Be practical

Hello everyone,

Believe it or not, I have kept a personal journal since the 9th grade with only a few lapses. I was reading one of my journals and I came across a passage that talked about the need to be practical and use common sense in teaching situations.

That idea of common sense and practicality was on my mind anyway, and reading it in my journal has emphasized it.

The situation described by my journal was a major epiphany for me.

I have come to believe that being practical is very important in education.

That means that, if your students are talking all the time, and you can't get them to listen to you at all, the practical thing is to get them to teach each other. Use their need to socialize in your favor.

It means that, if your students speak Spanish and you don't, you will work out ways for them to understand you. You may feel like you're in a Chaplin film with all the pantomiming you're doing and close-ups you're showing, but so be it.

It means that you may have to move them into and out of groups to get them to accomplish better what you need to have them accomplish.

It may mean that you have to get stricter; it may mean that you have to loosen up. Some classes need less control; some need more. Sometimes they need to be silent; sometimes they need to talk. Sometimes they need to be quiet; sometimes they must be loud. Avoid asking them to do one when they won't learn without the other.

You may be fighting for space to seat everyone; you should change your seating chart plans.

You may have to consciously plan fun things during certain times of the year, because your students will not, under any circumstances, be willing to buckle down and do work that requires great concentration. (Middle school teachers will find that Halloween and the East LA Classic are often such times.)

Sometimes you need to talk louder; sometimes quieter. Adjust for the circumstances.

I often suggest to new teachers that they put themselves in the students' places. It will help immeasurably in your sense of practicality if you can do this. If you happen to be teaching a class that your students hate, what can you do to help them in the subject? (Did anyone ever help you to appreciate a subject that you hated?) If you force them to learn it the way you did, you may have a struggle on your hands.

It all makes me think of my mother and liver. Our family hated liver. Mother loved it and saw it as an important part of a balanced diet. She experimented for years before she discovered that, if she shaved the liver very thin, fried it until it was unrecognizable, buried it in onions, and poured ketchup all over it, we would be willing to eat it. It wasn't liver the way her mother cooked it, but she got it down us, and we stopped feeding it to the dogs when she wasn't looking.

Be practical. It may not be the way your mother cooked it, but your students may be more inclined to eat it.

Jeff Combe