Dr. Heart

The Heart of a Teacher
Identity and Integrity in Teaching
Parker J. Palmer.

I came to study to be an English teacher as a means of embracing and sharing my skill and passion for writing. I have to be aware though that it is merely my passion and not necessarily everybody’s.



Is it in my power to make it others’ passion? Can I weave some magic and have the whole class under my spell? Palmer suggests that perhaps I can...if I have the heart to do it.

I found Palmer’s article a little preacher-like but did appreciate the message even so. Palmer discusses connectedness as the key to great teaching; when a teacher can “weave a complex web of connections between themselves, their subjects, and their students, students in turn learn to weave a world for themselves”(P2).



I love the idea that students weave worlds for themselves!



The connectedness in teaching emanates not from the teacher’s methods but from the heart, where “intellect and emotion and spirit and will converge in the human self.”(P2)



It was suggested in Eisner’s article that “students lack adequate guidance”. What is adequate guidance? I am sure most teachers would resent the accusation given their endless efforts to implore students in the appropriate direction. However, I believe there are teachers in schools who have lost heart and therefore they are losing students.



Parker offers a description of such a teacher, “Their words float around somewhere in front of their faces, like the balloon speech in cartoons.” (P2). I can only strive not to become so disconnected from my subject and my students.



Am I foolish and naïve though, to think I have an indestructible heart?

Life Drawing Class

My Real-Life Model

1998, Year 11 English Folio Piece:
“I am not here”
By Eloise Porter.

Mrs Margaret Smith could have dismissed me as a teenage drama queen. I submitted a folio piece, which delved into issues sixteen-year-olds need not worry about.

Through writing I made myself aware of things that would have otherwise escaped me. Through writing I was able to explore the hum that wanders around behind my eyes.

Mrs Smith was concerned. She had an obligation to investigate.

I was never alienated. I was never made to feel abnormal. I was never made to feel I was different.

Rather, on a small Monet fronted card, she commended me on a powerful piece of writing and offered me all the support I needed. It may have been a dreadful piece of writing but she told me what I needed to hear; that what was going on in my head was not nonsense. My anxieties were valid. I was valid.



Whether it be as an English teacher or not, I can only hope that I can offer the same kind of gentle intervention and quiet support to a confused young adult, or anyone who gives an aching piece of their self to me.

Questionable Direction?

Eloise + Children = ??

I have thrived on the energy of children all my life as the eldest of four children with countless cousins. My experience as a scout leader over the past seven years has surrounded me with both outgoing kids and kids who prefer the world to be a little quieter. All of them loved being shown every bit of how the world works: back-to-front, inside out and from above.

I believe English is a broad base to jump from, to float from, slowly down to the ground with full view of the landscape in which we live.

Cultural and Ideological Forces

Guts and Gore.

I have to be aware of


where I have come from.


I am twenty–five.

My mother is an actress.
My mother is a teacher.
My mother had breast cancer.
My mother is an alcoholic.
My mother gave too much.
My mother is a victim.
My mother is a martyr.
My mother can not say no.
My mother is weary.
My mother is my hero.

My father is an artist.
My father is a business man.
My father had a stroke at birth.
My father is a writer.
M father reads The Age everyday.
My father is a tyrant.
My father is a stay-at-home dad.

My father is a grammar school boy.
My father is a public school boy.
My father is wise.

I have come from a privileged background.
I have had everything made available to me.
My parents are still married.
I have had Shakespeare and Beckett

On the bookshelves all my life.
My parents are university educated.
I have been overseas.
I am an only daughter with three younger brothers.
Somehow, my brothers were left behind in class.
I have not had to share a bedroom.
I was private school educated.
I have always been surrounded by

What my father considers art.
I never have gone cold or hungry.
I have not had to provide for my family.
I have had a job since I was thirteen.
I have seen my mother in hospital.
I have seen my mother in a divisional van.
I have seen my father’s paintings on walls in public places.
I have seen my father struggle with disability.
I am father’s temper and my mother’s poison.

Philosophical Insights...

The Arts and the Creation of the Mind.
Elliot W. Eisner. Language Arts, Vol 80 No. 5. May 2003

I graduated from a creative writing major three years ago, whereupon I entered into a world beyond literature appreciation, a world that did not care for adventuring through twisted metaphor, a world of people who think it odd to liken the world to something you can not touch. I am constantly reminded that few people appreciate poetry and creative writing while some are baffled as to how it is done. I am baffled by both. I write because I am here. I write because my mind does not let me do otherwise. Sometimes I fall back in horror at the suggestion that writing is just play, it’s easy. I am appalled but have to wonder all the same: do I write because it is easy? I do not have to deal with numbers, or confronting conversation wrestling with others’ fiery opinions. I avoid it all. Am I a cop-out, a wimp? Have I extracted myself from society because I have not the tools to contribute?

No.

Eliot Eisner’s theories on how the brain is apprenticed into the mind, dispels any doubts I may have had. In his article, “The Arts and the Creation of Mind”, Eisner argues for a more widespread inclusion of the arts in schools on the grounds that through the Arts, students learn to transform their brains into minds and harness a deeper consciousness. Eisner discusses the way in which experiences and the recall of experiences through language play an important role in the construction of our consciousness. As an English teacher, I am primarily interested in the language form writing as a means of representing recollected or imagined experiences. I believe the arts, particularly writing in my case, is invaluable in the shaping of one’s mind.

Eisner explains how we too often encourage our students to learn a tree is “green”; he suggests students need to employ more perceptual exploration to further the mind. Through the arts, the student has the opportunity to explore the individual qualitative character of the tree to discover an artistic realization that it is fact closer to “greenish” than “green”. I hope to encourage “greenish” in my teaching practice.

Eight Different Multiple Intelligences

My Intelligence+s

Let me apply myself to Dr. Howard Gardner’s theory of the eight different intelligences, or it to me.

How smart am I?

I never really had the courage to ask anyone, let alone endure a rudimentary test set by someone who has never met me or, worse still, be judged simply and conclusively by a computer program. After learning of the theory of multiple intelligences, the IQ testing system does seem totally inadequate as a way of judging my intelligence. Can I be compared to another fairly by applying the same approach and set of questions?

Dr. Gardner’s theory intrigues me. It explains so much and yet leaves a little undone. I have looked around me to discover in my family of only six, we each have different intelligences. If we were a class, I wonder how a teacher would appeal to each of our different intelligences, each requiring a slightly different teaching approach in order to stimulate effective learning. How, in a forty-minute class of twenty students, can a teacher provide a child with the “opportunity to learn in ways harmonious with their unique minds (ARMSTRONG, THOMAS)”? It seems entirely super-human and far too much to ask of a mere mortal.

In collecting experiences for this assignment, I ran over memories of my own education; perhaps my teachers did in fact possess super-human traits. I actually recall many instances when the teacher was able to accommodate for students’ varying intelligences and therefore needs, by leaving tasks open to interpretation, whereby the student could decide on their preferred presentation of an assessment task. In primary school I was required to present a report on an Australian Explorer. The method of presentation was open to interpretation and as a result I looked for a way out. Projects scared me, long boring reports scared me; I was never any good at them but without strict instruction I was free to set my own task based on my strengths, not my weaknesses.

As I remember, information for this project was only found in large books with too many words and not enough pictures or dramatic stories. Rather than a standard written report that drudged through all the significant events in Henry Lawson’s life, I creatively constructed and carefully illustrated Henry Lawson’s (hypothetical) Antarctic Expedition Journal based on only the interesting bits I cared for in the information I found and my own fancy for story telling. Having analysed this fifteen years later, I realise the task made the most of the information I had and it made the most of my particular intelligence+s.

As a teacher I will need to be aware of my students’ varying intelligences in order to provide a stimulating learning and teaching experience. Knowledge and understanding of their intelligences will only come with a finely tuned knowledge of my own intelligence+s and therefore my strengths and weaknesses as a learner and as a teacher. I need to know my strengths and weaknesses:

We are all good at something.
My father tells me
I am a writer.
He is a writer.
We like words and
Where they take us.

I am quiet.
Rarely say a thing.
Words on a page
Allow me to
Divulge, indulge.
Meander.
















Dr. Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences alleviates any anxieties I had about the awful question, “how smart am I?” My answer now seems far more applicable to the real world than a number. I am primarily self-smart, quite picture-smart and word-smart, and I like to think I am nature-smart. I understand now and graciously accept that I have a limited logical-mathematical intelligence.