I worked as an English professor for sixteen years. My average class size was 30 students and I usually taught four classes per semester. If you add up those statistics, I taught approximately 3,840 students over my career.
I remember so many of them.
Wilma smelled like marijuana when she entered the classroom at 8:00 a.m. every morning, and when it was her turn to answer a question, she looked up at me with glassy eyes. Once, when she came into my office to get some help on an essay, she told me that she didn’t vote because she could never make a difference, even though she cared deeply about global warming. She took two of my classes—fall and spring. By the time she finished the second semester, she had given up smoking marijuana and had registered to vote for the upcoming presidential election.
Andrew was a hard-working football player and a lackadaisical English student. One day at football practice, he broke his ankle so badly that his football career was ended. He couldn’t drive to school because his leg was in a cast. He couldn’t take the bus to school because he couldn’t walk to the bus, get on the bus, or walk from the bus to his classrooms. No one in his family could help him since they were so financially strapped that they all had to work. He dropped my class. I emailed him to find out why, and then I told him not to give up. Football wasn’t everything; he had a lot more options. The next fall, he came back to class, worked hard, and told me he was going to transfer to a four-year college in a year to major in business. I gave him hope, he said.
But even though I have so many stories like this in my memories, none of these students were my best. My best student, by far, was myself. I was so invested in teaching writing, literature, and critical thinking to these students, that I spent thousands of hours researching and preparing for my lessons, and then I taught them. My students asked me questions that I didn’t anticipate, and I found out the answers. They came to class unprepared in skills and homework, and I worked hard to fix this. Here’s some of what I—my best student—learned.
Learning Takes Nothing Less Than Commitment
A teacher can present the most wonderful lectures or plan the most engaging activities, but students who are not committed to learning, still will not learn. If students don’t understand the benefits of what they’re learning, they won’t exert the effort. They’ll skip the reading, write their essays at the last minute with no planning or revision, and ignore the details that produce strong thinking and writing skills. I began identifying the students who were not committed to learning and worked to get them engaged. I learned that there are many reasons that a student is not committed including homelessness, hunger, thirst, anxiety, depression, trauma, or pain. Getting them support to mitigate these problems can transform their lives.
Success in Anything Takes Several Steps
Some students came into the classroom wanting an “A,” but not wanting to do the work necessary to get an excellent grade. Somewhere along the way, they had been taught that grades were more important than actual learning, and they didn’t understand that learning was a process, not the result of talent. As the teacher of an essential college skill like writing, I had to figure out how to change this misconception. I used the analogy of a staircase, and told them that if they wanted to get to the top of the staircase, the best way was to take each step, one at a time; otherwise, they would either get injured if they leapt to the top and miss the lessons of each step. Now, I’m using every stair on my own staircase.
Reading, Writing, Speaking, Listening, and Thinking Are Intrinsically Connected
Early in my life, I had been a good reader, but I hadn’t understood the intimate connection between reading and writing. While I was teaching English-As-A-Second-Language students, I learned that the most successful students engaged in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking in English. Later, I took this concept into my transfer-level writing and literature classes and taught it to my students. We analyzed readings for figures of speech, and then we practiced using them in writing. We scrutinized words for exact meanings in readings and then tried to use the best words in writing. We stood in front of the class and explained what poetry meant, and then used our speeches for essays. We learned that thinking is not the same as writing. Thoughts don’t come out of the brain in clear sentences, but they do provide incredible ideas for development.
Critical Thinking Can Be Learned and Understood
When I first was assigned to teach a critical thinking class, I had to try to define it for myself, but I didn’t truly understand what it was until I developed lessons for teaching it. Most students, I found out, didn’t understand it at all, and they had no idea why it was important. Finally, I developed a lesson which required students to evaluated websites based on criteria, and the students found out that not all websites were honest or credible. Their surprised faces showed their understanding of why a healthy skepticism was essential to navigating today’s unscrupulous society. Every time someone tries to scam me or sell me a product, I use this skill.
Writing Is a Slow Journey, not a Talent
Many of my students came into the classroom with a variety of writing skills, often deficient ones. My professorial pride would not let me pass students who wrote poorly, so I had to devise lessons to teach them strong writing practices. As I prepared and taught those lessons, I honed my own writing skills at the same time. I learned the importance of using consistent verb tense, active verbs, specific nouns, and focused verbs. To forgo adjectives for better nouns and adverbs for better verbs. To memorize the purpose of each part of speech and how their careful utilization strengthened my sentences. I learned how to deftly include quotations in my writing to improve my credibility, and, in class, my students and I practiced this until we were all much better. Oftentimes, students brought back stories of conversations at home where their parents noticed their improved vocabulary and speech.
Now I’m retired, and I’m writing a blog, short stories, and a novel. Fortunately, I was the best student in my classes for the last sixteen years and it’s paying off. I’m more productive in my writing than I ever have been, and I recently realized another lesson that I learned.
Happiness is a key ingredient to success. I’m certainly that.
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