Long-time residents of Los Angeles know all about June Gloom, the weeks in late spring when the sun dims, drizzling rain turns on and off, and you’d never know you were still in California. Students in our little school act in almost perfect contrast to the barometer – the sun hides, but they vibrate with the deep relief of school’s final days. Teachers find themselves stuck somewhere in between. Their own months off are coming closer and a year’s hard work is almost done. But the bittersweetness of the semester’s end is all too clear to many. They’ll miss their students, they’ll miss the school, and they’ll miss the feeling of doing a hard job well.

 
With a number of Advanced Placement courses on offer, our teachers face a distinct end-of-year challenge: the nation-wide AP exams all occur in May, and once they’re done it’s hard to keep the energy of the classroom high. The whole year’s curriculum has to be engaged before the AP exam – it’s basically a final exam on steroids. So what do you do in class in the weeks that follow? More than one game of Risk and more than one field trip to the basketball courts have been noticed. And then of course for the teachers who teach some AP courses and some others, the slack eases over into the non-AP courses. And once find ourselves just a week or two before the non-AP finals, and students start asking for review guides, and time to study in class. The final weeks risk becoming the least engaged, and least engaging, part of the year. Actual learning can exit the schoolroom all too early.

 

One principal I know has been working for years with all of the teachers at his school to keep them focused until the last day. Most already get it, and wouldn’t want to slack off for more than a celebratory day or two because they see the lost opportunity to do what they love to do. But some need encouragement, and one or two need even more than that. The principal can become frustrated when we talk about this, but frustrated in the most wonderful way. “I tell them,” he says, “that there’s something so precious they’re giving away when they don’t teach all the way through the year.” His face tells the story: he’s shocked. “Why would they miss the chance to teach? What on earth are they thinking?”

 
What they’re thinking – and what students can see and feel them thinking – turns out to matter a lot. Here’s a model of how many pretty good teachers teach. They organize their course materials, present coherent lectures, run well-thought-out discussions and give students a good amount of independent work to do. If some students are unmotivated, these typical teachers alternately become frustrated and wonder why the students don’t show more enthusiasm or discipline. Often they work hard to sell that enthusiasm or discipline to the students – to convince them that these are good ideas.

 
If you were sketching out the forces at work in the classroom, you’d have the teacher on one side of a sheet of paper, the students on another, and the subject and course content in between. The teacher takes a back seat to the substance of the work itself. And this is how we think about school too often – the primary relationships is between the student and what is being taught, while the relationship between the student and the teacher is secondary.

 
This is vital: there’s untapped magic in most classrooms that can be liberated by making that relationship between teacher and student primary, and letting the student’s connection with the course content follow instead of lead. It seems counterintuitive, but it makes a lot of sense when we look at how young people discover new ideas and make new commitments. More often than not, they begin with a relationship with a person they trust. They follow the person because doing new things – thinking new thoughts, becoming a new and different version of oneself – is frightening. Trust leads the way, the it’s much harder to learn to trust a book than it is to learn to trust a teacher.