Alice Schultz - Short Essays

At this point in my teaching career, I feel I'm at a crossroads. I can slog on with what I have been doing and hope to improve, or I can sit down and engineer improvement consciously to make myself a better teacher. I don't teach history per se right now; I teach American literature, but there is obvious overlap between the two. I believe that I cannot be a proficient literature teacher without knowledge of history, and I believe that my students will never understand what they're reading without some understanding of context. I want to bring in more history to my literature classroom, as I would hope that history teachers would bring writing about history into their classrooms.

So I think that I have all the right materials at my hands: content knowledge, classroom management, love of history, enthusiasm for teaching, etc. And although I am not exactly teaching history right now, I will continue to sneak as much in as I can in my literature classroom, and maybe someday soon even teach a history class or two of my own.

Teaching American Lit in Waukegan
It was a gray February day, dark in my classroom because I had the overhead on. I was boring my students. They had read an excerpt from Frederick Douglass' slave narrative the night before and been quizzed on it, but I'd say maybe half of them had actually done the work. My students stared at me through half-closed lids, some doodling on their notebooks as my co-teacher and I droned on about spirituals and hidden messages in songs.

Around the room, a few students were starting to sit up a little straighter, lean forward to hear what I was saying. Another student raised his hand. “So what you're saying is that all of the black dudes didn't like him because he married some white woman?" That's right, I told him. “Well, he shouldn't have sold out his people like that." Another student jumped in. “He can marry whoever he wants! What if he just happened to fall in love with a white woman?" My co-teacher added that many white women were not all too fond of Douglass after the war either; once blacks had the right to vote, Douglass stopped supporting women's suffrage.

Zarick was waving his hand again. “I thought Douglass was a hero. They always said he was like MLK, like a saint who helped black people get their rights and stuff. And now you're saying his people thought he sold them out by marrying a white woman and he stopped supporting women's rights. " I wasn't sure how to answer that at first. I hadn't anticipated that reading Douglass would lead to fleshing out who he really was enough to make the students realize that he was more than just words on the paper in the textbook. That was my goal, of course - but no one had ever gotten excited about it before, so I'd never thought it was a big deal.

I did my best to explain to Zarick - and the rest of the class - that history, and literature, is not about static characters. These were real people once, and they had their flaws as well as their attributes. Was Frederick Douglass a hero? Sure. Did he have flaws? Of course he did, like everyone else. Does that mean that we can't admire him for what he accomplished? No, in fact it's a better form of admiration, seeing his flaws for their worth and still having respect for the man.

It was interesting to see the change in my class. I had temporarily destroyed one of their heroes, but I think I got them to see that we need flawed heroes, or we won't have anyone to truly look up to. How can we strive to be better people, to hold ourselves to the ideal that our heroes represent, if we think these people are flawless? We'll never accept ourselves if we try for an unattainable goal. I thought it was so important that we had this discussion in my classroom, especially since so many of my students dream of being that hero, of going to the NBA or NFL out of high school and wowing the millions. I hope they will start to see that they have to start small and work up to it - and fame and greatness aren't always what's real.

Essay C
With the help of McRAH, I now feel prepared to address the challenge of teaching American literature from a historical perspective. Much of my curriculum as an American literature teacher consists of historical documents, particularly in the early units. I've struggled in the past with teaching something such as John Smith's “The General History" as literature as the textbook instructs me to. It is a piece never intended to be read as literature, but rather a written documentary glorifying Smith as a leader and detailing what life was like for the colonists who arrived at Jamestown in the early 1600s. The students have had a hard time in the past getting through pieces like this; the language and lack of a coherent “plot" are a struggle. But in McRAH, I've learned that if I approach it differently, I might get better results from my students. If I tell them that it is a historical document and analyze it as such, I think they will become much more engaged as learners in what they are reading. I think I had it backward before, taking a piece of literature and explaining it in the context of history. If instead I view it as a historical document that can be analyzed as literature, it takes some of the pressure off f the students to try to find some kind of literary coherence that many times isn't there. This school year I plan to address this problem and see if in fact the students' understanding does improve.

The upcoming school year will be my third as a teacher, my third at Waukegan. I started teaching raw from college when I was 21, and looking back, I can honestly say that I had no idea what I was doing. I was educated in Maine Township and student taught in District 214, where my only preparation for teaching at Waukegan was the Reading Skills special ed class I taught, and believe me, that was a gentle preparation. For the past two years I've felt like I was juggling everything: curriculum, classroom management, administration, etc. I'm afraid there hasn't been a ton of coherence to what I'm teaching, especially with the sophomore curriculum. This bothers me, but I've never had the time before to sit down, analyze and reflect on what the problem is, and try to fix it.

So this summer was quite a change for me, in that McRAH gave me a chance to talk to other Waukegan teachers, some experienced, some not, and attempt to organize myself. I've restructured most of my American literature curriculum by coming up with a focus question and writing objectives for every single day - something I never did before. That way I know every single day what I wanted my students to accomplish when I made up the lesson plan. I had some vague idea before - but it's amazing what a difference that articulating those goals makes.

I have also been at a crossroads in terms of where I want my teaching career to go. I've been under some pressure from my family and friends who don't know Waukegan to get a job in a safer neighborhood that will pay more. For a while I tended to agree with them - that like many other young teachers, I would use Waukegan as a stepping stone, a place to get my feet wet and then move on to greener pastures. I can't say exactly when that started to change, but it began early last spring when I realized that I actually like my job quite a bit. I've always liked the students, and I think I would like them wherever I was. But it wasn't until McRAH that the idea of staying in Waukegan longer than just a few years actually cemented in my mind. We were supposed to be talking about the teaching of moral ambiguities in history, and it turned into a mud-slinging session over whether or not Waukegan students were capable of understanding moral ambiguities in the first place. I got so defensive and protective of our students, and it made me realize that I am already doing the right thing. These kids deserve the best teachers in the state. That may not be me right now, but I will give them my very best every day - and my students know that. The kids at Stevenson or Maine South will get a good education whether or not I work there, but maybe some kid at Waukegan will get a good education in English or history because I was his teacher. That's a huge responsibility. And I'm sure it can be just as satisfying to teach in the suburbs and of course get paid a lot of money. But McRAH has reminded me that this is why I went into education in the first place: because these kids deserve good teachers who care about them. And there's no better place than Waukegan to see that in evidence every single day.

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