One evening when my oldest daughter was a teenager, I was excited to find that one of my favorite old movies was going to be on television. I convinced her to sit with me and watch it. We popped up some popcorn and were pretty excited. “I saw this as a kid,” I told her, “and it made me think of how glamorous and free living in Manhattan would be. I was dazzled. It’s all about that freedom that comes when you’re young and you feel like you’re in the most exciting place in the world.”

 
Or not. The movie came on, and I’m sure that half an hour into it I looked shocked. As a teenager, this movie spoke to me all about freedom. As an adult, I saw for the first time the deep sadness in the film, the loneliness of its key characters, the warnings about investing too much hope in a place or an adventure as an escape from inner sadness.

 
I began thinking about so many of my favorite films and books from my younger days. I really shouldn’t have been surprised – I go back to my favorites again and again, and they’re always different, because I’m different. I need different kinds of counsel and inspiration and insight from, say, Henry David Thoreau than I did when I was twenty, and I take a different kind of pleasure from Emily Dickinson or Jane Smiley. And so it was with this old movie. I saw in it what I was able to see in it when I was very young –what I needed to see in it. As an older man, I saw a lot more, and in some ways a lot less. I noticed, finally, that the glamour of the film was meant to be thin and misleading. I saw the film as a much more complex work of art, one that spoke to different people in different ways at different times of their lives.

 

The same holds true when I watch great teachers teach. I notice different things, and I usually learn best the lessons that I most need to learn in the moment. I’m primed to fill the holes that I have in my life as a teacher at any given moment – and I always have holes.

 

I’m especially conscious these days about what’s happening in the classroom for everybody other than the teacher. I spent so many years of my life as a teacher ambitious for myself, asking what I could do to be a better teacher, how I could perform my part in the classroom drama better, where and when I should gaining steam and when easing back for just that right rhythm – and so little time, I’m ashamed to admit, focused on the others characters in the room: the students. I suppose I needed to live through that phase of my teaching life, the phase of being my own most-engaged audience member. I wanted to perform, and to witness, the Peter show, and I was just so focused on how Peter was doing. The twenty other souls in the room were interesting, but secondary to my big act.

 

Now I cringe when I replay those teaching days in the theater of my mind’s eye. I try to pan around the room and see those students. I know some were engaged, but I know too that many were just not interested in my show. They had their own shows going on, and I missed so many opportunities to tune into that much more important set of stories. I’m a lot less interested now in crafting my own identity in the classroom, and much more in learning about and learning from my students. Partly this is because I’m older and in some ways I’ve completed the business I was transacting by thinking so intently about what I was doing and how I was doing it in those early years. But there’s more here. There’s a better way to focus on the classroom than through the lens of how great or poor a job any of us are doing. Just like that movie I saw with my daughter – a movie could and does mean different things to different people, but is only fully understood when that sense of sadness is appreciated – the classroom only makes its full sense, and does its most important work, when we stop asking how the teacher is doing as a teacher, and focus instead on how the students are doing as learners.

 

“I have a lot of trouble talking with my colleagues about this, and getting them to work with me to stop hiring the best-talking, best-looking, smartest and most energetic teacher candidates. I have to get them to think about how much magic these applicants have with the kids. The meeting and greeting around a table is worse than pointless – it’s misleading. It encourages us to fall in love with candidates based on how they talk to adults, and make their colleagues feel. I want to know how they make kids feel. So we always have a couple of demonstration lessons with real kids as part of an interview process, and even then I have to get people on the hiring committee to stop looking at the teacher, and to look instead at the students. Where’s the learning happening? Who’s lighting up? Which kids are making progress, and how many are scratching their heads? These are the things that show us what a teacher can really do.” – Middle-School Principal, Massachusetts

I had a group of three new teachers at my school in California one year. All three were great, each in a different way. One was a classically-trained opera singer who was raised by his Spanish-speaking family in the U.S., and taught music and Spanish at our school. He’d been teaching for a number of years elsewhere, and had some tricks of the trade to help him day to day. One was a brilliant recent college graduate, just back from a fellowship year in Asia, and enormously warm-hearted, if a little overwhelmed by the practical aspects of becoming a teacher. One was a new college graduate who was teaching science for the first time, and volunteered to take on a heavy teaching load in order to offer a couple of classes in environmental studies.

 

A mixed group of ages, background and interests, but a powerful team. The veterans in our building understood that they were bringing some new perspectives and new energy to our little school, and all with a good spirit. They all made friends easily with other staff, and they all had early success becoming part of the community. Every one of them – without trying, I suspect – wound up with two or three students who would tell their favorite teachers from prior years how great these new teachers were. That really sealed the deal for a lot of the veterans. They know the students so well, and when a student with real character and judgment spoke up in a quiet moment and said, “You know, Mr. V – he’s really awesome,” that did something important. And every one of these three new teachers – different from each other as they were – had a similar appeal to a core group of students. One of the students finally explained it to me: “They make me happy,” Tiffany said. “Because they’re happy. They really act like they’re lucky to be here, and I love that.”