Back in the saddle

Recently my friend Emilie let me teach two sessions with one of her classes.  It was part of an experiment, an idea from Ben Slavic’s Professional Learning Community.  I was to do PQA (Personalized Questions and Answers) and a class story.  Then, using me as a model, Emilie would do the same with another class and we would send the videos to a class in Chicago that had used the same structures and let the classes compare their stories.

I’ve written a long report about the experiment, but first of all I want to say how grateful I am to Emilie for giving me a chance to stand in front of a class again.  I enjoyed myself immensely. I do so miss the buzz that comes from having to move an entire class along the path, catching the stray doggies and getting them all moving in the same direction, at different speeds perhaps, but making sure that they all progress.

At present I teach sitting down, usually with just one or two students.  It’s more intimate and I’m able to see their individual progress more clearly.  I no longer have to give grades and that is such a liberating feeling.  I smile and say “good job” when a student does something they were not able to do before and they beam back at me.  When they make a mistake, I do what a good trainer does with a dog or a horse.  I ignore it.  When you think of how much of a teacher’s time is taken up by “corrections” and marking and registering grades and talking about grades with other teachers, parents and the administration, and when you think of how much better that time and energy could be spent preparing lessons, you realize that Alfie Kohn is a genius.

So, thank you, Emilie, for the privilege of teaching your class.  And to all my former students, forgive me for the grades I was obliged to give to you.  No relationship can be reduced to a number, least of all the relationship between teachers and their students.