Erica Jacobs: Teachers’ unsung heroes are their department chiefs
By: Erica Jacobs
Examiner Columnist
August 11, 2009
If it hadn’t been for Sue, the department chairwoman during my first year of high school teaching, I wouldn’t have lasted. Nearly one third of teachers drop out during their first three years, and the reason two thirds stay may well be the unsung heroes of every teacher: their department chairmen.
I had no notion what high school students would be like — only 10 years of university teaching as a measure. I’d been a successful college teacher, but that part-time gig was not paying the bills. It was time to take the public school plunge.
I was unprepared for the reality of what is known as “the reluctant learner.” That first year, all my students were “reluctant.” If they could figure out a way to get us off topic and into a conversation about life or football, they were happy. I was unprepared for their determination to avoid all topics related to my classroom.
Sue convinced me that the students really did want to learn, but that I’d have to have more will power than they did in order to get them there. She was right. By the end of the year, the football team was reading Chaucer in the original Middle English, and writing their own epic poems!
Fast forward seven years to Oakton High School, where I would spend the next 16 years. My students still loved to talk about life, and
I’d learned that their drive to push the discussion “off topic” could be incorporated into the lesson. The key was interdisciplinarity, the foundation of the program of my second school: Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. Once English and history merge into humanities classes, questions of how literature plays out in society become relevant. After all, studies of the past are really human narratives recorded by historians.
Oakton’s department chairwoman, Paula, encouraged me to co-design, with the Advanced Placement government teacher, an interdisciplinary course called “Senior Seminar,” where discussions of how literature plays out in the real world would become the heart of the curriculum. Senior Seminar incorporated what my students had always loved to do — discuss people and ideas based on their observations — and elevated it to academic legitimacy.
Paula and I figured out how this double Advanced Placement course could be offered separately from other AP courses, and students embraced the concept. Four student sections the first year ballooned to as many as 12 sections before long. The number of Oakton students taking AP tests exploded, as well.
But none of that would have been possible without the backing of the person who acts as teacher advocate to the administration. Paula helped make that course happen, and it still survives at Oakton.
Department chairmen often suffer administrative disapproval when they take on the causes of their teachers; both Sue and Paula transferred to different schools because of conflicts with administrators, but not before leaving behind a legacy of good work. It’s not easy to be a teacher advocate and also the bearer of the perpetual bad news issued by any administration. Yet that’s what department chairmen do well, to the benefit of teachers and students, and I would like to thank them all!
Erica Jacobs, whose column appears Wednesday, teaches at George Mason University. E-mail her at ejacob1@gmu.edu.
WHAT THE KIDS ARE READING
This weekly column will look at lists of books kids are reading in various categories, including grade level, book genre, and data from booksellers. Information on the books below came from Advanced Placement Senior Seminar classes at Oakton High School.
Life meets literature: Topics from Senior Seminars
1. 1984 by George Orwell. Government Surveillance: How much is too much?
2. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. How have women’s roles changed in the past two generations? What are women’s conflicts between dreams and reality? Can those conflicts be resolved?
3. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. How does society deal with outcasts? In what ways are we all “outcasts”?
4. Dubliners by James Joyce. Are we our brothers’ keepers? What responsibility does society have to those who exhibit abusive behavior? What do we have in common with addictive personalities?
5. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. Do terrorists and hostages share common bonds? If you were president, how would you deal with a hostage crisis?
6. Hamlet by Shakespeare. In a situation where all choices seem to have negative consequences, how do you avoid tragedy? Is Hamlet a prototype for the modern monarch or president? – Erica Jacobs
More from Erica Jacobs
- Erica Jacobs: What no teacher can prepare for
- Erica Jacobs: Horace's Hope: My educational journey
- Erica Jacobs: I am Horace: More thoughts on Theodore Sizer's progressive Educational Philosophy
- Erica Jacobs: I Am Horace: How Theodore Sizer nailed what really happens in high school
- Erica Jacobs: When words fail us
