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Christopher Nissen
Jennifer St. Leger: Middle School Teacher
Background:
Jennifer St. Leger was born at Columbia Medical Hospital in Manhattan. She grew up and was raised in various neighborhoods in both Brooklyn and Manhattan. At one point, she also lived in Scarsdale, New York located in Westchester County. She is currently forty-three years old and currently lives in Connecticut with her husband and two children. She holds dual undergraduate degrees in both economics and British Literature. She is also a graduate of Hunter College’s Education program. At one point before and during her time at Hunter’s Adolescent Education program, she owned a bar in Hell’s Kitchen. Jenny has been teaching at the Comprehensive Middle School Project M.S. 327 for nine years. She started teaching at M.S. 327 as a substitute teacher in the fall of 2012. After one semester there, she was offered a full-time teaching position in January 2013, before she had even finished the Adolescent Education programs at Hunter. Since then, she has taught Seventh and Eighth-grade levels of middle school English. She currently teaches Eighth Grade and has done so for the last few years.
Personal Tastes:
When I conducted my interview with Jenny, in between asking her about her educational motivations and inspirations I asked her some more lighthearted questions about some of her tastes and preferences. I, like Ethan, also took some questions from Stephen Colbert’s questionnaire. The first question that I asked was very near and dear to my heart. “What is your favorite action movie?” Like any rational human, she gave me multiple answers. Her first answer was the all-time classic Die Hard. After that, however, she said that if you include fantasy, then the original Lord of the Rings Trilogy as well. She also considers Star Wars an action movie, which I also agree with. Her personal favorite of those films was A New Hope, the original. I also asked her what her favorite sandwich was. Like the films, she had multiple answers. A meatball parmesan with extra sauce on a hero was her favorite followed closely by an eggplant parmesan. I found these to be very New York answers. “Marinara sauce goes a long way, especially on a sandwich,” she said to me.
Some other insights about her personal tastes that she revealed to me; she brings lunch, rather than buying it most of the time. If she could listen to one album only forever, it would be Nirvana’s Unplugged. That speaks to her practicality. Her most used app on her phone is Google Calendar, followed by Kindle and Amazon. She said this half-ashamedly, but I understood why. Teachers always take their work everywhere with them. It’s never just about the work you do in the building. Google Calendar in tandem with Google Classroom makes organizing things easier. It is a tool that simply makes modern teaching a bit easier. I asked if she exercises and if it is worth it. She practices Yoga three to four times a week. Specifically, she mentioned that in tandem with always being on her feet all day, it brings a nice balance to stay on the healthier side. One of the last personal taste questions that I asked was about her favorite teaching film. Her answer was Dead Poets Society with Robin Williams.
Motivation and Teaching Philosophy:
At one point, I asked Jenny what her favorite grade level to teach was. She loves to teach Eighth Grade by far in comparison with Seventh Grade. She explained in a wonderful fashion. “There is this magic summer between 7th and 8th grade that they do so much growing up during. When they are seventh graders, they are the worst versions of themselves that they are ever going to be, and when they become eighth graders, they are just a bit more emotionally mature enough to self-reflect. They are calmer and more stable with themselves and their peers.” Self-reflection and mindfulness are very important guiding tools for students. When I asked her about which grade level would be the most intimidating to teach, she stated that Kindergarten would be. Being stuck in a room with the same thirty kids every day would be more of a chore for her. She prefers the freedom and flexibility of teaching older grades.
Flexibility in her curriculum is also a big part of why she stayed at M.S. 327 in the first place. They have a liberal approach in the ELA department and that also appealed to her. This fact along with the location of the school being in an underserved neighborhood. There were going to be students who were going to need extra work to be motivated and reached out to. Schools that are in low-income neighborhoods like M.S. 327 benefit from teachers who want to empower their students. It reminds me of what Giroux says while praising the importance of imposing critical thinking and how it benefits people who are taught to think, despite any difficulties they may encounter: “To the contrary, it was about offering a way of thinking beyond the present, soaring beyond the immediate confines of one’s experiences, entering into a critical dialogue with history, and imagining a future that would not merely reproduce the present.” (2010, p. 716) Many of these students are going to face an uphill battle in their lives and Jenny knows that. I also asked Jenny what made her want to teach ELA. Her answer I feel truly gives some major insight into why she does what she does. The study of English never came to her as easily as other things. When she was younger, she had a natural gift for math, and it always came easily to her. She had to work and struggle to excel at English in school. She feels that most people gravitate to teach things that they are good at, but that desire can lead to complacency.
I am currently witnessing these core values of Jenny’s pedagogy take place in her classroom firsthand. The students are currently working in groups writing a joint argumentative essay. The groups were selected by four group leaders in each classroom. These group leaders took turns picking out their groups like they were picking out a dodgeball team. In one classroom, most of the groups drafted the students who were the strongest in the subject first. In the other class, a bunch of the group leaders just drafted their friends instead. Jenny was aware they were going to do this and let it happen anyway. The students who picked their friends to help write this group essay are going to have a tougher time navigating their time and work than the groups that drafted for “efficiency.” She is confident that if they make mistakes, they will learn from them. Their self-awareness will grow from the experience. It mirrors some advice from Price-Mitchell’s article about students practicing things they may not fully understand: “The act of being confused and identifying one's lack of understanding is an important part of developing self-awareness” (Price-Mitchell, 2015, p. 2). One cannot reflect on mistakes without making them in the first place. Jenny giving these students the space to grow from their own mistakes seems to be a bit harsh, but with some proper guidance afterward, I think it will be worth the experience for them.
I feel that so much of Jenny St. Leger can be summed up in an anecdote she shared with me at the end of our interview. I asked her what her most memorable experience as a teacher was. In one of her earlier years of teaching, she had a student call her a bitch. This was after she had corrected this student numerous times while she had consistently mispronounced his name. After this confrontation, she spoke with the student afterward. She learned that he was having difficulty with the group that he was working in, and she had not quite seen that side of it. The ultimate point of the story is that the student and she are very close, even with him being off in high school. She learned from that experience that even as a teacher who is trying to observe everything going on, you can still miss something. The important thing is to learn from these experiences and never forget that these kids need you. I personally hope that I can become half the teacher that she is with the drive to match.
References:
Giroux, H. A. (2010) Rethinking education as the practice of freedom: Paulo Freire and the promise of critical pedagogy. Policy Futures in Education, 8(6), 716.
Price-Mitchell. Marilyn. (2015, April 7). Metacognition: Nurturing self-awareness in the classroom. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/blog/8-pathways-metacognition-in-classroom-marilyn-price-mitchell
Colbert, S. (n.d.). The Colbert questionert. https://thecolbertquestionert.com/#questions
Hi Chris!
Thanks so much for sharing this with me!
It is clear that you are close with Jenny and I hope this exercise lets you examine why this is the case. Is it because of how you are as people? Is it because of her pedagogical choices? Can you distinguish who she is as a person from who she is as a teacher? What does all of this say about you? About your values? About what you think education is about?
I hope you continue to develop your relationship with Jenny and her class. And I hope you can take the best from her and incorporate it into who you become as a teacher and as a human being.
Thanks again for sharing this with me!
Dino