure of myself. I was not reflecting on who I was and how that could, would, or should inform who I was as a teacher.
I have done that now. Or, more accurately, I have made that kind of reflection an integral and on-going part of my pedagogical process. The results have been revelatory. I have been able to define, critique, and fundamentally reform my orientation to teaching, and my own transformation has meant that I am much less a critic and much more a mentor to my students. This is the story of my transformation.
Some believe that personal transformation is just that—personal. Sociologists take a skeptical view of such individualistic interpretations of experience: we believe that the personal is always also social. In a story of individual triumph (or defeat), we look for the cultural substrate, the socialization experiences, the dynamics of power and privilege that form the soil from which these stories grow. To be told properly, then, the story of my transformation must also be the story of the worlds in which I have dwelled and how they have shaped me.
I am the product of a white, middle-class, intact family that lived the quintessential suburban lifestyle of the 1970s and ‘80s. So I was raised with some very specific expectations, assumptions, and privileges. When it came to education, these were encapsulated in the mantra, “Schoolwork comes first!,” which my friends and I heard so often that it set a steady, irresistible rhythm for our march through compulsory schooling. It meant that school performance was the primary measure of our worth, a worth that could be more or less quantified in grades and GPAs.
To be clear, I do not think those standards are unique to my race, class, or community, but there is no doubt that my social position affected how I (and others like me) absorbed them and the nature of the challenges we faced in trying to meet them. We believed that there was a straight, unbreakable line from our days in high school to a college education to a successful, lucrative career and a relatively comfortable life. All we had to do was get decent grades (read: nothing below a “B”), and our parents would ensure that the line remained intact.
They would do this by giving us the privilege of resources. They gave us money, so that whatever jobs we had through high school and college needed to provide only supplemental income. Thereby they gave us time. We didn't need to—and we weren't supposed to—work forty hours a week; we had the mandate (and the privilege) to keep our focus on school. They gave us connections; they always had a family friend or acquaintance we could call for that book report on contemporary professionals or to get an “in” on a competitive internship. And, through their whiteness, they gave us social legitimacy. Never did we have to worry if that line, so carefully laid out for us, would be broken by the informal racial policies (as was the case for black employees of Denny's, Coca-Cola, Boeing, and other companies) or by the disciplinary practices of our own schools (given that many metropolitan districts have a long history of suspending and expelling students of color disproportionately). Lastly, they gave us the unchallenged assumption that pretty much everyone saw the same unbroken line that we did, cherished it like we did, and could travel it with the same ease as we could.
Is it any wonder that I unknowingly arrived at my first teaching assignment as a graduate student with the philosophy and baggage of the critic? I had been taught my whole life to see myself in terms of grades and commitment to school and to judge myself harshly if either of those faltered; why wouldn't I see my students through the same lens?
I can say with confidence that I am not a bad teacher now, first and foremost because I see myself, and by extension my students, differently. What caused the change? I wish I could say there was a single “a-ha” moment in which I went from critic to mentor. But it wasn't like that.
I do recall one young woman—an African-American student athlete I tutored—who was the first person in her family to go to college. From my first days with her, “Nadine” (let's call her) was upfront and secure in her sense that she was a “C” student, but she was determined to get better. I was disarmed by her clear and nonjudgmental assessment of who she was as a student. Where I came from, it was a source of shame to be a “C” student, and it would have been even more shameful to accept yourself as such. But here Nadine was, loving who she was exactly as she was and using that love as motivation to better herself.
I think the fact that I was her tutor, not her instructor, helped immensely in allowing me to see her on her own terms. Without the institutional mandate that I had to judge her (i.e., give her grades), I was free to be utterly in her corner, get caught up in the excitement of playing a small part in this remarkable young woman's self-affirming quest for academic achievement and personal growth. At semester's end she earned a “B” in her sociology course, and I had been given a glimpse of a new conception of the teacher.
Working with Nadine was the start but by no means the completion of my transformation. (Indeed, that transformation is a work in progress. It's most accurate to say I'm a recovering critic.) What that experience produced was a shift in consciousness. The recognition (albeit intermittent and partial) that one fundamental flaw in my teaching—a source of the angst that infused my efforts and daily wore me down—was inside me meant that I could work actively to change it.
The operative word here is “could,” which is not the same as “did.” During the four years immediately following this experience, I conducted my classes and myself pretty much as I had always done, with the critic making sure that I was “offering” my students more judgment than support and encouragement.
In retrospect, I'm convinced that this stagnation was due to the fact that I was not surrounded by people with whom I could have the conversations I needed. My graduate institution was only beginning to value (or pretend to value) teaching enough to offer rudimentary teaching seminars. The topics they addressed were helpful (even though they simultaneously reinforced the lowly status of teaching at the institution)—managing problem students, effective syllabi, not letting teaching swallow all your time. But they were far from asking the teacher to “know thyself.”
When I graduated, circumstances took me to the West Coast, and I spent the first year and a half there taking whatever teaching jobs I could. The low pay, inconvenient schedules, and strange new environments were not conducive to searching my teacherly soul, and neither were my classroom experiences.
The first gig I got after moving was teaching introductory sociology at a community college in a working-class area at 8:30 in the morning. The school was on the quarter system, so compared to the semesters I was used to, the course was, objectively, relatively brief. But I remember it as the longest I ever taught in my life.
Going in, I knew that community college classrooms tend to be more diverse than university ones on all sorts of socio-demographic variables: race, class, the age of students, their previous life and work experience, and so on. Intellectually, I welcomed this diversity and was eager to make it an energizing force and teaching tool in the class. In practice, I hadn't a clue how to do this. In practice, what I (the critic) saw most in these students were deficits of skill and intellect compared to the university students to whom I had become accustomed (and of which I had been one). This was perhaps the critic's lowest hour, for his intellectual superiority was now spiced with an unhealthy dose of classism.
The predictable result was a stultifying experience for everyone. For the first five weeks I taught over their heads and they worked below my expectations, and the only things we built together were frustration and a budding mutual animosity. And when at last I recognized clearly that I was teaching to the wrong level, the critic blew a golden opportunity. Rather than engage them in a dialogue about reasonable goals and expectations, I kept my frightened distance and began teaching down to instead of over them.
Each day, I would devote the class to outlining the portion of the chapter they had been assigned. I told myself I was helping them build the foundational skills that they lacked. What I was really doing was hiding behind a mind-numbing exercise and, in the process, both insulting my students and shortchanging them. Here is as good a place as any to offer those students a long-overdue apology.
That community college experience left me nowhere to go but up, and, thankfully, I soon found myself in an environment where moving up was possible. I landed an adjunct position at a small Jesuit university and quickly realized that, in terms of the importance and attention given to teaching, I wasn't in Kansas (or Land Grant U.) anymore. Here they actually talked—positively and creatively—about teaching. They used words like rubric and teaching objectives and active learning. They knew Perry's nine stages of cognitive development and the importance of teaching to multiple learning styles.
And most of them seemed to take all this jargon and theory and mold it into classes that engaged, excited, challenged, and transformed students. I'm not talking about entertaining lectures and well-written exams that garner good student evaluations. I'm talking about courses as experiences that grab students emotionally as well as intellectually, teaching that can and frequently does prompt students to become scholars, leaders, and activists in their own right. In that sort of milieu, where's a clueless critic to hide?
Well, one thing I can say to my credit is that I didn't hide. To the extent that I was able, I joined the conversation. I went to seminars on promoting students' independent thinking skills, teaching in the face of national tragedy, leading discussions, and using feminist pedagogy. I invited colleagues both inside and outside my discipline into my classroom, and I listened intently as they critiqued my responses to student questions, my efforts to generate discussion, and my class preparation strategies. I latched onto those who were considered the gurus of teaching at my school like a wide-eyed disciple. And I talked and thought, and talked and thought, and talked and thought about teaching.
Sometimes, all of this conferring and contemplation left me overwhelmed. I would become convinced that all of my course designs were broken beyond repair and that I would need a year (which no university would give me) to scrap and rebuild them. In darker moments, I was convinced that I was broken beyond repair—a well-meaning but hopeless instructor who didn't have the gift.
I sustained myself in these times with the thought that I was just soaking it all in. No, I didn't see a remarkable surge in the quality of my classes or decrease in my anxiety or course prep time. No, I wasn't even sure that I was seeing incremental improvements. But something good would surely come of my just eavesdropping on the conversation. And something good did come of being around experienced teachers, listening to them talk about their craft. I learned the lingo and tricks of the trade; I also expanded my conception of what's possible in a college class.
But I wasn't just eavesdropping; I brought myself to all those discussions. Although it often seemed that I only offered worry and negative examples, I see now that it was inevitable that being more reflective about my goals, strategies, and expectations as a teacher would shine a light on who I was. How can it be otherwise when the transmission of information is such a small part of the job? Beyond it, there are the intricacies of tone, presence, and demeanor that make up our in-class performance. There is coaching and coaxing, as we try to convey to students the full extent of their abilities. There is class management—the ways we foster and negotiate student-to-student interactions, positive and negative. And there is role modeling, the picture we give students of what constitutes an educator and a professional in our field. All of these elements can be molded and refined by learning about pedagogical practices. But they emerge from who we are, and transforming them means transforming ourselves.
My personal transformation is far from complete, but I believe I've come quite a ways from my days of treating students like problem children and writing outlines on the board to avoid really interacting with them. The challenge for me, as I've noted, has been to stop projecting who I was as a student onto my students. As a sociologist, I've always known, intellectually, that who we are now—our perspectives, values, interests, and goals—is shaped fundamentally by our pasts and the social surroundings from which we emerge. But it has taken what seems like a shamefully long time for me to appreciate the practical implications of that knowledge.
Thankfully, my students seem willing to teach me. One particularly adept instructor was “Kareem,” who all but-singlehandedly compelled me to restart the stalled redefining of “good student” and “effective teacher” that my encounter with Nadine had begun. Kareem was the closest I've come to having a street person on my roster. I say that not because he wore tattered clothes or gave off an offensive odor but because his experiences, attitude, bearing, speech, and perspectives were so fundamentally of a different world than the insular one of higher ed. In his 28 years, he had known crime, violence, poverty, racism, and even homelessness with an intimacy that none would covet and few would survive.
But here he was—a truly self-made man, a loner by default, whose outspokenness, passion, inquisitiveness, disdain for pretense, and barely restrained anger made him alien (and intimidating) to his classmates. I loved his intensity and unflinching honesty, but his raw personal style, distrust of authority, and inexperience with the routines and rigors of academic work did not position him for stellar academic performance. Was I going to tell him that he was doomed to fail—that his poor writing and underdeveloped analytical skills were a handicap he could not overcome? The critic surely would have.
But a wonderful thing happened. Thanks to what I call a “sociological parable” I told on the first day of class, Kareem considered that I might be an ally. As he was drawn to me, I got to know him better. I learned that his ability to study was regularly impeded by an absence of a stable place to live, extremely limited experience with computers, and financial hardships; at the same time I discovered that he craved new knowledge and quickly applied it to his own life. For instance, he loved learning about dramaturgy, the study of social life as theater, because he felt it gave him insight into the insincerity and duplicity he saw among his classmates.
The gaps in Kareem's academic skills and knowledge did not magically disappear during our time together, but profound learning occurred nonetheless. He developed his sociological imagination, as well as his ability to reconcile the world he came from with the one he'd chosen. I, meanwhile, learned more fully the lesson that Nadine first tried to teach me—that good students are not those who display the trappings of studiousness (perfect attendance, rapt attention, meticulous work). Good students are those who learn. Whatever their preconceptions, barriers, or deficits—whatever their story—they take new information and new experiences and, to the best of their ability, make them tools for transforming themselves and their world.
And at last I've learned that a good teacher is someone who can recognize and connect to good students—in all their forms.
Mark Cohan is an assistant professor of sociology at Seattle University. He has taught for over ten years in contexts ranging from large public and small private universities to community colleges and small-group tutoring.