Patterns, Ideals, and Expectations: Learning to be at Peace with Myself in the Classroom

Someone once told me that expectations are simply preconceived resentments. I resisted the notion--after all, most human action is based on the expectation of some future result: I would not go to work (much as I love my students) if I did not expect some kind of compensation; I would not save money for the future if I did not expect to have a future; I would be very unlikely to ask a young lady out on a date if I had no expectation of her saying yes. After a year of teaching, however, I have decided that I will accept the proposition with which I opened this post, with a slight modification: unrealistic expectations are simply preconceived resentments. In my case, I too often vacillated last year between resenting my students (not all of them, but certain ones), and resenting myself or my own poor pedagogical practice.

This year, I am learning not to lower my expectations, but to make them more realistic--to realize that for both myself and my students, learning comes in small steps, taken one at a time--as the Biblical prophet Isaiah described it, we learn and grow "precept upon precept, line upon line." Remembering this truth has made it much easier for me to be at peace with myself, and with what is happening in my classroom, during these first weeks of my second year.

The realization came to me as I was leading my 8th graders in the "Islands" game--an activity designed to help develop communication and cooperation skills in small groups. In the game, students distribute a deck of cards with islands on them to each group member. Each island except one has a match somewhere in the deck. The groups task is to find the odd one out without showing or trading any of their individual cards. It is an activity that came out of the Complex Instruction system, developed at Stanford University by Rachel Lotan and Elizabeth Cohen. I had seen the activity work perfectly, providing a wealth of teachable moments, in my course on Teaching in Heterogeneous Classrooms at Stanford, and I wondered why it was not working nearly as well with my 8th graders.

Then I remembered something. I had seen it work so well with a group of graduate students at Stanford who were preparing to become teachers. It was simply silly to think it would happen just the same way with my young 8th graders. What I saw at Stanford was a pattern--an ideal I could strive for in my own practice. My reality will not always conform to the pattern, but the pattern is still essential as a tool against which I can constantly measure my practice as a teacher, hence growing closer and closer to the ideal. I discovered last year that it is far to easy as a teacher to use the pattern as a stick with which to flagellate oneself rather than as a measuring stick with which to monitor progress, slight and slow though it may be.

It would have been easy, at the end of last year, to simply throw out the pattern--to become disillusioned, to tell myself that the academics in the schools of education were out of touch with what things were "really" like in the classroom. But, that would have been unfair to them, to me, and to my students (not to mention being inaccurate, at least in the case of Stanford's School of Education--you would be hard pressed to find a better place for linking theory and research to practice). Instead, I need to remember to return to the pattern often, to see how closely my practice fits, and to enhance my own understanding of the pattern itself. Thus the pattern becomes not a reminder of my failures and shortcomings, but a source of living, growing knowledge--a guide to follow as I slowly, steadily fashion myself into the kind of teacher I know I can be.