My little blog.

Paper1 FinalDraft

     This Teacher's Role 

     A nine-year-old barely knows anything. We’re still trying to figure out about a lot of things: the latest episode of Boy Meets World, leveling up our charmander Pokémon, and different ways to actually become a Spice Girl. However elementary school consumed most of our lives…fourth grade was a huge step; I mean it was only one more year and we’d be an actual middle-schooler. To think back to when I was that little, kind of hurts my brain, but there’s one memory that has been burned into the back of my head since then. It’s this really fond thought; we were just given an assignment: come up with your own alien, and draw it on this huge piece of construction paper.

     I was especially stoked; I had my 24 set of crayons with me…and the only thing bothering me was the fact that Austin who was across from my table was boasting his 64 pack. With colors like Macaroni and cheese and Tickle Me Pink. I didn’t really mind, I just started coloring away, forcing out a creature that lived on Mars, with checkered feet and a polka dot cloud body. My teacher made her rounds, checking everyone’s works of art, and she stopped abruptly at mine. She stared at it, examining it, and then pulled a seat up to me. She pointed to my smudged and smeared construction paper, and opened her mouth to tell me what she, (well what I hoped), liked about it. This shocked me. She started commenting on my work, how it looked like a regular animal, not like an alien. I wasn’t trying anything ‘new’ and it was becoming a ‘dog’ like creature, or some type of a ‘sheep’. I stared at it, seeing my creation fall to pieces. I took my pencil and turned it upside down, and began to erase a line or two, feeling the tears well up in my eyes like I had done something completely wrong. Because in my mind, I did do something completely wrong.

     Here we are, eating large amounts of ramen now and sitting at our little desks, typing away essays like there is no tomorrow for our English professors. Not much has changed; my professors are firm on their teachings. just like my teachers in elementary school, they tell me how to fix my errors with each paper I hand in. Peter Elbow has a great way of thinking, but I can only agree with him to an extent. Within Elbow’s preface from Writing Without Teachers, he states that “it is possible to be a student and not have a teacher” (1). That a student can learn something without having a teacher there to guide them, to learn and to not be taught. I can agree with Elbow to a certain level.

     I agree that there may be some circumstances where you don’t need a teacher to be taught something excessively. However you cannot have a legitimate classroom without a teacher. In my writing courses throughout my education career, I did the same thing, every assignment. I would have to have my work organized; in some type of a style that my teacher forced upon the students because we were more likely to get better grades in that way. Introduce your topic, create a thesis, indicate details and then lay out your examples. Don’t forget those awful ‘transition’ words that were supposed to make your paper flow just the right way. It was all in the skill of organizing your writing.

     My grade would reflect on the way I organized my writing, and also my grammar and how well I could write on a topic. In a college or university institute it was almost aware that my grade would consist of how well I could come up with a topic, or how well I could style my work. I didn’t see this in College composition, but inside the course, “College Research Paper”, I was constantly aware of my mistakes. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. My teacher was great, and was a ‘true’ teacher because she didn’t expand on how “badly” we did, but how we could improve our writing. What would push us further to do better? That is how I would define a teacher. The power or the authority over the students, there to help guide us, to help show us ways to improve ourselves, and our skills.

     In my experience, my teacher, the leader or the authority of the classroom, made a mistake. In my case, I had every right to interpret the project (alien creation), in any way I needed to. So what if my alien turned into some type of sheep? To me, that was an alien. My teacher wasn’t even doing her job as a teacher. She was correcting my beliefs, and wasn’t leading a positive classroom. I believe that within an academic classroom, there needs to be some sort of a leader in all of the chaotic messes academic students tend to explore. This doesn’t mean that the teacher is allowed to stop every creative flow a student has to offer. There is no way that a student could get away without a teacher there to help actually guide them throughout their processes of creativity though.

     However, Elbow exposes that “if the student’s function is to learn and the teacher’s to teach, then the student can function without a teacher, but the teacher cannot function without a student” (1). An agreeable statement. Yet, this results in a typical and a very unsatisfying question: What came first, the student or the teacher? To me, a teacher’s role in a classroom should be the authority to not take control, but to help guide the students into a state of control. The students need to know that they are under a certain authority, but that they are free to have their own creative mindsets. Teachers must push the students into the right direction, but don’t force anything. Students interpret everything differently, even from each other. So there is no way, or position for a teacher to even begin to force a direction to a student, or push an idea onto someone else’s beliefs. That is where the job of teaching ends and the career of preaching begins.

     Obviously there is no end to this debate. I feel like the teacher’s position has actually been blurred, and needs to be reinstated somewhere. Elbow has a great idea about teachers, and he exposes the teacher to be almost like a “lost soul”, like there is no real teacher out there. He states, “But they are exceedingly rare. Any such teacher should keep up whatever he or she is doing and try to tell others what it is…” (1). He is exposing that there are very few good writing teachers out there. It feels like he is trying to itch at something else though; maybe we are all students. The question: what came first, the teacher or the student, makes it seem like the teacher did come first; who was the first person to decide to ‘teach’ something of another’s interest? This would and could go on forever.

      What I have figured out, and have thought of throughout all of this has been this: Teachers were once students, who still are students. Students can, and will still learn without teachers on many different levels of educating. However, teachers can show you, or help demonstrate certain aspects of education when students cannot self educate themselves. My teacher didn’t have the right to stifle my creativity because her role in the beginning was to help me, or to push me into a students’ best effort, not how to stop my ideas to turn them into something that would ‘work’ for her. The teacher has to stabilize something inside the academic classroom, however it cannot be the ideas and efforts the students set forth, but more or less the student’s ability to set forth these ideas and efforts.

Works Cited

1.      Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers. Oxford University Press. London.