Donna ended our email interview with some further thoughts for Yale students interested in education, and she was also kind enough to reach back out with a second, deeply thoughtful message to Yale students in education, both copied below.
Additional advice for Yale Education Studies Students (going into teaching)
- Keep reading. Keep exploring. Keep learning. However, don’t feel compelled to implement every bit of knowledge you pick up. I can’t tell you how many workshops and seminars I’ve attended because some administrator or colleague read a book about the “next big thing” in education. Keeping up-to-date in any field is a must. However, you need to figure out what pedagogical practices are effective and authentic to your teaching.
- Learn to appreciate and respect silence. The first moment of my teaching where I asked a question and no one responded…let’s just say that the silence was deafening. It will take practice to be able to sit in that moment and not feel compelled to fill that space. Don’t assume you asked a horrible, unanswerable, or foolish question (though you will certainly ask some of those). Remember that students need time to do their own thinking. Create an environment that allows them to have the courage to respond in ways that will surprise you.”
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Recognize who you might be to students. Each semester on the first day of class when we do introductions inevitably a student will ask me where I’m from and where I went to college. When they learn that I went to Yale, I often get some curious looks and occasionally the “that’s a good school” response. One semester, after class a student approached me and asked, ”If you went to Yale, why do you teach here?” So I confess that instinctively this led to a moment of self-doubt and a crisis of self-confidence—perhaps that’s human instinct. But as she continued, I realized that the self-doubt was hers in thinking that community college students like her were not deserving of such faculty.
It’s easy to see ourselves (at least from our misguided notions of their perceptions) as the red pen that tells them when they’re incorrect and points out their flaws/inadequacies. Our students’ lives are complex. I certainly don’t believe that I am the most important person in their world; they have friends, family, co-workers, etc. I’m just the random person who gives them grades. But when they are lacking those support systems, we must also remember that sometimes we are the person who gives them the small moment of connection that carries them through.
- We are not their saviors but extending empathy should be part of our job. It’s easy to say the paper is due when it is due, to follow the rules of the syllabus with no exceptions, to only deal with them as students but what is more important is to view students as full human beings who need not only learning but compassion. We should behave during each class and when we encounter students on campus as if all of our interactions with them are significant.
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Sometimes you have to wait for the ah ha moment. We all love instant gratification. It’s amazing when we can watch students have the Eureka moment when things click and make sense. Getting the facts and general ideas may happen in a class period. But sometimes getting to that deeper learning, synthesis, and critical thinking takes more time. Some of my favorite teaching moments are when students figure out what I’m doing: when they remark, “Oh so that’s why you talked about this that or the other a few weeks ago.” One can lecture endlessly about Thomas Jefferson & the Declaration of Independence and try to fit in all the other problematic aspects of his life and work (owning slaves, his ideas about Blacks in America as detailed in the Notes on the State of Virginia, his critique of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry, etc.) and then expound upon how Americans respond to the ideas of the Declaration when they are applied to women’s rights and the conflict in Vietnam. But it’s more useful to let students struggle through the quagmire of these conflicting notions to examine and come to terms with the complexity of individuals and ideas.
I like to keep in mind the lines from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself, 47”
I am the teacher of athletes,
He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own,
He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.
It is a disservice to our students as scholars and human beings to make them forever dependent upon others to acquire knowledge. True education should be about helping them gain critical thinking and analysis skills to enable them to continue their development, to learn on their own, to be gain the awareness to know how and when to seek reliable data when they don’t know something so that they have the courage, information, and wherewithal to stand up for what they believe.”