REFLECTIONS ON BEING A COLLEGE TEACHER

Miriam Laskin

I am a graduate of New York City’s public schools - from first grade through graduate school. The only exception was my time at SUNY Stony Brook, where I received my MA and Ph.D. in English. My MLS is from Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies. During the first year of my doctoral program, I was thrown into teaching an English composition course and I almost sank, soon into the semester. I was terrified of being the teacher in the front of the room. Nothing in my many years of school had prepared me for this except listening to and observing my own teachers. By the second or third week of the semester, I came down with a really extreme strep throat and I wasn’t sure whether I’d ever live to teach again (and I must have been a bit unsure about whether living and teaching was better than dying of strep throat!).

Getting so sick was an overly dramatic reaction, I know, but I’m trying to underline a common experience of anyone who teaches in college. At least CUNY has a writing fellow program which, as we at Hostos know, does offer some support for college teachers-to-be. If there was anything positive to be gained from being tossed to the wolves—oops, I mean, the students—it may be that this sadistic entry into the role of teacher may be part of a (un)natural “weeding” process, favoring those who are too stubborn or too brave to quit in their first year of teaching.

My first, full-fledged teaching experience was in 1974 when I was assigned a Freshman Comp course at Stony Brook. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t very good at it. I continued teaching English, mostly on the developmental and first-year level, as an adjunct Assistant Professor for many years. At times I would have only three courses in one or two different colleges. At other times, I found myself teaching five courses at five different institutions. My years of adjunct teaching gave me an understanding of the hardships of this peripatetic way of life. However, it took me until 1997 to realize that I had burnt out as an English adjunct. I enrolled in the graduate library science program at Queens College and in June, 1999, earned my MLS—exactly twenty years after being awarded my Ph.D. in English.

A few months after I was hired in March of 2001 to be the coordinator of instructional services and a reference librarian in the Hostos Library, I ended my long adjunct career. Now I have another ten years of teaching and librarianship under my belt. The contrast between being the “authority figure” in front of the classroom and being an ally of our students as they struggle with learning how to learn and how to do research, is something that has given me more of a perspective on the meaning of “teacher.” It is not only in the classroom that one is a teacher. It is pretty much everywhere—once you have accepted that identity.

There have been challenges for me, as there has been for every teacher, and I will share a few. One of the most fundamental challenges I faced when I began teaching English on the developmental and freshman level was how to teach gram- mar and sentence structure. English grammar is not as neat as Spanish or Danish (two languages I know). It’s not as neat as a lot of other grammars. But I had learned grammar mainly by osmosis - as I learned to read, and it was through reading obsessively as I grew up that I understood how a sentence works. By the time students reached my college classes, however, my method of learning English grammar as an infusion integrated into the novels I read while growing up wouldn’t work with them. Of course, as any good English teacher would do, we did a lot of reading together, and I would point out some of the vocabulary and grammatical constructions in the service of discussing “style”—and I did it without distracting from the essay or story. But I knew that I had to teach myself English grammar—particularly verbs—by actually comparing the way verbs in English are organized in comparison to Spanish verbs and verb forms. So I sat down with my English grammar manual and next to it, one of the most helpful language books I’ve ever used, 502 Spanish Verbs. I often tell students, even today, that they don’t really remember or learn something until they’ve worked at putting it into their own words, whether on paper or orally. It was a lesson I found out by becoming clear enough about the English verb forms and tenses so that I could explain them to my students.

Another challenge faced especially by English teachers is the need to assign essays at least every other week (allowing a week turnaround time and the students a week to review and edit the first draft). Along with assigning essays, of course, is the task of reading, commenting upon, and grading them. Lots and lots of essays. I spent years trying out different ways to give my students appropriate and helpful feedback on their writing. Of the minor but nevertheless psychologically interesting discoveries I made, is that using a red pen on student essays is a lousy idea. It’s too punitive looking. So I changed over to purple or any other color that would contrast enough with the students’ pen color. (Yes, for most of my English-teaching career, most of my students didn’t have access to computers or even typewriters.) I also gradually learned not to correct every error. I would pick out the two or three grammar, spelling or punctuation problems a student had and concentrate on those. And I would only correct an error the first time it came up in an essay. Early in my teaching career, I would correct every grammar or punctuation error, and then all the student had to do was re-draft the essay using my corrections. I recognized that I wasn’t helping them by doing their work for them. And I learned pretty soon that if you are correcting and commenting on a student’s essay, you had better start off with at least one positive comment; hopefully I would find more than one to make, but sometimes it was hard.

Much of my life in the classroom, including teaching research workshops, has been spent working to stay creative and flexible and in trying to find new and more effective ways to get points across; to keep the class interested; to provide emotional and practical support; to keep students motivated to pass the course—or to leave the library workshop with some clear ideas on how to approach their research. It always felt important for me to keep my developmental English students in a positive state of mind, and engaged with the curriculum because all their work during the semester came down to a pass or fail on the standardized essay test. In terms of being flexible and creative, I learned to change horses in the middle of the stream if one of them showed signs of breaking down. That analogy will also serve to point to one of the ways I learned to help my English and my information literacy students understand a point if I felt that I was losing some of them. Analogies and examples of theoretical or difficult points are great tools. I never just leave a general or theoretical statement go by without adding either a quick example to illustrate, or an analogy that I hope will help clarify the point. Making sure to be tuned in to where the students “are at” in their levels of vocabulary and understanding of a subject is a springboard for being creative in the moment. I’m sure most teachers will agree that you sometimes have to think on your feet, be a good improviser and actor. Being animated, energetic, funny and as cool as possible (without looking like an older adult trying to act like a teenager) are worthy goals. Every time I’ve ever taught a class, including our library workshops, I use so much energy that I’m exhausted for a while after the end of the class.

I cannot forget to mention two of the most truly important attributes for a teacher: a good sense of humor, with a full quiver of jokes or other ways to make students laugh. Most teachers will admit that laughter helps learning in the class- room and in the relationships between student and teacher. And finding ways to teach using humor helps students remember whatever is being taught. The other important attribute for a teacher runs parallel to a sense of humor—that is, a teacher needs to be able to laugh at herself, in front of her students, at least once in a while. Don’t take yourself that seriously, even if you are the “authority” in the room, with a “professor” or a “doctor” in front of your name.

Hand in hand is the ability of a teacher to say, “I don’t know the answer to that!” It’s a myth that perhaps many students and teachers believe in: the teacher knows everything. But that is impossible and there is no reason to try to come up with a plausible “explanation” of something when you really have no idea of whether it’s the right explanation or not. In fact, I found that my students had more respect for me if I sometimes admitted I couldn’t give them an answer on something. If it was something I should have known, I’d tell my students that I would find out and bring the answer back to them—which I would do.

As an English teacher, I welcomed the challenge of trying my best to maintain a one-on-one relationship with each of my students. I’m not sure why this felt necessary to me, but I think it had to be tied to my own experience as a college student. If the teacher never spoke to me or I to the teacher except during a class discussion, I felt the teacher was distant from me and my learning experience. I hated it when a teacher would not know my name, and so I had some strategies to learn my own students’ names. I would create what I called a “name circle” at the beginning of the semester where we’d go around the circle saying our names after repeating the names of everyone who came before us in the circle. I would urge them to see me outside of class hours for any reason, and would make sure to have a private mid-semester conference with each one. During that conference I would balance the line between being too encouraging when a student was not doing well at all, and not working at it, and being too discouraging. Mostly I think I gave pep talks, while pointing out clearly what was going well in their work and what they needed to continue to concentrate on. By the end of the semester I would feel as invested in their success as they felt; and sometimes more. I would try to keep my tears from welling up and falling down my cheeks whenever I had to tell a developmental writing student, “I’m sorry. You didn’t pass the exam.” It would feel as much my failure as theirs. But my tears were because I knew they were trying hard not to feel like a failure.

Perhaps it is my personality, but I know I preferred not to rely on the exact same syllabus each semester, whatever course I was teaching. After a few years, I knew what I had to convey to cover the course content and I preferred to experiment with new lessons, new readings, new jokes, new charts, new assignments. After some years, I also realized that, in order to learn research basics, a teacher does not have to assign a long research paper. I experimented with different types of active learning that involved some research. I began to break down (or scaffold, as we say) the process into discrete parts and help them with due dates and feedback for each part of the whole. I also learned that students didn’t know how to paraphrase correctly and that long research papers encouraged them to plagiarize like crazy. And I learned that it could be as effective to assign an annotated bibliography with very carefully thought-out requirements about how to set up their choice of topics so that it was harder for them to cheat on the assignment.

Out of the thousands of students we teach over a long career, there will not be very many who stand out years later in our minds, and not very many who will make it a point to tell you how much they appreciated the work you did with them on their way to success. However, I do have some memories, both from my time in the English classroom and the Library. There was the student in my Freshman Comp class at BMCC who wrote me an anonymous love letter one summer. My admirer asserted that I must remember her because she was always the one who was looking at me during class. Go ahead, laugh! And no, her hint didn’t help me narrow down the possibilities at all. She remains anonymous.

Last year, a woman left me a voicemail message. She said she really wanted to talk to me. She said she had been my student at BMCC a very long time ago and left her name and phone number. Her name rang a bell, though I couldn’t conjure her image. I called her and she told me that she had been in my class sometime in the mid-1980’s and that I had changed her life by one thing I had said to the class. Neither of us remembers what the class was discussing, but she told me that at one point I looked out over the class and said, “I cannot believe you don’t know who Malcolm X is, and that you haven’t read his autobiography!” This woman was of Afro-Caribbean descent and had not heard of him. She said that my remark made an impression on her and she began to read not only Malcolm X, but also other African-American writers. She told me it was transformative and that after she graduated from BMCC, she continued in college and entered the nursing program at Lehman College. She got her nursing degree and after working as a nurse and raising her daughter to adulthood, she decided to go on for her Master’s in Nursing.

She was almost finished and wanted to teach public health to nurses. We were both crying by this time. I told her to get back in touch with me when she was ready to teach and I would love to see her working at Hostos.

My time at Hostos has been a richly rewarding experience and I’ve never regretted going back to school to get an MLS and become an academic librarian. But during my first couple of years at the Hostos Library, I had to learn a new role: not the authority figure in front of the classroom, who knows she wields some power over students because they will receive grades for the course; no, I couldn’t say some- thing to a student in the library and have them listen to and respect me just because I was an adult and a faculty member. I had to learn a very sweet lesson: that a librarian is the students’ ally. We get to help them every day and receive thanks (from most of them) in the moment. “Thank you for helping me with this, Professor.” And it is always a great thing for me to be approached by a Hostos student who says, “I just wanted to tell you that I got an A on that paper you helped me research.” It’s very sweet to be able to share in students’ victories. I get students who come back to our library, like one young man did today, and hold up their new Hunter College, or John Jay, or Baruch College ID card, grinning from ear to ear.

I have one or two especially good memories of how students can give back to a librarian, their ally, not their stern authority figure. A couple of years ago, half- way through the Spring semester, I was called over by a student I had worked with a few times. He was younger than many of our students and was a bit of a “tough kid.” He was in a rage caused by stress and panic. He was trying to write a paper for a history course and having a difficult time. And he was very unhappy that his teacher was so exacting. He told me that he was going to drop the course and gave me an explanation about how he was taking four other courses and he just didn’t feel he could do it. I told him, “Wait. At the very least, talk to your history teacher before you withdraw.” And when he added that he was supposed to graduate that spring, I tried to persuade him to hang in there and not to drop the class. I didn’t really think this pep talk would work, but a few weeks later, he showed up at the library. I asked how things were going. He told me he had decided to stick it out and not drop the history course. And that he had found out how fascinated he was with history! I almost leapt for joy at that. In fact, this young man did graduate and came back the following Fall to do a little research at the library. And to show me his John Jay ID card.

One more story of what teachers live for, at least partly. That same semester I also gave a pep talk to this funny, not-really-motivated student who was personally quite charming, but who didn’t seem to take important things that seriously. One day in conversation he admitted that he was doing just “C” level work. And that even though his brother had graduated the year before, he himself wasn’t planning on going to his own graduation, even if he passed all his courses. That was the graduation where Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was going to be our key- note speaker. I said to this student that he really must not miss his graduation. How many people get to graduate and get hugged by a Supreme Court Justice—one who had grown up in his very neighborhood? I also told him that he should really push himself to do the very best he could with his courses and not settle for a mediocre grade. Like my conversation with the other student, I didn’t think what I had said was going to have an effect on this charming young man who didn’t take himself too seriously. But a couple of weeks later, he came up to me and told me that he had taken my words to heart and had turned on the effort to do as well as he possibly could. Just as the semester was winding down, I was teaching one of our last library workshops. The young man opened the classroom door and in his inimitable style, poked half his body into the classroom, looked at me and the students and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Professor Laskin! I love you!” and closed the door again. I am sure that I blushed, and the students in the workshop were amused. He did graduate and he did get a big hug from Justice Sotomayor.

I believe teaching is a calling. I am not sure whether there is an innate “teacher gene” but if one is an observant and self-reflective person, teaching is a continual search for knowledge, understanding, relationships, and excellence. Teaching in- sinuates itself into your soul. You become Teacher, from which there is no escape. Thank the goddesses.