Low-income schools + many students - motivated Teachers = A need for someone like you

(http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs009/1101793155518/archive/1102563242266.html)




We constantly hear in the news (at least I do as a metro Detroit resident) that schools are closing because they just can’t afford to stay open. When I hear that more schools are closing, this makes me think of all the students that need to be bused further away from their home schools if they want to continue their education. It also makes me think of how hard it must be if these kids must then be crammed into other classes like the one below, where some students don’t even get a desk because classes are so overcrowded.

(http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ed-cuts20-2009sep20,0,2312077.story)

But, despite the fact that some classes become overcrowded, this is not really the norm, especially in low income districts. And, even more, especially not in higher level grades like 12th grade. By then, most of the students will have already dropped out. When I think of high school graduation, I think of it being a necessity in order to get a decent job. Hell, when I think of getting a good job, I wonder if an undergraduate degree is even sufficient. Right now, I am on the verge of graduating from college and wonder what it is that I will do once I graduate. So, why aren’t high schoolers getting it? Why don’t they push themselves to get to graduation? Do they just not care? From what I have learned in the Teach for America application process and in reading numerous articles in developmental psychology as well as on the news on this subject, these kids do care, or at least want to care. The problem is that the kids either aren’t challenged enough, and when they are challenged, they are not given the support they need to reach those high expectations. When they aren’t challenged they either know it and feel that they are being treated like kids; they feel that they are undermined. Or, they think that they are up to par, and then they find out when they get a difficult teacher, that they have been betrayed all these years, that they really don’t know what they thought they knew, and then they start to feel like they aren’t smart enough to make it any further. They feel that they are too far behind, and begin to think that it’s not worth pushing forward if they are going to keep failing. So, they quit. Like many of their parents, they end up dropping out of high school, getting a minimum wage job, and live pay check to paycheck like much of the rest of America.

But, is this what they want? No. Who wants to struggle? I’m going to venture to say, no one. Therefore, these kids need to be challenged every step of the way. And, when they fail, someone needs to be there for them to say, “it’s alright. We’ll work together on this. You can do it.” Therefore, motivated, dedicated, caring teachers need to go into the classroom and turn things around. But many question whether it’s really worth becoming a teacher.

Sure, being a teacher can be difficult. That’s why so many teachers drop out of the field within the first few years of teaching. According to Mei-Lin Chang of Ohio State University (UM fans, don’t hate me for using an OSU scholar’s argument!), studies have shown that as many as 40% of teachers will completely change professions within 5 years of starting teaching. This phenomenon of joining the profession and feeling the need to leave is referred to as burnout. So, why do teachers leave the profession? My family argues that teachers don’t get paid enough to deal with “those” rude kids who don’t value education. Madeline Justice & Sue Espinoza argue in their article “Emotional Intelligence and Beginning Teacher Candidates” in the scholarly journal Education. that reasons for burnout include “low salaries,…working conditions, classroom discipline, administrative support, extensive paperwork, lack of respect, lack of parental involvement, and…few career advancement opportunities” (Justice & Espinosa, 2007).

But, beyond the difficulties, there are benefits to being a teacher. If you agree with my coworker Marc, one of the greatest perks of being a teacher is getting that all that vacation time. If you get a run-of-the-mill job, expect 2-3 weeks of vacation a year. If you are a teacher, expect about 3 months of vacation a year. Then, there is the perk that you get health, dental, and vision benefits, not to mention paid leave. But, as most teachers will probably tell you, money and benefits are not the best benefits of being a teacher. If a teacher has the right attitude and emotional abilities, positive emotions are often the best reward. As found by Izhar Oplatka in his June 2007 journal article in The Teaching Record, “[w]hen teachers were asked about what they find satisfying in their jobs, they spontaneously refer to emotions of joy, wonder, and excitement.” One of the reason Teach for America targets the top college students is because they are passionate about the fields they went to college for, and when they get to instruct about what they love, their satisfaction and their students motivation both rise substantially. Therefore, if you have want the highest paying, easiest job in the world, don’t teach. But if you want to make a difference in the world and see graduation ceremonies with seats filled for all students, not just half of them, teach. If you want other students to have the same options that you had, teach. If you want to make a difference in the world, and make a decent (albeit, not rich) living, teach. Otherwise, without your passion and dedication, students will continue to fall behind, and graduation ceremonies will continue to look like the one in the image shown below.

(http://who-will-kiss-the-pig.blogspot.com/2009_08_01_archive.html)

Easier said than done

Think back to 1934, as Hitler is continuing to gain power in Germany. Now, imagine that you were a German, and all of your friends, neighbors, co-workers, etc. were steadfast dedicated to the goals and means of the National Party. Your friends would look at Hitler, idolize him, and wanted nothing more than your country to be brought together, and saw that Hitler was bringing the nation together. Would you be able to see beyond the desirable front that was being put up, and know to leave the country before the Party gained too much power? From our perspective, and knowing all of the cruel things that Hitler did, sure, you might think it would be easy to identify that Hitler’s schemes were not to be trusted. But, what if you didn’t know about the Holocaust? What if you didn’t know about Hitler’s dirty laundry? My English class explored this idea recently, and have come to conclude that many of us would have just gone with the flow. So, how can we ensure that something similar doesn’t happen again? Perhaps that’s the whole point of taking a class on argument; to understand what makes an argument good, and how to see past the desirable exterior.

In class on Monday, my teacher showed us a film called Triumph of the Will. This black-and-white film was produced by Leni Riefenstahl in 1934 under the funding/guidance of Adolf Hitler. If you are not a history buff, that was 5 years before Germany invaded Poland, and many years before the Holocaust. There were already camps in 1933 for those “undesireables” who broke the laws and fought against those in power, but these camps weren’t limited to one race or group like the Jews. Also, this was following WWI, and Germany didn’t look that desirable to the rest of the world. Therefore, Germany had to build up its image, build up its national character, and make the Germans themselves as well as the rest of the world respect Germany. This is where Hitler came in, and the film made by Riefenstahl aided in that mission.
In the movie, right from the beginning, what you see is desireable. The film starts from a plane floating in the clouds, a scenic view. Then, as the plane landed, a crowd awaited, cheering, happy and content. How could anything be wrong? Hitler was shown in his car driving down the streets. It seemed impossible to fathom that anyone was still in their homes because the sidewalks were so crowded, but no one seemed annoyed by this fact. At night, there were parties, fireworks, live music. During the day, the movie showed women with baskets of food, children eating apples; it seemed like a bountiful time. All of these visuals were arguments that as Hitler was rising to power, people were happy, they were well-fed, and they were united as one people supporting one person. Hitler appealed to people’s ethos by showing that other people gave him the power, and that he was willing and able to accept it. At the same time, there were constant appeals to pathos, in that people were just shown loving Hitler. Hitler was shown holding babies, people were fed; no one had to worry about pain or famine, so people were happy. People were brainwashed by this.
How could you say, “no” this is not OK? If you were brainwashed into thinking that Hitler is equated with food and prosperity and a united nation, wouldn’t you want him to stay in power? If you decided that Hitler was too radical, you would probably be shunned. Think of going to a football game where you’re not welcomed. For example, one of my classmates said how they went to the University of Michigan – Michigan State football game a few weeks ago, and how people booed her, harassed her, and even threw things at her. This would be emotionally difficult for one day; would you really want to deal with this harassment every day, even if you really did love the opposing team? Probably not. Maybe you would fake it and say that you loved State, maybe you’d just keep quiet, or maybe you’d just leave if you could. But if East Lansing was home to you, and the city was prosperous, it seems that it would be difficult to uproot. This may be similar to why even those people who knew something was up stayed in Germany and kept their mouths shut. However, although those people who go against the grain may be ridiculed, those are the people who make the greatest impact in history. Martin Luther King, Jr. , Rosa Parks, Thomas Edison, Amelia Earhart: these people all did what everyone else told them was crazy, wasn’t normal, and they were ridiculed. Sometimes we have to step back and say, maybe the extremists have a point worth examining; I really need to try to see both sides of the story: that’s what argument is. Objectively examining both sides, and coming to a conclusion, that’s the best option. That’s perhaps one reason why pathos is avoided in academic writing: because pathos has a tendency to pull on the heartstrings and make you forget logic.

So, argument can be used to develop an identity for both parties involved: those you are viewing and those that are being viewed. People liked Hitler, because he argued that people liked him; or at least, that’s what Leni Riefenstahl argued in the film she produced. At the same time, the visual and verbal arguments in the movie argued that Germans were united, and that everyone wanted the same thing. Using Riesman’s theory of the conforming self, people were other-directed, worrying about the needs of the other. But, by doing what everyone else was doing, the Germans were convinced that they were really looking out for themselves because the images they saw showed that being other-directed meant being prosperous.

In the end, I guess my point is that although it sometimes may seem easiest or the most logical to go with the flow, we need to step back, reevaluate why we are thinking the things we are thinking, and ask objectively whether the situation we are in really is for the best. It is easy to become brainwashed into thinking that something is the best option or the best way of doing things, but we should always balance our view with the opposing view and underlying reasons for their argument, and decide if we really do respect the side that we argue for. This is easier said than done, but it’s worth the fight.

What the other side may say: focus on students, not teachers

I just want to start out by saying that the following is not my position, but rather is a response to the following prompt provided by my Argumentative Writing teacher (I just don’t want you to think I am eternally confused and have completely changed my mind, especially if you compare this blog to prior entries).
"Figure out what the opposite claim would be to the paper you are working to write during class. For your blog readers, write a well‐supported, reasonable, and fair articulation of the OPPOSITE argument using the standard 5 paragraph essay format you used in high school or some variation of that format (4‐7 paragraphs, primary claim in the first paragraph, topic sentences articulating criteria/ reasons for support, etc..)"

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Currently, the education system finds it necessary to focus on the needs of the students. We are constantly performing research to determine how different teaching techniques affect students, what the importance of student-teacher connection is for the student, and how it would be best to integrate more information into the curriculum to prepare students for their future in our fast paced society. If we don’t focus on the current students, the future will be grim. Therefore, we shouldn’t dedicate any funds to the professional development of teachers beyond learning new material to present to students. These teachers will either take the incentive to reach out to their students, or they won’t, and no amount of “emotion training” will help in this arena. Therefore, education reform needs to continue focusing on student’s learning needs and let teachers learn about emotions from experience.


One of the first reasons to not divert funds to teacher “emotion training” is that by doing so, you are taking funds away from students. After all, the education system is constantly being compromised as it is. Schools are constantly closing, students are getting bused further from home, and children often don’t even have the resources they need such as books. The system needs to find ways to generate more funds, but until then, we need to focus all efforts on our students.

Also, teacher emotion work is not something that we can train. There are way too many experiences that our teachers may experience in the field for us to truly be able to understand or determine which ones we should teach about. In some districts, teachers discuss how their 7th graders already have infants. In other situations, some kids are dealing with the difficulties of raising their siblings while their parents are at work. These are home situations that the students may discuss with their teachers, but there is no way for us to address all the different emotional stresses these students could bring to the class. Also, we could try to simulate experiences like these, but as we all know, simulations and role playing are never as helpful as real practice.

Additionally, by spending time on teacher emotion work, we would keep more teachers from getting out into the field because they would be spending more time in the class. As standards are currently set, teachers often need bachelor’s degrees, and if their degree isn’t in education, they need to take courses and/or exams to become certified. Currently, there is no way for us to increase the pay of teachers. Therefore, our prized members of society who may have been likely to enter the educational arena will avoid it if they think they are going to have to spend an excessive amount of time learning about how to teach. People like a profession that is quick to get into and pays well. Since we can’t change the latter, we definitely don’t want to make the former even worse. By adding more “emotion training” to the curriculum, we would make the teacher preparation process too long. This is not to mention the fact that we need teachers! There is a dire shortage in many states for teachers, and if we add more time to the programs, that means we won’t be able to get more teachers in the field for even more time.

Finally, we can develop learning practices that truly help students, and teacher training isn’t that necessary for. We can teach students many skills by having them work in small groups more often. This would encourage participation, and active engagement in their learning, and wouldn’t require any additional training of teachers. Also, we could dedicate more money to student counseling programs, something that would reduce the need of teachers to learn how to address students’ emotional needs because if we had an adequate system, teachers could just refer their students to the counselor. After all, we don’t have doctors who do the billing, appointment scheduling, and diagnosing; doctors decide what is worth their time and expertise, and teachers need to do the same.

In conclusion, there is not enough of a demand to start focusing on the emotional needs of our teachers. Currently, there is not enough funds to even think about how we can spend more money on teacher training. Also, although we agree that teachers need to be emotionally stable, skills of emotion work are something that are learned in the field, not something that we should be teaching in a classroom. Also, we have a shortage of teacher, and adding “emotion training” programs aren’t going to solve that need. Finally, emotion work is the job of the counselor, instruction is the job of teacher. Teachers need to do what they are good at: teaching; not counseling.

James's development of arguments on teacher identity: from arguing to inquire to arguing to convince

My first idea of the Hochschild concept was the limited one provided by Holstein & Gubrium. In this presentation of Hochschild’s theory, the authors explained that Hochschild believes that there are two components to identity: the true self and the false self. The true self is the self that would be revealed if not under any external pressures. Alternatively, a person can have many false selves and these are the identities that they present in multiple social situations would be those false selves. Hochschild claims that the false self performs emotion work, the act of presenting emotions that are completely opposite of what the person is truly feeling. Again, she claimed that these false emotions would have no effect on, or influence from, the true self. Hochschild’s theory was thought by Holstein and Gubrium (authors of The Self We Live By) to be important in preventing the true self from being inundated and overly influenced by the social. Other theories of the self, like Riesman’s conforming self, are more grim in that they see peoples’ identities as being completely shaped by the social, and that they don’t really have an identity beyond that which society creates for them. In contrast, Hochschild’s theory was seen as grim, but more positive than Riesman’s theory of the self because Hochschild’s theory said that there was a portion of identity that wasn’t subject to the pressures of the social. However, at least from my initial understanding of Hochschild’s theory, I felt that there was no interaction between the true and false selves.


Additionally, my initial concepts of teacher identity was that it was a direct representation of this concept of identity: that a teacher’s identity in the classroom had no influence on who they really were. However, as I have continued to contemplate these concepts, my opinion has changed. This has been influenced not only by my research for my Argumentative writing class, but also by my application/interview process for Teach for America. As I have learned more about the Hochschild type identity, I have found that there are conflicting views on the subject. Some people feel that the identity they present in the classroom is completely false and not representative of their true feelings. From sources other than the assigned text in our class, The Self We Live By, I found that Hochschild would call this surface acting. Other teachers profess that they also do “emotion work” . However, there are others that feel that they perform is more influenced by their true personality, and that they actively shape their current emotions by trying to change the emotions they are feeling, not just faking them. This is what Hochschild called deep acting.

Then, there are others who say that Hochschild’s emotion work and false selves at no level can truly apply to their profession. In the UK, they praise what they call philanthropic emotion work, an emotion work that is not exploitative at all, but truly loves what they do and don’t feel obliged to do their work. They feel that the only time they do Hochschild type work is when they are forced by the education system to follow a prescribed lesson plan and force all their class time into instruction, never being able to truly relate to their students. From this point, I started to see that when teachers do Hochschild work, they feel an emotional conflict, and often leave the profession or just feel overwhelmingly stressed. This made me think of the concept of teacher burnout, the idea that many teachers leave the profession shortly after starting, and as I believe some sources have cited, can occur at rates of 40% or higher in educators’ first 5 years in the profession. Other sources have actually determine that in large school districts, like in Chicago, the turnover of one teacher can cost about $18,000.

In my developmental psychology class, I have been reading about the importance of a safe learning environment, one in which the student feels comfortable, on the child’s development. The appropriateness of the material to their developmental stage (grade-level/age for instance) or personal traits (gender, culture, local community) is important in developing lesson plans. In my Teach for America application process, I read numerous article about how students are suffering from the short comings of the school system and how teachers need to stress improvement and do “assessment for learning,” a technique in which teachers show at-risk children with poor grades that their grades don’t show that the kids’ efforts are futile, but that they are just making minor mistakes or have minor shortcomings in their understanding, and then giving them the chance to improve. Therefore, I am constantly being inundated by the importance of the student. But, what about the teacher? Don’t they have needs to? And, if we want to teach students more properly, shouldn’t we first make sure that our educators are well adapted and prepared?

This is the point where I have transitioned to my “arguing to convince paper.” I always thought that it was important to worry about the needs of the students; however, if the teachers aren’t prepared for the situations they will encounter (not just the academic ones, but the emotional and psychological situations), how can they reach out to their students. Although some teachers don’t need what I would call “emotion training,” some do. And, this training is more important that some situations in contrast to others. For instance, in Teach for America, these corps members are placed in low-income communities. Some of these kids come from families where there parents work multiple jobs, and then the children must take the role of “parent” for their siblings. Others become parents extremely early. In blogs on teachfor.us, a site of Teach for America corps members’ blogs, one teacher mentioned how when she asked her 7th grade student about a picture of a baby boy he was holding, that the student told her that the picture was of his son! That’s right, a 7th grader with a son! How about the corps member who had to react to a student who talked about how good the popcorn was at the prison he had to visit where his brother is. Some of these kids don’t have any positive male role models because they have single moms, or their dad, uncles, etc. are in prison. Therefore, teachers need to be able to know how to properly respond to these kids emotional needs. But, if the teachers aren’t taught how to do this, they will shy away. Therefore, education reform needs to start focusing solely on the needs of the students, and instead focus on developing positive teacher emotions and identity.

If we can successfully help teachers prepare emotionally to connect with, and respond to their students in difficult situations, burnout rates may decrease. This not only helps the emotional state of the teacher, it would save the districts money by decreasing turnover rates! Also, when teachers don’t feel as stressed, they are less likely to miss work, and therefore don’t have to spend money on substitute teachers, who probably compromise students’ educational opportunities anyway in most cases. If people are worried about diverting money away from students needs, it seems from my arguments, at least, that by helping teachers, we will not only save the districts more money to spend on students, but it will help students connect with their material more and really learn, whether that means increased comprehension (what really matters) or just higher test scores (what the educational system emphasizes). In the end, I believe this is the direction that work on teacher identity research needs to take.

Interviewing: Are you who you say you are?

So, this Monday, I did my final interview for Teach for America, also known as TFA (Brett, does an acronym count as nominalization?). Although I can’t actually disclose any of the questions that were asked or any of the details beyond those that TFA presents on its website, I must say that the overall format of interviews made me think about the identities of the interviewer and the interviewee.


Honestly, as I think most people who meet me already know, I am a quiet person, overall. However, there are some instances in which my persona changes and I try to be loud and outgoing, perhaps even authoritative at times. One of these instances would be when I lead study group. As a study group leader, I have to command attention and bring motivation to my members. When I do these things, it makes me wonder, is this outgoing nature just a different aspect of my personality?  Or am I just completely faking who  I am because the situation demands it?  The more complications I see with theories of the self, the more I am confused about who I am.  Because of Hochschild's theory of the self, I thought what I presented was a false self, but I'm not completely sure. But, getting to the point in time where I can actually say I'm a teacher, first requires that I interview to be offered a position as a teacher, as is the case with any other job.

During an interview, you would to repress some emotions and present false ones. One of the parts of my TFA interview was that I had to present a 5-minute teaching lesson for your fellow interviewees.  When I did my 5-minute teacher lesson, I kind of thought that I had failed. The college students in the room seemed like they didn’t understand what I had just taught them, and they already had taken chemistry as high school students! How could I be an effective chemistry teacher to students who had never seen this material before if I couldn’t even reach college students. In this case, I felt a lot of emotional stress. But, was the emotional stress that I felt because I was repressing my emotions of nervousness so that the interviewers and other interviewees wouldn’t pick up on it, or was it just because of the fact that I was stressed. Am I perhaps reading too far into the emotions? Maybe it’s not the repression of emotions that’s painful, maybe it’s just the act of experiencing those emotions.

Not even discussing emotion work, Hochschild says that flight attendants and others in the service community present multiple false identities. But, after this interview, it made me think that maybe it’s not just the service industries or teaching that involves false identities, it’s almost every aspect of everyone’s life that involves these false presentations. When you interview, are you really yourself? I think the best answer to this is most often, “not if you want to get the job.” I often hear that the whole point of interviewing is so that the company can learn who you are. The same is true of the medical school application process. But, most people don’t really present who they are. I know many people who volunteer because they have to if they want to get into the medical profession, not because they want to. Then, they come up with scripted reasons of how volunteering touched them and why it is so important to help the community. Interviews don’t tell the interviewer who the person they are interviewing is; interviews tell these people how good you are at faking who you should be. Can you present a domineering self that can succeed in the classroom? Can you pretend like you really care about a patient, even though you may not?

I’m not saying that we are all heartless, don’t really care about other people, or that some of the things we say in interviews aren’t true, but they definitely don’t evaluate who we really are. The interview should be just another factor in the process. It seems that our personal recommendations should bear more weight, since they are written by people who supposedly actually know who we are. But then again, we choose who we want to write our letters. Have you ever gone to office hours to get help, and instead had to wait while some annoying person asked 80 ridiculously detailed questions, not because they really wanted to know the answers, but because they want the professor to think that they want to know the answers? Then, after we fake who we are to get the letters, and we fake who we are in the interview, if we get the job, we fake some more. Teachers do it, flight attendants, doctors, you name it. It seems like a kind of depressing concept to me the more I think about it; is there even such a thing as the true self, or are we always trying to fulfill roles? Perhaps there is a true self, but are the emotions we feel even from the true self, or are from another false self that society has made that we are trying to present? How can we ever know that the feelings that we feel are really ours? After all, what we define as our morals or our beliefs are often imposed by other people and other social constructs. Perhaps these complications are the reason why Hochschild said that at some point we present so many false selves that we lose the real self. When I first wrote my inquiry paper, I thought that the emotions I felt inside were from my true self, but now I’m starting to wonder if they really are mine, or are just what I think are mine.

I am also thinking more about the dramaturgic self. It seems that this whole concept of presenting a false self is really just acting and presenting false characters. Hochschild tried to look at the bright side of things and say that there is light at the end of the tunnel, that there is a true self though we have trouble finding it sometimes, yet she was in “The Dark Side” chapter. In The Self We Live By (TSWLB), Goffman (who described the self as dramaturgic and socially situated) is quoted as saying that the “self itself does not derive from its possessor, but from the whole scene of his action.” I have trouble seeing the difference between the self Goffman describes and the one Hochschild describes. Both theories say that we all have many selves, and that they all depend on the situation at hand. Is Goffman’s self in the “Formulating a Social Self” chapter while Hochschild’s self is in the “The Dark Side” chapter because Goffman thinks that each socially presented self is a reflection of an aspect of the self, while Hochschild’s false selves are completely fake? In TSWLB, the authors say that “Time and again, Goffman reveals that each and every one of us has many selves, pertinent to the purposes of daily living, always part of, yet also reflexively separate from, the moral orders we share with others.” So Goffman says that we have many selves, but they are not false? But, if they are meeting up to the expectations of the situation, and we are molding them to meet the demands of that situation, how is that not fake? Perhaps it is because I am now brainwashed by the ideas of Hochschild that I don’t understand how the selves we can present can be real selves. Alas, I am lost again in TSWLB. Tell me your thoughts :-D

If I have to convince, what should I argue? And to who? With what reasons?

In my arguing to inquire paper, I tried to understand teacher identity. As a model, I tried to use Hochschild’s concept of the true and false selves, to see if her model really could relate to teachers. Some say no, not at all; others say yes, but with qualifiers. In the end, I came to conclude that, by and large, Hochschild’s ideas of true/false selves and emotion work do apply to teachers, just in different ways and to a different extent than it does in some of the service professions. Then, in the inquiry paper I also tried to look at how conflicts between the true and false selves, and the stress of performing emotion work/labor can be detrimental to a teacher’s true emotions and true self, and who this could contribute to teacher burnout rates, which in the U.S. are extraordinarily high, and in some districts where student drop out rates are high, teachers still “drop out” more often than students do. Perhaps we are not completely blind to this fact: after all, I have always wanted to teach, but knew that it would be emotionally challenging. This is one of the reasons that Teach for America appealed to me: I could leave after my two year commitment without having to look down at the ground and feel like a failure who succumbed to the stress of being a high school teacher, but instead could say I made a difference, and I didn’t leave because I couldn’t handle it, but because my time was up and it was time to move on.


So, that’s my background info. Hope you enjoyed it. I will probably first have to re-prove that teachers emotionally manage their emotions…can knock off a few of the required sources right there ;). Now onto the main point of this blog. What do I want to argue in my Arguing to Convince paper?

I think that I would like to argue that teacher education needs to perhaps stop focusing solely on the emotional management of students, but start working on building teacher identity so that new teachers don’t go into the profession and get burned out so quickly. I believe that if teacher training programs focus on emotions at all, it is probably about how to address a student’s emotional needs. Teachers are expected to be these amazing, philanthropic, hard-working people who are strong and don’t need emotional support: but if they are getting burned out, obviously they do!

If I made this argument, I believe my audience would be teacher educators or prospective teachers who don’t want to take even more time in the classroom and need to get out in the classroom. These people may argue that becoming a teacher already requires 4 years of education and that teachers can’t learn how to manage their emotions in the classroom, that they need to practice in the real world.

Or, perhaps I could argue that schools need to start focusing less on memorization and test scores and instead start focusing on real learning. With the No Child Left Behind act, schools now have to perform assessment tests much more often, and when schools don’t perform up to standards, they actually have to inform parents that they have the right to find a better school, or the school can even be closed down. This only adds to the stress of teachers, and as studies have shown, this blatant memorization of facts for performance exams actually jeopardizes the learning environment because kids aren’t learning critical thinking skills, they are learning how to memorize and pass tests (I would use my developmental psychology book and online articles I have for sources). I fear that this may be hard to tie into teacher identity, but maybe not (I do have some sources that link it it…read below about UK system).

In this case, I believe my audience would be those who develop laws and testing schedules and believe that the only way to assess student performance is by analyzing test scores. I would argue to them that these tests are not only bad for students’ learning since it inhibits them and makes those who are at the bottom of the scale feel inadequate and hopeless, but also that it makes teachers standardize classroom instruction, use fake emotion, become emotionally mismanaged, and hurts the teacher-student relationship.

Now, I don’t know much about the teacher education system, so I may find that programs in fact do work with emotion management and not letting the classroom psychologically injure the teacher’s self-concept. Therefore, this weekend for Fall Break, one of my objectives is to ask my cousin who has a Master’s degree in elementary school education what her training experiences have been. Has she been taught to emotionally manage the self, or just to manage the student? Does she think that such programs would be helpful? I believe she would be able to provide great insight into this topic.

Also, I think I would make the argument that if we want teachers to manage their students and make a lasting impact on the lives of their students that the teachers have to first be confident in their selves. After all, a teacher who is overwhelmed by their emotional conflicts will become disconnected from their class and not have much of a lasting impact on the students. For this argument, I have a source that states that when teachers in the UK switched from more philanthropic work to surface acting like Hochschild type work that they became disconnected, burnt out, and I believe it said that many ended up leaving the profession. This would be evidence that emotion management not only comes in many forms, but when teachers aren’t trained to properly manage their emotions in a changing classroom that teachers become disconnected, which means their students feel it too. Additionally, if I decided to argue that we need to stop stressing tests and start emphasizing learning, this article would definitely tie into that argument as well. This would be anecdotal evidence.

For one of my reasons that this argument is relevant, I would not only quote the statistics that say that teacher turnover is high, but cite the resources that show how expensive it is to keep replacing teachers when they leave (which kind of makes me question Teach for America (TFA), but since their turnover rates in low-income communities are similar to non-TFA teachers in the same regions, maybe they aren’t really hurting the system, although they may). In fact, I think it costs somewhere around $20,000 more for a teacher to be replaced than it is to keep the old teacher on staff. Why this is true, I’m not sure, but I think it’s worth exploring further. This would be expert opinion and hard evidence.

I do see some problems with my argument, like how can this be done? After all, is emotional management in the class something that can really be taught? For flight attendants, I think one of my articles explained that indeed it can be done. People in this profession are taught how to manage their emotions when others share anecdotes and ideas for emotional management. For instance, one of the research articles I read shared that in one flight attendant training program, a story of a flight attendant with an unruly, rude, irate customer kept their calm, but let that person “get to them.” They weren’t emotionally managing their self! However, that person found out at the end of the flight that the person’s son had just died and he was flying to his son’s funeral. Now that flight attendant always emotionally manages their self and doesn’t allow their true self to emotionally react to the situation because the person who is being rude to them may just be having a bad day. In low income communities, teachers may be able to do something similar, allowing themselves to say that maybe the student acts out in class because their parents don’t give them enough attention, not because the teacher is boring or ineffective. Through training programs where teacher would have to suppress their emotions and learn how harmful it can be, and learning to understand that everyone comes from a different background and may come from a stressed out family that isn’t supportive, warm, and loving that they shouldn’t take the comments or actions of their students personal, because they are not really directed at them per se, but more are inner directed feelings that the student can’t control anymore and must direct them at someone else to relieve their internal stress. Perhaps for my arguing paper I should just argue that teachers need to be taught emotion management though, and not how the system should teach them this. Perhaps the “how” should be left for the persuasive paper. What do you (YES, YOU, THE PERSON WHO IS READING THIS BLOGBrett will give you an imaginary smiley face sticker if you comment, I’m pretty sure… you should do it!) think?

First blog...yeah, not so good; but, it did have narrative slippage and narrative editing :D

For my English class, I was prompted to look back at my first blog, and then analyze it in terms of narrative slippage and narrative editing.

For those of you who don’t read The Selves We Live By, narrative slippage is when you relate to a broader context or group, but your individual story starts to “slip” from the group as a whole and has more influence on the writer’s individual experiences. For me, I could look at myself in terms of a student, but the way that I describe myself may not always seem particularly similar to that of most students; my particular context may vary from the norm. We stress different aspects of our live that have gotten us to a point, and even though we may reach the same goal or conclusion, we may significantly differ in the way that we view how and why we got there.


For narrative editing, we often step back, and reflect on what we have written or said, and then reexplain our thoughts or qualify what we were saying in order to elicit a particular reaction from the reader/listener. Our feelings, our reflections, and our ideas of who were are before, during, and after a conversation change and are often influenced by the listener, so we edit our story, and in turn, may edit who we are. Well, at least that’s my take on narrative slippage and editing.


So, now to look back at my blog. Wow, was it ever awful! I can now understand why if you read that blog, you would have stopped reading my posts. Upon reflection, it was a dry autobiography. I wanted my readers to respect me, so I gave my life history of all my accomplishments and the characteristics that I thought were most important. I believe that the nature of the blog was determined by my trying to accommodate to my audience, as well as due to the self reflection I was doing at that time while trying to write my letter of intent for Teach for America, which I believe was due the Friday of that week. I believed that anyone could be reading my blog, and although I wanted to relate to my fellow students, I knew that it was more likely that only the professor was going to regularly be reading my blogs, so I wanted to impress her. Therefore, I kept listing all my accomplishments, past jobs, and leadership roles from high school (which although I have been told before to stop dwelling on those high school attributes, I didn’t realize until now how pathetic it actually sounds to list off things from high school…that was four years ago, James; move on). Therefore, my story was a “constructed story” of the self more than a self in a story, I think.


So, Brett asked how did I “slip from the broader construction of the larger discursive practice of your group, be that defined by age, class, ethnicity, activity, dialect, etc.[?]” Um, I’m first of all going to admit that I never really fully understood this whole discursive practice vs. discourses in practice concept, but I’ll take a shot at answering the question anyway. In reference to my group as a college student, I think I slip a lot from that group. Most people emphasize the things that they have done in college, and not the things that go on a resume, but the things that actually make them who they are: their life experiences, their friendships, their engagements in activities, their self reflections. But, I slip from my group a lot. I focus on the things that I think my parents or my teachers or employers would want to see. I don’t feel that I have ever fully fit into my age group, always feeling able to better relate to those older than me, but impeded at the same time by my lack of life experiences.

I do often step out of my story and try to attend to perspectives and the way I want them to be heard, but I think I do this more in my conversation than I do in my writing. For some reason, I seem to think that I don’t need to explain my perspectives to the greater group at hand while I am writing; it’s like I know I am writing for others, but I feel like I don’t need to clarify things because I believe that what I say needs no clarification. Of course, that’s not really true. But, when I write I feel like I get into a different mindset than when I speak, and I think more about the things that I write than that I say, so that when I put them down on paper my ideas are clear and don’t need to be qualified for anyone else. However, in reflecting on my blog, I do step out of the story and attend to the way I expect people to take me. I said things like “Though long winded much of the time, I will try to be more concise in the future,” which you can obviously tell from my blogs turned out to not be true. I believe the second to last paragraph involved a lot of this narrative editing; it seems that I was finally speaking to the reader, and not listing my accomplishments for myself and my teacher. I also made comments like “I have volunteered at a soup kitchen and a food distribution plant for the poor in the ghettos of Detroit, volunteered last semester (and continue to do so again this semester) once a week from 10PM - 2AM at Arbor Hospice with patients during their last stages of life, and have volunteered in many other spheres…” Here, after listing my job and extracurricular accomplishments, I think I wanted to essentially show that I am not just a snob who brags about their job accomplishments, but wanted to show that I like to help people and serve the community, trying to make my listener look at me as a philanthropic person, not just an overachiever.

Anyway, analyzing the first blog is probably one of the first times that I have felt like I could actually understand what Holstein & Gubrium were saying in TSLWB in relation to my own life. I often feel like I analyze myself, but never in such a constructive view. So, with that, I say thanks, Brett!

Finally, I would like to note: Brett, the name that I go by is not David, despite you typing that in your comment. I know that you now know this, but I just wanted to point it out because it reminded me of how Lauren keeps harassing me about how I have 3 first names. Nevertheless, I always appreciate your feedback-->indeed, this comment may seem out of place and random, but that’s me, so deal with it :-P