All teachers go through it. The administration sends someone with seniority to sit in the back of your classroom, watch you teach, and take notes.

They do it for three years.

If you pass muster, you go from probationary to full credential and they give you a job with beginning seniority and more pay.

I’ve written about it elsewhere at length, but I have more to say. I realize that when I was being evaluated, I also evaluated myself. I saw how I tried to find things that worked with my students, and to revise things that didn’t quite work but had potential. I got better and better, and so did my students.

I had special advantages. I loved my students at the outset, they responded and worked as hard as they could. They shared my vision of a better world.

I always said I wanted my students to reach the level where they no longer needed me. But because they had become friends and family, we kept in touch.

It was like a nuclear reactor. You enrich the fuel and add to the pile until you get critical mass. At that point the reactor can continue on its own.

Teaching is like that.

I’ve led a long life of success and love. I want to share it. I want other teachers, my beloved colleagues, who have found in teaching what I found, practice what I practiced, to be encouraged to continue even through trying times, and to encourage their colleagues to do the same.

I want teachers who have not yet found “the way,” to open beyond the daily lesson plan of status quo, to find the joy in life and learning and share it with their students.

I want us all to be together.

I’m looking through the folders and drawers and boxes of my past and re-read those many evaluations of my teaching.

Some are instructive, helpful, sometimes harsh, mostly supportive, some even outrageously laudatory.

But there’s always something to be learned from evaluation.

Don’t take my word for it.

Below, for example, is an example from a tenured Professor at California State University at Los Angeles, CSULA, after it was upgraded from merely CSLA.

Those were the days when I tried to spread my wings and flex my muscles. I took on an extra class, teaching college later in the day after a full day of teaching high school English classes with too many students, sometimes as many as 200 per day, in classes so overcrowded there were not enough desks and the overflow had to sit on bookshelves and the radiators when they were turned off because in California it rarely gets that cold.

They started me with students learning English. We did a lot of talking and reading and writing and learning how to get through every day, and then how to sink our teeth into literature and get a taste and chew a bite.

I was evaluated there too. The tenured Professor came back again after finals when we had a party with pot-luck food from all the counties represented. The students lined up behind their offerings with signs in good English describing what we were eating, telling us about their country and traditions, and the idiosyncratic ingredients in their culture’s special food. They were proud to answer any questions we might have.

My evaluator had apparently spread the word, and all the Professors descended to “evaluate the class.”

We had enough food to go around, and students and Professors sat together in common cause at the same table, and I felt like the Proud Papa looking over my extended family.

I had brought my share to the feast, two large pots of potato salad, one classic enhanced. The other my own special creation, Greek Potato Salad. My good friend on the staff, Head of School Relations and Counseling when we worked in a triumvirate of power between my high school, the Pasadena Unified School District, and CSULA, came to me and exclaimed over a mouthful, “Have you tried the Greek Potato Salad? It’s out of this world!”

“I know,” I said, “I made it.”

So I was a hero once again.

But the intent of this blog entry is to get around to the evaluation of my teaching English 101, where I could get to teaching the real subject.

It’s an example again of what can work in the classroom. It shows that what you can do in elementary classrooms can work in high school and college.
The readiness is all.”

November 12, 1993

OBSERVATION OF GARY STERLING’S CLASS


Mr. Gary Sterling’s class (English 101) which I observed on November 11, 1993 was the kind of class I myself would like to take if I were a student again. I arrived shortly before class and found the students seated facing the instructor while Mr. Sterling chatted with them. It soon became clear to me that Mr. Sterling was telling the class how Dean Gonzalez reacted to their letters. The letter was an assignment with the Dean as the intended audience. As Mr. Sterling reported that the Dean was so interested that he would like to visit the class, everyone seemed pleasantly surprised by how real the assignment turned out to be. Sterling then reminded everyone that next Tuesday the class would be attending Professor Brier’s public lecture. He also handed out copies of two essays (Amy Tan’s” Two Kinds” and Adrienne Rich’s “Split at the Root”), two sheets containing Discussion Questions and Four Final Examination Questions (made available by Composition Committee), asking the class to think of interpretations and writing strategies well in advance of the examination.

The main event of the day (lasting about 50 minutes) was a Peer Response activity: Gary Sterling asked the class to pair off, read and respond to each other’s in-class writing from last time. When finished, they could pair off with another partner. The students seemed not only accustomed to but also interested in this type of activity. From the conversations that I overheard, they were eager to find out how their peers thought of their work. Some students offered simple suggestions (“You could use more examples.” etc.). While this was going on, Sterling called a number of students to the front desk to conference one-to-one about the same in-class piece. In the middle of this activity, Sterling stood up from his desk to reinforce the purpose of peer editing, saying that reading and sharpening up someone else’s writings benefit ourselves. “It’s a reader’s game we all play,” he said.

In the last 30 minutes or so, Sterling engaged the class in a discussion of the title of Professor Brier’s lecture: “Humanism and the Challenge of Multiculturalism.” Students actively responded to Mr. Sterling’s questions: What does “challenge” mean? What is multiculturalism? What is Humanism? Mr. Sterling steered the discussion with skill and a sense of humor. The discussion provoked the class into thinking about the possible issues and questions that might be involved in the lecture.

From my observation, Gary Sterling is an effective teacher who is well aware of the essential elements for a composition class: small group dynamics, the instructor’s attention to individual needs and how writers should play the reader’s game. More importantly, his sense of humor, his patience and his ability to guide discussions are desirable teacherly qualities. I do have one suggestion though: the instructor could provide some brief guideline before a peer response activity so that the exercise could be more purposeful (the purpose may vary from one exercise to another). I realize that I observed a class towards the end of the quarter and that Mr. Sterling may have provided enough instructions before so that that particular activity could be left open-ended. In short, I am convinced by the class I observed that Mr. Sterling is a welcome and valuable addition to the writing component of our Department.