Concluding Post: An Open Letter to My Students

To my students; past, present, and future:

My teacher friends and I often joke about how those outside the field of education have no idea what the life of a teacher is like. My family members often ask me about my plans for summer as if it were a long-stretching, wide-open space of time for me to fill however I want. I do my best to hold back my instinctual sarcastic responses and answer honestly; I’ll be taking this class or that, meeting regularly with the cheerleaders I coach for practice, camp, and fundraisers, working on curriculum planning with my colleagues, and, yes, hopefully taking a trip to a Spanish speaking country to brush up on my Spanish, which I constantly fear is going to stagnate at a level 1 if I hear one more student say, “Me llamo es…” or “What does ¿Cómo estás? mean again?”

Students, with the exception of those whose parents are teachers often see teachers the same way. Yesterday a student asked my why I hadn’t gotten his project graded, reminding me that I had had a three day weekend! I didn’t know exactly how to explain to him that I had, in fact, spent about four hours on Saturday grading, but hadn’t gotten to that class’s projects, and that, while Monday the students didn’t have class, I was at school in meetings, planning for the coming week and beyond. In this letter I hope to broaden your understanding of the profession of teachers and consider the things I consider as a teacher. Education affects everyone in our country, and I think it’s both sad and strange that so few people really know and understand it.

So to my past students, while what I have to say here may come too late, as I’ve learned some of it after having taught you, and to my present students, who I know I sometimes fail because I’m still figuring things out, and to my future students, who will hopefully get to see a more polished version of me as a teacher: I’d like to explain who I am as a teacher, what learning has been like for me as a student, a teacher, and a citizen of the world, and how what I’ve learned can impact you and help you on your way to become a responsible global citizen.

Let me start by sharing with you some of the basics of how I look at my role as a teacher. I am now finishing the last courses in my Master’s program in teaching and curriculum, and while I have learned and grown more than I ever expected, I’m surprised by how much what I thought about education when I first graduated with my Bachelor’s degree six years ago is still the same. In the philosophy of education I wrote as a piece for my first graduate class, as an intern in 2008, I wrote, “I believe as a teacher my responsibility is to help students become independent life-long learners.” I would, perhaps now tweak that to include something like the objective line on my resume: “to prepare students to be responsible, informed global citizens,” but overall I find that the goals I had in my first year of teaching are still goals I have now. Even though my job title is “Spanish teacher” some of the most important things I hope to impart to you have nothing to do with Spanish. One of the reasons I love teaching Spanish is that I find it lends itself easily to other lessons that help reach those main goals of teaching you to be a life-long learner and preparing you as a global citizen.

In fact, learning Spanish played a key role in shaping who I am today as a teacher, and why I believe the way I do about education and my role as a teacher. Students often ask me when I became fluent in Spanish, how long it took. It’s a hard question to answer, and often I say something like, “I’m still working on it,” which is true, I feel like there is so much to learn I could spend a lifetime on it. (Which is another thing I love about Spanish!) But the true answer to that, one that often (unfortunately) discourages the most eager students, is that it wasn’t until I moved to Spain. Sure I learned all the verb tenses and plenty of vocabulary in school, but none of it became real until I had a chance to, and had no choice but to use the language in real situations. If I wanted a cell phone I had to go to the Vodafone store and speak Spanish. If I wanted Internet at home I had to first make it through the most difficult phone conversation of my life with a Jazztel representative. In order to find a place to live I had to be able to communicate all kinds of things about myself, the building, how to get there, what was included in the price, etc. Not to mention adventures like finding employment, reporting a lost purse to the police, helping a stranger with directions on the street or in the metro, navigating a local market, finding enjoyment in anything on TV. When I first moved to Spain I thought it would be a good idea to enroll in a Spanish class to brush up on my grammar since I was being flooded with opportunities to try it out. I went to one class and promptly decided it was a waste of time, I got more out of a two minute (*free) conversation with my neighbor than I did out of the hour long class.

I don’t say these things to discourage you, or to make you think that school is unimportant. Of course it isn’t. I never would have been able to accomplish any of those things without a strong background in Spanish first. My friends in Madrid who didn’t speak any Spanish prior to moving there didn’t gain nearly as much through their experience of living there as I did, because they had first to overcome the language barrier (or look for a way to complete all those transactions in English), which took considerable time and energy!

But while official schooling and all the conjugating and vocabulary memorization were helpful in the end, I needed to be able to use those things, I needed actual life skills, and that is why my main goal as a teacher is not about Spanish at all, but rather about helping you develop and reach your destination in life prepared to be a responsible, well-rounded individual who is able to enjoy life as much as I have been able to.

Over the course of my journey through my Master’s degree, I have done a considerable amount of reflective writing on different aspects of curriculum and education. As I stated at the beginning of this letter, I think it’s an injustice that only teachers know anything about these topics, so I would like to share with you what I have learned through creating and analyzing these writings, and how I think what I have learned can affect you as well.

Studying my writing for this course, I found four themes that emerged that I believe can stand in as rules that I teach, and maybe even live by. The first I’ve already addressed here- the idea that learning does not end at school, and as such my job as a teacher is not simply to oversee your memorization process, but to teach you to grow your abilities and develop skills you will need in real life. School is, after all, just one portion of your life. What you do next will be much more important in the grand scheme of things, and I want you to be prepared for that.

The second rule involves standards. As my past and present students know, and future students will understand soon after joining my class, I have very high standards. This applies to my students, to myself as a student, and to my personal life. I don’t think there’s any point in doing something and not doing it to the best of your ability. This means a few things for me as a teacher. One is that having high standards doesn’t always mean having the same standards for everyone. My Spanish 3 students sometimes (though not often) complain about the rigor involved in their assessments. They ask why the other classes don’t have to write as much, or take listening tests, but they do. My response is simple- they have to because they’re capable of it. I’ll admit that I’ve demanded more from them than the other Spanish 3 teachers have of their classes, but my students have risen to the occasion. I’ve never asked more of them than they’re capable of, and they’ve proven that over and over again. Even in my Spanish 1 classes, they’ve come to realize that it’s actually a very bad thing when I give up and speak English to them. As much as they complain about how they “can’t understand” and “why can’t I just speak English,” when I do, they usually get offended and tell me they can handle it, I don’t need to go easy on them.

Likewise, when I taught Spanish 2 and I knew that several of my students just wanted to pass Spanish 2 so they could graduate, but never planned to do anything more with the language, I had to check my overzealous feelings about Spanish in exchange for a more realistic view of what would actually be useful to them. I hated that it felt like lowering my standards in a way, but really it was more about shifting them, keeping my teaching consistent with my professed goal of preparing students for their actual futures.

Another rule I teach by as far as standards is that failure is okay. In today’s world, in most

contexts, failure is absolutely not okay. In my classroom it’s okay to fail sometimes. I have very high
standards. I’ve admitted it, and I know you all agree. This means that sometimes you won’t quite measure as high as I’d hoped for you. This doesn’t mean that you’re a failure, it means you still have more to learn, and I will make it my goal to help you see what needs to happen to get you to a place where you can be more successful in the class.

My favorite analogy with failure is videogames- you play and play and play, and fail all the time. (How often do you save just in case you fail, so you won’t have to start all the way over?) But you still keep going, and in the end you focus on how good it feels to finally beat the game instead of how frustrating it was to fail all those times. You will fail sometimes in life. I certainly have. Going back to some of my experiences in Spain, I think about when I first tried to purchase a monthly metro pass. I didn’t know that you can’t actually buy one in the metro station (of course, right?), but rather you have to go to a tobacco stand at street level. When I asked about the ticket at the metro ticket window, the man working responded with “eres idiota.” That’s all he would say to me. I did my best not to cry in front of him, and spent the rest of the day missing my small town where people offered to help when you needed it instead of calling you an idiot. Eventually I figured out where to buy my metro ticket. I failed at first, but I ended up learning how the system worked as well as the word for the tobacco stands, “estanco.” In fact I learned that word so well that at the one Spanish class I attended, when the teacher asked me what I had done the past weekend, I told her I bought an “estanco.” I was going for “estantería,” bookshelf, and after lots of confusion on her part and explaining on mine, I figured it out and haven’t confused those words since. Sometimes we learn the most when we fail. So, while I know you hate it, and I hate that it’s painful, sometimes it’s okay with me if you fail in my class, because I believe you’ll learn through the experience.

A third rule for my teaching, and again, for life in general has to do with values. I believe that everyone deserves to be treated with respect. That’s the motto of our school: Respect Others, Accept Responsibility (which we as Golden Lions shorten to

ROAR), and I couldn’t agree with it more. When we study different countries and cultures and we talk about acceptable ways to discuss diversity we’re doing more than meeting the World Language Standards about culture. We’re learning about how to be accepting of others and to interact with people in a respectful way. I hope that you’ve seen how important RESPECT is to me, and can understand that I’ve made such an issue of it in the classroom in hopes that you’ll carry that out into the world with you. 

A final rule I’d like to address is that of the relationship between community and schools. Throughout this letter I’ve expressed my belief that learning doesn’t happen only at school. This is why I think it’s crazy to try to separate school and community, or, conversely, to not try harder to link the two. In one of my classes it’s a joke among the students that I’ve called all of their parents about one thing or another. They like to compare notes about who got a phone call home and why, and when we took a true colors assessment as a class, and I explained what it meant that I was “gold,” they said, oh, that’s why you have to be in everybody’s business. They joke about it, but me connecting with their parents is important, and if I had the time I truly would call every parent much more regularly. 

Curriculum theorist Ralph Tyler reminds teachers and curriculum creators to study what students need and consider what curriculum can do to provide that, he reminds teachers that curriculum extends past school into the community. Similarly, curriculum experts and authors of the book Align the Design, remind teachers to “learn, then do.” This is something I struggled with as a teacher from small town southwest Michigan working for the first time in the diverse Lansing Public School system, again as a new English teacher in Madrid Spain, and yet again when I moved to North Carolina. Every context I’ve taught in has been markedly different, and each time it took quite a bit of studying, learning (about what students needed, wanted, expected, etc.) in order for me to be successful as their teacher. In Madrid I had to learn to pronounce my “t”s in words like “twenty.” In North Carolina I’ve learned more expressions than I ever imagined existed like “mashing a button” (instead of press), or “trying someone” for calling them out. I had to learn to tone down my polished neutral English teacher accent, because I sounded even more foreign than a “regular Yankee” to my Southern students. In each of these scenarios, the more I understood about the community I lived and worked in, the better able I was able to understand my students. 

Nel Noddings says, “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely” (433). This is something I’ve tried to convey to you in the classroom. When I encourage you to work as a team, when I make you stay with your group throughout a whole unit even though you “don’t like each other,” I’m trying to share with you what I believe about community and schools and their relationship. Things go smoother when we work as a team- in school, out of school, connecting school and community- I think this belief holds. I want you to learn to think of more than just yourself, to be more global, to be more willing to take on collective responsibility for more than your personal choices; to see how what you do affects everyone else.

In closing, let me thank each of you for everything you have taught (or will teach) me. I’m by no means finished with my journey as a teacher, so I’m confident that these beliefs will grow and be challenged, and continue to take shape as I go, but, like the basics stated in my philosophy of education and the objective on my resume haven’t really changed, I am sure that the basis for these beliefs will hold true, because they’ve taken years of formal and informal education and life experiences to form. I hope that reading this has helped you understand my perspective as teacher; what goes into the decisions I make, why I do things the way I do, and how I have arrived at these beliefs and “rules” that I live, and consequently, teach by.

Sincerely,

Sra. Rose