Even Old Teachers Can Learn New Tricks

During this past school year, I would forget I was retiring and make notes to myself about how I could improve my teaching in the future. I would then catch myself and laugh.

Yet, I have improved each year I have been teaching. Sometimes, I am embarrassed when I meet former students and I remember who I was and how I taught ten, twenty, or thirty years ago.

I wish I could go back and teach myself to be the teacher I was at the end of my career. I wince when I think of some of the things I did way back at the beginning of my career, things some of my colleagues still do, and some things that no one does anymore.

Whether it is a better way to approach quotation integration, the power of reading aloud, allowing students more freedom and choice, or learning how to really like the difficult and challenging children, I wish the less experienced Mr. Hirsch could have had the tools that took me so long to master.

You can teach this old dog new tricks. I love teaching with technology. As I was finishing a class in May, and my colleague’s students were coming in, a student commented on my agenda document projected on the screen. This young man had been my student three years prior for Freshman English. He said to me that the “Today Sheet,” (which is what I called my document that lists the targets, activities, and homework for each day) was one of the things he wished that all of his teachers would use.

I thought to myself, why didn’t I use it earlier? What took me so long? Did I need a computer to do that? I often told the students the list of things we were doing for the day. I even had laminated signs for all the targets, and I would hang the ones we were using in the front of the room. What took me so long to make put it all together?

Experience, mentoring, reflecting, and collaborating. The more time I spent with other teachers, the better my teaching became. The more I really listened to what others were doing, the more I could critically reflect on my own practice. It took a few years to learn this- and then to keep learning it. But when I was in survival mode, being reflective would fall away.

That is my main lesson for new teachers and those who help them: get them out of survival mode. Move them past “what do I do?” and get them to “how do I do this well?”

Ironically, the past two years have been times of great growth for me. The main reason is I took on a new class. Last year, another teacher and I sat down and worked on the class together and then met once a week all year while teaching it. This past year, there were three of us teaching the class and we met and collaborated. These collaborations have made my last two years of teaching the best teaching I have ever done!

Putting together a brand new curriculum, teaching books I had never introduced to students, and sharing all of it with a team of colleagues was refreshing and forced me to be highly reflective. Over and over, I asked myself, my students, and my teammates how things went. What should we change and what should we keep?

I will always be a teacher. I am still going to teach once a week on Sundays. I will still think like a teacher and try to  “stay current.” I am not sure if I will go back into the classroom on a daily basis, but if I did, I know what to do to keep improving my teaching.