What I Can Learn from my 16-year old Self
My first teaching job was giving swimming lessons at my local pool. I was 16 years old, and I didn't know how to teach. It would be years before I would hear the words "pedagogy" or "methodology," but I could swim just as well as I could walk, so when my manager offered me a spot on the morning shift, I didn't flinch. There was, of course, no training involved, nor any sort of curriculum. I was given four separate Intermediate-level classes and told simply to improve their strokes. On the first day of classes I watched the returning teachers jauntily greeting their students with high fives and smiles; they excitedly hopped into the cold pool, offering motivational splashes. I can do that, I thought, as I approached my class of 10-year old Intermediate students. We stood in a circle on the pool deck. I told them my name--they told me theirs. There were 28 minutes left in the 30 minute class. And I had no idea what I was supposed to do next.
When I was 16, I knew nothing, but also I held one or two secrets of the universe under my hat.
I felt a lot of things that day, but I remember fear the most. Fear that the class would see I didn't know what I was doing and that I'd be exposed as a fraud. Fear that I would lose control. Fear that they would leave the class with nothing and then later look up at me lifeguarding and regard me passively. Fear that I wouldn't be able to adequately explain to them what I knew how to do so naturally myself. My reaction to this internal crisis was very important. I could have met the fear with apathy--Who cares about these kids? I'm 16, and I want to get paid so I can buy Phish tickets. I could have gotten cynical--These kids aren't going to the Olympics, and anything I do won't change that fact. I could have responded with defensiveness--I'm teaching them, and I know how to swim--I don't know why they're not getting it. Years later, I would learn to recognize these positions in myself and in too many colleagues. While natural and instinctive enough, they have a few things in common: they have nothing to do with teaching; they're all about me; and they're not very smart.
Young and immune from adult nonsense, I made a subconscious decision to become a real teacher. My fears were good and healthy, it turns out, and they led me to focus directly on the problem of teaching: how do I articulate to students the thing that I know how to do? I became obsessed with this question, which led to more practical questions about form and content: At what point do the arms come together in breaststroke? What do the hips need to do to effect butterfly? What motion do the wrists make in freestyle as they move past the thigh and come out of the water? As a lifeguard, I had always found the lap pool tiresome and preferred the entertaining chaos of the family swim pool, where out of control children did cannonballs and belly flops and girls my own age sat on the edge and feigned indifference. Now I longed for the lap pool, where I could observe the swimmers in front of me. I wasn't guarding them--I was studying them. How did the great swimmers move? How did the awkward swimmers move? What made one person glide through the water, while another person slapped and splashed and got nowhere?
I took mental notes, made identifications, and formed complete sentences in my mind. I imagined sharing my discoveries with my students. And it was here that I was doing the work of a real teacher--learning how to articulate the subject, thinking about my students, and visualizing the lesson. In short, caring enough to think it through. Later in class, 30 minutes seemed to fly. I was prepared, I was excited, I was animated, I was entertaining. My students listened and reacted and took instruction. We were in it together, and there was something about it that made my teenaged self feel alive and useful and in step with something great. I loved it. In the midst of one particular lesson, I remember a fellow teacher looking at me from her class across the pool and saying, "You're really into this, huh?" I was actually hooked, even then, on teaching.
I'm 39 now, and I've been teaching high school since I was 22. I've failed and succeeded and fallen and grown in all the right ways, but even today I'm aware of 16-year old me within, grappling daily with the problem of teaching. And not much has changed--the fears are still there, and I am constantly studying.
