Why I am here

I am a teacher.

Yet despite more than twenty years of teaching at both secondary and elementary schools, as well as (with a great many reservations, because who am I, after all) teachers through professional development, and, now, in pre-service and post-degree programs (online and off) at university, I do not know how to teach. I seem to know less as the years go by.  I yearn, however, as the world changes at a dizzying pace and the range of diversity in the students before me expands beyond my grasp, and classrooms swell to include the until recently unimaginable online space, to find at last a (meaningful, loving) way (or ways) to teach (deeply, beautifully) in our (for a) changed (changing) world.

What I’ve come to realize, though, is that I’ve been looking in the wrong direction. For years, I’ve turned toward evidence-based research, to the learning sciences, to neuroscience, to developmental, cognitive, and social psychology, to the possibilities unleashed by an ever-expanding array of tools that technology now offers. Yet despite conscientious effort on my own and in collaboration with many others, nothing has consistently worked, and the work only seems more and more exhausting, less joyful.  

Still, I have known success in small but important ways. Those successes, though – moments when eyes have lit up with learning, when a hush of deep thoughtfulness settled on the classroom, when a buzz of electrified conversation swept through it – have not been set off by evidence-based practice at all, but something else. The poetry of teaching, I’m calling it. I have begun to believe that this is the important foundation for beautiful teaching and learning. More, I worry that with our increasingly relentless focus on scientific approaches, particularly in these spaces created by technology, the poetic, this ineffable, inexplicable, mysterious, beautiful something else, risks being extinguished altogether.

This blog is an attempt to uncover the poetry of teaching, to make it, somehow, visible before it begins to fade from our memories like open meadows and clear running creeks in our crowded cities, like the steelhead salmon from the rivers of my youth, the sweet tang of fresh clean air, the flocks of birds that darkened spring skies.

Here in the open, sharing my tentative, unpolished and fragmentary thoughts, rather than thinking alone, burnishing my own ideas to a fierce sheen, a finished piece to set upon the mantle to gather dust, I hope to uncover poetry, or even something smaller, a burning shard, perhaps, that others could take up, or a lit sliver that might light up a way to see teaching and learning anew.

I imagine the possibility that you might join me here, that we might together fashion a torch and see something else for teachers, for learners. Something beautiful.

Let us start a conversation through comments here or via Twitter: @sbeleznay.