The "I don't know" syndrome.

How many students said, "I don't know" today? I don't know.

In the morning class there are about four students who regularly raise their hand to be called on, every time. There are about five more students who will respond if I call on them. The rest of the students, when I call on them say, "I don't know." At other points of the class there is a lot of calling out. The patterns of participation in my classroom are overly aggressive and passive. There is no in-between. In an attempt to establish an orderly classroom at the beginning, my teaching methods are becoming much more traditional than I find comfortable, and as a result traditional patterns of participation are occurring. I have tried cooperative group work, but it's not cooperative. Everything I try to do that doesn't fit the teacher-at-front model, is something that has worked well with tenth graders. Ninth graders are a whole different ball game. I managed to do some student-centered discussions in the ninth grade class I taught a year ago, but I'm realizing now that it worked perhaps only because I had eighteen, not thirty-two, students. I am struggling to find a model where students take turns, but do not talk only through me. I am tired of being the gatekeeper of conversation. More importantly I fear that I might actually be the teacher I repudiate in the opening of my "Teaching Philosophy" paper I submitted to my graduate program:

“'The unkindly spirit of the teacher is strikingly apparent; the pupils, being completely subjugated to her will, are silent and motionless, the spiritual atmosphere of the classroom is damp and chilly' (Zinn 257). In the alternative history A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn cites this classroom observation written by a journalist during the American Industrial Revolution. Education in America, as Zinn claimed, was initially an institution designed to subdue children of the working class to quiet obedience and eventually raise them into unquestioning adults. Education was not a place to encourage dissent, but rather a training ground for 'those who would be paid to keep the system going, to be loyal buffers against trouble'(257).

Even though much progress has been made in the field of education during the last 110 years, it’s no secret that many students and teachers alike still feel uninspired by school. But I believe it doesn’t need to be this way. I wish not to subjugate my students to the makings of calm, complacent, American citizens. Rather I aim to stir revolt in the soul, not a rebellion against this nation but a deep love for it, a love of its literature, landscape, and diversity. I believe that teachers have a responsibility to engage youth on a moral level, to ask them to seek out answers to society’s biggest problems. I believe the classroom should be a recurring, safe, and seminal locus of meaningful and explicit discussion about race, gender, sexuality, and language. Through these discussions, teachers should inspire students to question the status quo and decide for themselves the future of their country..."