In retrospect: my teacher training

I've just finished up with my first full school year here in New Zealand. My friends (and co-workers) have been asking how my year was. Some expect a simple statement about whether I liked it or not, but most want a bit more information. I've been trying to find the exact words for my experience and all I can think of is a black cat named Kiesha, aka Psycho.

Kiesha was our neighbour's cat back in Missoula. Our apartment was in a larger house that had been divided into four smaller apartments. We had a shared back yard and got along really well with pretty much all of the tenants. Kiesha belonged to the neighbour right next to us and we dubbed this cat Psycho pretty early on in our tennancy there. Psycho was svelte, mature, black, and had a remarkably good-natured way of approaching you with green pet-me eyes before lacerating your hands on the third or fourth stroke. She was very playful and an all-around good. But psycho.

Psycho loved to ambush all living things. She would hide behind the rose bush next to the walkway between the garage and the house. Sh pounced on everything: people, other cats and the occasional stupid pigeon. One day I had come home from the grocery store and parked the car in the driveway. Groceries in hand I headed for the back door. Having made it past the rose bush I thought is was in the clear until I felt four little paws contact my upper thigh simultaneously. Surprisingly, they came from the direction opposite the rose bush. I turned quickly to see what it was only to find nothing at all to my side, nothing behind me. I did see, however, the final movements of some very recently disturbed branches low down on the rose bush. Psycho had struck again and had made a clean getaway. I was startled to be certain, but unscathed.

This is basically how I feel about last year: startled by a series of not completely unexpected events, but unscathed and enriched by the experience. The year was unexpected in that I had my own notions of what teaching here would be like, mostly informed by my training in Montana. One of the biggest challenges I faced this year was matching up my current school demographic with all of the theory I learned in my University courses. Pretty much everything I learned in Montana had to do with the American demographic. Ideas where couched in the context of a co-ed environment that fostered independent thinking and learning, freedom of "thought-out and reasonable" expression and student directed curricula that teachers for the most part devise on their own. I won't say that these things don't exist in New Zealand, but I will say that they take on a very different form from what I was used to.

For starters, I work in an all-male environment. My classroom management style, consequently, has taken on a much more direct and procedural tone than I would use in a co-ed environment. This also means that students treat me differently than they treat male teachers, for better or worse. I had a group of students who, according to their male homeroom teacher, had a history of ganging up on female teachers in relatively benign ways. This would take the form of figuring out code words that a teacher would likely use and then make a particular noise each time a particular code word was said by the teacher. A number of students confessed to me over the course of the year that they tend to not listen to female teachers as much. "I don't know why, but I just don't," they'd say. Whether this is a result of societal gender rules or the admittedly top-down, highly disciplined nature of the school, cannot be said. What I do draw from this, however, is that many of my classroom management strategies and theories about the teacher-student relationship learned in college now mean exactly squat. I'm adjusting.

Similarly, students here tend to work in groups much more than in the States. Students here grow up with their desks grouped in bunches of four or six, facing inward, until the 8th grade level. They typically work in groups or, when given individual tasks, have ready access to group knowledge when they get stuck. This is a fantastic way to foster group learning skills and a sense of community within the classroom. This has a downside, though. I've noticed that when high school rolls around and students are forced to quietly perform at an individual level (i.e. in exam situations at least three times per year, every year), many students encounter problems that come down to thinking/logic skills and give up. I don't know how many times I've supervised exams where more than half of the class has stopped attempting questions beyond a certain point. The students here know the content but tend to grow up in a communal skill pool that delays their own internalisation of critical thinking, logic, process and editing skills. They don't learn to persist in academic contexts until university.

Consequently, I've had to adjust how much choice and ownership I give students over their personal courses of learning. Most of time that I've tried this style of teaching, the students choose similar projects or problems and then work as a group outside of the classroom to get the assignment done. Very few choose to go off on their own to explore their own ideas. Even fewer read texts and add comments to discussions that start with, "in my opinion..." or some similarly individually-oriented perspective. Most say "_____ is _______, right?" and try to pin down the facts and the "right way of reading the text". Students in my classes had a surprisingly hard time understanding that an essay is essentially arguing a unique or personally-driven idea gleaned from the text. American students jump on any opportunity to tell a teacher what they think. Here, many interpret the "what do you think?" question as, "tell me what the answer is." As a result they are reluctant to answer truthfully for fear of getting the answer wrong when there really is no wrong answer.

When I asked other teachers about this aspect of education in New Zealand, it was mostly the teachers from overseas who had also noticed a lack of confidence in individual skills. These teachers were most keen to discuss with me why they thought this is the case. New Zealand born and bred teachers tended to attribute this lack of intellectual individuality not to learning styles in early and intermediate education, but to the NCEA system currently in place. NCEA is set up such that students must earn a certain number of credits spanning a variety of subjects and levels in order to leave school with a certificate. Depending on what they want to do after high school, they work toward the corresponding certificate level and then leave school once they have it. This may be sometime during Year 12 (11th grade equivalent in the US) or at the end of Year 13 (12 grade). New Zealand teachers have mostly jumped on board with the system, citing that it allows more students to set achievable goals and leave with something they can use. Most also comment, and rightly so in my opinion, that the students are now driven by credits, not the desire to learn the material. In other words, credits are credits, no matter whether you passed with a 60% or a 90%. Therefore, students put as much effort into the course as is needed to get the credits and then move on to the next item on the list. Most teachers acknowledge that this is a major problem for us in our desire to instil in students an appreciation of learning as a life-long skill and joy.

All of these things have changed how I perceive my role as a motivator and facilitator. More often than not last year I found myself asking students what certificate they were aiming for, not what they enjoyed or most understood about the material at hand. This isn't because I don't think the students have a ready answer for the second question, but that the first question always motivated the students to get down to work. Perhaps I was just an idealistic first year teacher who finally had her "grounding in reality" moment. Perhaps I just have a different set of factors to deal with here. It is most likely a combination of the two. All in all I've learned quite a bit about what drives the New Zealand male student in my school and will be able to better meet those needs next year.