There was a moment, just as I was getting into the groove of my second class, where I thought I had it all together. And then, I didn’t.
I’m teaching a class this summer on education and public policy at Teachers College, Columbia University, an endeavor I didn’t foresee until about a week and a half ago. Two years ago, I was a new doctoral student taking this class, and now I had a chance to remix it and interpolate it with some middle-school-pedagogical considerations and current knowledge to boot. But there I was, about 30 minutes into class when a student secretly messaged me mid-mini-lecture on the new events. At least a dozen students were murdered in a small town in Texas. I kept calm and kept going. Shortly before our scheduled break, I extended our class break but didn’t have the words for the moment. I paced back and forth for the better part of 15 minutes, not knowing whether this amount of time and the right amount of grace would let the adult learners know I cared.
I don’t know. It took 15 years for me to develop that intuition in my middle school teaching. Even then I didn’t always know. Luckily for me, I also know it’s OK to not know.
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