psychology dector

She sat on the other side of my desk, well dressed, perfectly made up. The sunlight slanted through the blinds on a late fall afternoon. Parent-teacher conferences. “Your daughter’s doing well,” I started. “She needs to keep up her effort and study, and she should continue to do well.” “Yeah, but, I’m concerned about her future. I want her to do something that will make me proud.” “Doing well in an Advanced Placement course is something to be proud of.” “No, I want her to do something in the future so I don’t have to hang my head in shame.” “What would she ever do to shame you?” I asked quietly. “She wants to be a teacher.” “What’s wrong with being a teacher?” The woman smiled nervously. “Please don’t take this the wrong way,” she sighed, “but what kind of person wants to be a teacher? I mean you work for peanuts, no respect, no prestige, you deal with kids all day, everyone hates you because you assign homework and grade them hard. I always thought people who teach did so because the

Why did we become teachers? Sure there are days when it feels like I am hitting my head against a wall. Students haven’t done their homework, the administration is bothering me because my grades have not been uploaded yet. I have yard duty in the school cafeteria. There are days when I go home exhausted and I still have hours of work ahead of me. Parents and students challenge me, the papers keep coming in, I need to prep my lessons for tomorrow. Summers mean classes and workshops. I can never learn enough, and there are always new methods and classroom ideas to come up with and try out. The time is never my own, even on the weekends. But every Monday, I show up for more. Why? I have hope. I do not believe in a lost cause. Yes, the world seems mired in darkness, students read less and less, and no one seems to know how to get things back on track. But I know my presence in the classroom is a blow against all that. The odds are overwhelming, and the learning I facilitate may not have a

I have a confession to make: I ran away from the first grade. I had a deep and passionate love affair with the seven year old girl across the aisle from me. She did not know I was alive. Still, there I was, trying to talk to her instead of paying attention in class, and dear, rotund Mrs. Babineau marched down the row of tiny desks and taped my mouth closed with masking tape. Only, she did not stop there. She wrapped layers of tape around my head, up one side and down the other and under my chin, and then tangled me in several strips fastening me securely to my desk. I sat immobile like a sticky mummy until lunch, when she unwrapped me and told me to go out and play. I was done with Humiliation 101 for the day. The teacher always left the room unlocked when she went off to eat what I thought would be a prodigious lunch, given her size. I crept into the empty classroom, packed my things, grabbed my Hot Wheels lunch box, and hit the road. The crossing guard in front of the school did not

For English teachers, this is our Vietnam: grading student writing. And for me, almost every assignment I make in my classes is a writing assignment. Oh, how I envy my math and science colleagues, shoving Scantron sheets through the machine in a haze of clicks, a whole set of twenty-two tests in a matter of minutes, finished and graded. A class of twenty-two students and their thousand-word essays takes me five hours on a good day with a large bottle of Excedrin. So it was with great pleasure that I stumbled upon an essay in Harper’s by Lynn Freed entitled, “Doing Time,” about her work as a college writing instructor. The essay is included in her memoir, Reading, Writing and Leaving Home: Life on the Page . Freed takes on the daunting task of teaching writing in order to have the resources to spend part of the year writing full time and traveling, twin passions that she refuses to surrender. The plan backfires, to an extent. She finds that it is nearly impossible to write while teach

The morning after the earthquake in Haiti, I ask several of my classes to tell me what they knew about that nation. Some were unaware an earthquake had occurred there. Others knew of the country, but little else. And a number of them knew quite a lot about the political structure, geography, history, and current crisis situation on the island. America is a country mired in narcissism. We see world events only as they impact us. This is a result of our myopic world view and our obsession with the cult of celebrity. We are much more interested in Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Tiger Woods and his harem, and the gun-toting antics of Gilbert Arenas than what happens in Africa, the Caribbean, or at the Copenhagen Climate Summit. We must see ourselves as a global community: not individual countries with individual agendas, but as a whole fabric of humanity. In that pastel-colored rubble under a blindingly blue sky, our futures are as much at stake as the Haitian people. A crisis in their cou

Everyone has a story. Everyone loves to hear a good story. In teaching, simply telling a student what she needs to know is probably the worst instructional methodology. The best method is to put the student in a position to learn by doing. A good way to facilitate this kind of learning is by helping students find a story to tell. I want my students to learn the craft of stringing together words to form coherent sentences, paragraphs, and essays. I want them to learn to write by writing, by telling stories. To that end, I have been using two websites for inspiration for my students. In the 1950s, journalist Edward R. Murrow created a radio program that broadcast essays by prominent Americans and ordinary citizens alike. He called the program This I Believe , and featured voices as diverse as Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Robinson, Helen Keller, and Harry Truman. The only requirement was that the essayists be able “to distill into a few minutes the guiding principles by which they lived.”

It has been one year since I cancelled my subscriptions to The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times . In that time, I continued to read both publications online. My assessment of this experiment is that reading newspapers and journalism online is vastly inferior to the hard copy thrown on my porch each morning. So I restarted my subscription to the Los Angeles Times and I have made it a point to buy The New York Times as often as I pass one of those coin boxes or my local news stand. The catalyst for this re-evaluation resulted from catching the film, The Soloist on cable last week. I liked the movie, although the scenes I found most interesting were the ones that showed columnist Steve Lopez at work. I realized the book was sitting in my “to-read” stack, so I pulled it and began reading. The book, as I expected, is better than the film. Lopez clearly addresses the revolution occurring in journalism, and worries about his future with the paper even as he researches and writes

Over the break I have been rereading Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage . I am struck by the writer’s ability to capture the heat of battle on the page when he had never experienced a war in his life. His work is so descriptive and impressionistic, utilizing the contrasts between nature and war, cowardice and redemption, innocence and maturity. Henry Fielding reacts to battle much like we might react if thrust into such a situation. He runs away. His subsequent encounters with Jim Conklin, a soldier dead on his feet, the dead body in the clearing, and the deserter who smashes his head giving him the much sought “red badge” that later marks him erroneously as a hero, all demonstrate different aspects of soldiering and the horrors of war. Henry’s redemption shows us that courage and cowardice are not easily defined. Ultimately, Crane was a journalist, and although his work is fictional, he wanted to get to the element of truth. What is it like to be in the heat of battle? What is

Education of a Wandering Man: A Memoir By Louis L’Amour Bantam Books; $25.00, cloth ISBN 978-0-553-05703-4 My generation is most likely the last one to idolize cowboys. Television shows like Gunsmoke, The Lone Ranger, Big Valley and The Rifleman were must-see programs. I strapped on my six gun and copied what I saw on the old black and white TV set in the living room. As I grew older, I became uncomfortable acting out such childhood fantasies. I ditched the western wear for Louis L’Amour novels. I read at the rate of ten books a week, plowing through a veritable forest of paper, soaking up the lore of the west at the hands of one of the most prolific writers. L’Amour died in 1988, yet his novels, short fiction, and poetry continue to hit the book store shelves. He said that he could write anywhere with his typewriter balanced on his knees. He did not understand the concept of writer’s block. His novels were usually short with lots of action, sometimes a rather clumsy love story, and