Anxiety and Expectation

 

Before I started, I was having a lot of trouble creating a vision of my classroom. My past teaching experiences—substitute teaching in charter schools in Chicago, teaching ESL in Santiago—were unpleasant, restrictive, stifling. And yet, I’ve carried this idea of myself as a teacher, as wanting to teach for so long. So I started this quarter with a good deal of apprehension. What if I didn’t like this either? What if I felt confused, stuck, incapable? When I considered my class, it was mainly to worry that they wouldn’t like me and wouldn’t want to participate.

When I did imagined the classroom itself, I hoped that I would be able to create a comfortable, safe, useful learning environment. I wanted my students to take part, to feel valued, and to contribute freely. I also wanted to follow the class. I love improvisation and wanted to let the classroom be organic, to grow and change. Like Murray says, I was hoping that I would be able to “create an environment that [would] attract and make use of surprise” (3).

Murray isn’t terribly practical or specific, though, and he doesn’t say how to create this environment or what the elements of it would look like. I have some assumptions—freedom, comfort, safety, autonomy, maybe a degree of instability or flexibility—but I’m still trying to figure out the right balance. Here, Murray is relatively unhelpful, more a fan of the grand sweeping statement.

Bean, on the other hand is much more pragmatic. He’s the chef with a recipe, and he’s going to tell you not only what a best practice might look like, but give you the research to back it up. Reading Bean before we started had me thinking about a number of ways to nurture the kind of environment I wanted. One of the main strategies (and one near and dear to my writerly heart) is what he calls “exploratory writing.” He tell us that, “the payoff of exploratory writing is the students’ enhanced preparation for class, richer class discussions, and better final-product writing” (145). I hoped to find occasions for writing in class, fostering a sense of exploration. I spoke in class the first day of the “beginner’s mind,” wanting my students to approach our work with curiosity, openness, maybe even surprise. I planned to do some kind of writing every day in class that I could get it in. I don’t know yet how this process will feel for my students, but I will check in with them, and hopefully it will help in all the ways Bean assures me it can.

It’s only been two days, and I’m still searching for the right ingredients and how to balance them day-by-day. But it has been pleasing to me—tremendously relieving actually—to find classroom adhering closer to the fantasy of a dynamic, enjoyable learning environment than the anxiety of dead space and non-participation.