The Look

11.12.09 By Kellyanne Mahoney

The majority of masterful teachers will be able to demonstrate to you the crippling prowess of their unique and finely cultivated “teacher look”—this is the glare that teachers use to convey the sheer terror and magnitude of their earnest and wholesome authority toward unruly or insensible students. Much like snowflakes and students, no two “teacher looks” are exactly the same. From what I have gathered most teachers deliver this look as an imperative statement—or at least a declarative one. My “teacher look,” however, is definitively a question mark. My look corresponds with countless speeches I have and will deliver to my seventh-graders about how they have been deliberately and unjustly deluded in their schooling up until this point into believing that they have been under the control of their teachers, when in reality they have been in control of themselves all along. Sometimes I even imagine myself into the role of Morpheus from The Matrix as I coax along this epiphany. My “teacher look” emotes: “THIS is what you choose to do with your own free will? I am shocked, genuinely confused, and quite frankly hurt.” Is my “teacher look” truly effective? I don’t know. It seems to be.

There has been much talk in recent weeks about the necessity for more rigorous evaluations of teachers. According to a recent Boston Globe article, efforts to improve teacher effectiveness are expected to be a major part of the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, the school reform law that Congress may take up in the coming year. As a perhaps overly—if not neurotically—reflective teacher, this all sounds great to me. My only qualm lies in the question of how “effectiveness” will be quantified, and who will be the source of this definition. I feel like whoever is able to come up with an even satisfactory “working definition” should be awarded the Nobel Prize. Perhaps the most controversial suggestion in developing the criteria for judging teacher effectiveness is the use of a “value-added data system” based on standardized test scores that can track the growth in individual students’ achievement from year to year, and that would possibly also be tied to a merit-based pay scale for teachers.

Educational theorist, activist and teacher Parker Palmer defines good teaching as “an act of generosity, a whim of the wanton muse, a craft that may grow with practice, and always risky business. It is, to speak plainly, a maddening mystery.” Possibly due to my Catholic upbringing, I think I personally learn best from people who possess the ability to scare me, or who otherwise shroud their motives in an air of secrecy. I think what most drew me into my alma mater and current employer Latin Academy’s pedagogy as a student was its unapologetic formality. However, the vast majority of the pedagogical articles and books I read as part of my teacher training seemed to imply that I should aspire to be like none of my favorite teachers from high school. As a result, I often ask myself: To be a “good teacher,” must I break the mold—without respect to the fact that this mold is what shaped my own intellectual development? I ask this question not only out of my reverence for what came before me, but also because of an awareness that when a school makes the decision to dump the old mold, the new mold—in the form of fancy whole-school improvement curriculum—often comes with a hefty price-tag from its outside developer. Moreover when I run through the mental panorama of teachers who have most influenced my development, they do not all fit into a singular mold at all.

Case in point would be my favorite professor as an undergrad, Professor MacBride, who taught The Philosophy of Journalism. For our first class meeting, he arrived 20 minutes late and then with an air of solemnity passed around a tree branch and a hand mirror. Our first assignment was to read a chapter on photosynthesis from a science textbook and write about how all three things relate. Such were his typical assignments, for which he required everyone in class to read their typically puzzled responses aloud. His response to our responses was usually an awkward silence governed by his stare, which could range from frighteningly blank to deeply pensive, and even emotional, depending on how well-contrived our writing happened to be that day.

The second time I took the same class, (after failing to complete the final paper he had assigned two weeks before term end that required us to answer in two-page, thoughtful responses each of his 20 questions, and that asked us to ponder the relationships between such things as Egyptian ideas of the Afterlife and his favorite Christopher Walken movie), there were few traces of what had happened in the Fall semester a year before. For example, he arrived on time for our first class, (during which he gave us what seemed like twenty minutes to come up with a way to “thank” each of our classmates using only our eyes). But he arrived late for our final class, (which lasted for only five minutes and consisted of him handing out manila envelopes he sternly prohibited us from opening until we left. I had given away to my classmates his secret final assignment, and those of us who hadn’t dropped his course due to my news were woefully awaiting the dreaded 40-page final assignment. Inside the envelope was instead a reprint from The New York Sun of the famous “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” column.) I eventually passed the second time around not by dutifully handing in all my assignments, but by penning a heartfelt manifesto describing in great detail the savant nature of my ability to sham teachers into believing I had actually read all of the things I had been writing about—including an outline of all the shameful personal milestones leading up to this point, and then a bold declaration that I would never again partake in such intellectual dishonesty.

I later gleaned a little more about MacBride’s philosophy of Journalism in the course syllabus for a different class I took with him on news writing and reporting, the central tenet of the philosophy being that “reporters are no better than murderers or child molesters.” (In hindsight I don’t think he meant this statement literally, but was using a bit of hyperbole to disillusion some of the chirpy broadcast hopefuls in our class. Still, I’m not quite sure.) After silently reading the syllabus at the start of class, we were then barked at that showing up stoned would result in automatic failure. He dismissed us shortly after, and we did not go on to discuss his philosophy again.

One on one, Professor MacBride was decidedly more straight-forward, even vulnerable. After class one day he pulled me aside. One of my classmates had complained to the department head about his teaching style.

“You get the point of what I do, right?” he inquired. Outside of class, his smoky teacher voice grew faint. And at this moment, his ever furrowed brow and down-turned mouth appeared more pleading than contemplative.

I was quick to reassure him about the merits of his teaching, and then tried to make him feel better by telling him the embarrassing story of how, over the weekend, my friends who were visiting from home had coincidentally knocked that same student’s boyfriend and his friends down two flights of stairs at my house.

“You think that’s bad,” he said, and went on to tell me about how a close friend from home had been arrested for robbing a bank the first time he came to visit him at school. MacBride grew up in Springfield, Mass., which I think was poorer than some of the poorest neighborhoods in Boston. I liked the stories he told me about his city, about what it was like as a black kid going to public school there during court-ordered busing, and about his father who sounded a lot like mine.

Had it not been for MacBride, I may not have graduated from college. The semester that I had failed his class, I had failed all my others too without alerting my professors as to why I had disappeared. My father was dying from leukemia at Brigham and Women’s Hospital back home, and when he finally did succumb to the disease in early November that semester I just stopped going to class. I tried to speak to someone in the administration at UMass-Amherst about what to do, but her recovery plan seemed unmanageable. So I just failed in fear of officially withdrawing and losing my housing.

The semester after I was supposed to graduate I had planned to study abroad in Granada, Spain, to fulfill the empty credits I needed to graduate. Professor MacBride had offered to advise me in an independent study on “The Moorish Influence on Southern Spain” that would round out the additional credits I needed for my diploma. The administration at UMass, however, refused our proposal because it challenged some guideline that one could not earn credit for an independent study while studying abroad. Realizing I was about to drown in the ridiculous formalities of the school’s bureaucracy, MacBride worked in collusion with a bureaucracy-loathing administrator from the Spanish department to mask what I was doing with a different title and to send me to Spain.

MacBride gave me two of his books to use: The Golden Age of the Moor, and Black Athena, a revisionist, Afro-centric history of the ancient Greeks. Before I left, I dropped in his mailbox as collateral a few of my favorite books, including a history of rioting in Boston that culminated in the anti-busing riots of the 1970s. Although I did read both his books cover to cover, I never did complete my paper on them. He gave me a passing grade for it anyways. This still makes me feel guilty when I think about it.

I pull MacBride’s books from my shelf from time to time, and open them to the covers where the Moroccan friends I had made on the trip wrote silly inscriptions to me in French and Arabic while I was visiting them in Barcelona. I hope that MacBride still has my books on his shelf too.

Parker Palmer writes that good teaching “comes from the integrity of the teacher, from his or her relation to subject and students, from the capricious chemistry of it all.” I wish I had thought of something this nice to tell MacBride that day he asked.