I Heard Your Smile

There was a famous incident in which the Israeli psychologist Daniel Kahneman explained to the Israeli Air Force why they were idiots. The officers had discovered that if a pilot flew exceptionally well and they praised him for it, he did not fly as well the next time, whereas if a pilot flew poorly and was criticized, he improved. This led them to conclude that they should criticize, not praise.

Every student in my Intro to Psych class is clamoring the same thing right now: “Where were the control groups?” They never tried testing criticism on pilots who flew well and praise on those who flew badly, or indeed, not saying anything at all. Kahneman noted that due to regression to the mean, pilots who had done particularly well or poorly in one round, tended to present a more average performance in the next round; everyone tends to do about average, after all.

This was in my head on Thursday, when I received the “Excellent Teacher” award of the year from my school. It was nice to receive the reward, but as I navigated the rows of clapping teachers, I worried that next year I won’t do as well. That I’ll regress to the mean or below it. Then I started to wonder what the mean is, after all, in teaching; what does that even mean? Have I ever satisfactorily defined good teaching to myself?

Today, while interviewing a teacher for next year, my principal asked the candidate his signature question, “what do you consider good teaching to be?” My immediate thought, that good teaching can only mean good learning, feels somehow both true and a cop-out answer.

While planning for next year, there are so many things that I am trying to balance: scaffolding skills for my students, while hitting every part of the curriculum, while differentiating sufficiently, while using culturally/gender/etc. diverse texts, while engaging them in relevant, thought-provoking inquiries… and yet through it all, I am aware of deep dissatisfaction with my own process. The truth is, I don’t know what good teaching is. I don’t know what students of 2020 should be learning in order to be equipped to live a good, productive life—I have no idea what the world will look like in 2030. If I really thought about it, I’d probably spend all my lessons on survival and ethics in a post-apocalyptic world. Well, we are reading The Handmaid’s Tale next year.

That's a lot to get right...

I know, sometimes, when there’s been a good learning moment. When the classroom is humming with students’ ideas and every corner is somehow generating a different form of creativity, or the students are pushing and pulling at some question that together leads them to a bigger truth. But that’s as much a product of the students as it is of anything that I do before class.

Today, when I came back to campus for the interview, it was silent with summer stillness. Most of the students have gone home; only those who cannot return have stayed. At one point, laughing with the other staff present in the teacher’s lounge, I caught sight of one of my favorite students through the door. He was fluttering there, waiting for me to notice him.

“Ah! Let’s go talk,” I approached him. He’s a writer, so there are any number of things we need to catch up on each time we see each other.

“I came down from studying upstairs. I heard your smile and knew it was you.”

“You heard my smile?”

“Yes, I heard your smile.”

I didn’t correct his English. It was too exquisite and unexpected. I folded away the loops of laughter that I knew he meant, and thought instead that he could hear my smile, and that his homing pigeon instinct to find me so we could discuss Tuesdays with Morrie and the afterlife and how to zero in on meaning in an essay is probably good learning. I don’t know what good teaching is, but as long as there are students like him (and there are, oodles and caboodles), I won’t fall too far below the mean—some students demand that their teachers live up to them.

The Four Students

At the end of the school year, report cards are sent out, eliciting varying responses in students. Some have worked hard and achieved superb results; others coasted and failed. It’s on neither of these that I lavish my attention. It’s with those who worked hard and emerged disappointed that I am most concerned. They are the ones in need of encouragement, in need of direction, in need (in short) of teaching. But their needs surface in different ways, usually in my inbox, after reports have been sent out. They can be broken down into four kinds of students, with four responses.

The first student, the wise one, sends an email stating that they are disappointed in themselves. They tried hard, and yet didn’t meet their expectations. What can they do to improve? Can they send practice essays over the summer for feedback? What kind of study schedule should they build?

I write these students back my most supportive responses. We can do it, I write (we are in this together), it is a process, and I map it out for them in meticulous detail. You’ve worked hard, and already come so far—I can see what you can’t, and it’s your trajectory to success. I write these emails carefully, because more than anything, I want them to believe in my belief in them—and then to transcend it, no longer need it, sustained in their own belief in themselves.

The second student, the unethical student, sends an email much like the first. They tried hard, and didn’t meet their expectations. What can they do to improve? Is there a chance I might rethink their grade?

It’s this last question that differentiates them from the first student. The first is interested in learning and improving their skills, the second, in improving their score. I write a fiery email about corruption and ethics, and then delete it, and instead craft a measured email about how I grade blind (covering every student’s name with sticky notes, so that I don’t know whose work I am grading) and changing a grade simply because a student had the initiative to ask for it, would be morally wrong. I suggest ways to improve and offer feedback, but my focus is on the student’s personal ability to improve. This student will only be capable of hard work after accepting that improvement of their performance, not their grade, is what is at stake; that the change has to come from them, not from me. It’s moral education, rather than English or Psychology, that I’m attempting here. 

The third student doesn’t email me—their parents do. This student is enfeebled by parents who have kept them dependent. Rather than helping the student draft their email to me, these parents jump in on their own, cutting through the student-teacher relationship that I’ve worked so hard to build, and trying to achieve for their child instead of helping their kid manage for themselves. Sometimes, I get to respond that their child is wise, and has already emailed me. But often I am left with the sense that I am educating them, rather than their child.

The last student is the one that concerns me the most; the student who doesn't email. They receive their report, and their face drops, and then they leave the room, and I don’t hear from them. I know what they don’t—that with work, they can succeed—but they are so firmly entrenched in their belief that they will fail that it is difficult to reach them—they have stopped checking school email, or attending tutoring, or responding to reassurance. I wait for a response to my encouragement, and wish for a way to break through. And think to myself that, next year, I will teach better, clearer, more grippingly, the only thing that matters—that learning is, after all, a process, and the main thing is not to despair during the journey but to keep moving forward.

 I have two weeks until I begin teaching in Ashkelon. A good fortnight for a break from my regular IB teaching, during which I’ll do the things that teachers do on their vacations: grade, plan, study content knowledge, and spend at least four hours a day reading or at the beach. Ah, summer vacation-- when teachers work only as much as a non-teacher does during the year. I'm looking forward to it!

*Any resemblance to the four sons of the Haggadah is entirely coincidental.