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.