why who how where when what

Like most teachers, I was at work yesterday setting up for the start of another year. In the photocopy room I found myself discussing courses with a colleague. She asked me about my 3U English class this semester: was I starting with the novel, the short story unit, the obligatory Shakespeare?

I gave her the straightest and simplest answer I could (straight and simple answers are decidedly not the spécialité de la maison: Shakespeare, probably, I guess. I dunno. Truth is, I hadn't really thought much about it.

She looked around nervously, waiting for the lightning bolt. I hadn't thought about it? But the semester starts in three days! Why the hell haven't I thought about it?

Because I'm thinking about other, more important things.

Because WHAT I'm teaching on a day to day basis is the least interesting and least important aspect of my job.

Because the real sequence of questions for any serious teacher goes like this:

WHY do you teach?

WHO do you teach?

HOW do you teach?

WHERE and WHEN do you teach?

And only then, at the very end, 

WHAT do you teach?

What matters most is the intention--the WHY. A good teacher must be aware of their motivation, their goals, their inspirations, their aspirations. A good teacher must understand themselves and their relationship to their profession and their students if they are to be effective. Kids can smell insincerity. Adults going through the motions at the front of the room teach kids nothing except to go through the motions themselves. Adults who love what they do, love learning, love sharing--they teach children to love learning too.

Next on the list is WHO. Contrary to what the stylish nonsense of standardized testing would have you believe, there are no standardized children. They each come to school with a different set of motivations, goals, triggers, passions, expertises, and challenges. In effect, they each come with their own WHY. A good teacher needs to learn WHO is in the class in order to teach each student the way they most want to be taught--as much as is reasonably possible within the increasingly narrow confines of budget, time, and sanity.

Which brings us to HOW. You know what you're doing in the room. You know who else is in the room with you. How are you going to get through to them? There are no "guaranteed success" teaching tips or tricks. There is no one textbook, or activity, or strategy, that works for every kid, every time. So the good teacher, once aware of WHO is in their care and WHY that child wants to learn (or not learn!), has to grapple on a daily basis with HOW to bring a diverse group of children each to a place of receptivity. This, really, is the majority of the job for most front-line teachers on a day-to-day basis: how to make the subject matter at hand sensible and appealing to the children in our care. This is the art that elevates the craft.

WHERE and WHEN are really just a subset of HOW. Children cannot learn effectively in hostile or uncomfortable environments. Part of the job of a teacher--and here we must also include the surrounding host of administrators, architects, cafeteria staff, government funding models, community support groups, soup kitchens, urban planners, furniture manufacturers, and child and family welfare agencies, among others--is to create an environment where children feel safe, comfortable, and engaged. Every day teachers struggle to help students who have not slept properly, not eaten, never been read to at home, are worried about money or their personal safety or that of their family members, worried about whether the heat will still be on when they get home from school, worried about whose couch they'll crash on tonight. Schools run breakfast clubs, walk in closets, drug addiction counselling programs, and a host of other programs designed to make the WHERE and the WHEN of learning possible and palatable. 

The last question, the WHAT question, certainly bears consideration in the grand scheme of education. WHAT equals CONTENT, after all--could there be anything more important than that? Sure, there are vital philosophical and sociological issues at stake in curriculum development: what we choose to teach, and what (more importantly) we neglect to teach are societally formative decisions. If our schools do not produce the next generation of physicists, cabinet makers, accountants or soccer coaches, who will do these jobs? Should our schools teach healthy active living at the expense of literacy? Advanced mathematics at the expense of poetry appreciation, ethics, or small engine repair? If we ignore Black History Month or celebrate Diwali in our classrooms, have we made the world a better or worse place? What if there are no woman novelists on the reading list? At first sniff, the WHAT question appears to be the most important one.

However, those decisions are largely out of the hands of front-line teachers; the big framework type decisions are entrusted (rightly or wrongly) to policy mandarins at Queen's Park several telegraph relays removed from the classroom. Most teachers have little part in curriculum design, even though many would have excellent insights. Most curriculum designers have no part in day-to-day classroom education, even though many would probably find it enlightening. As a consequence, the general outline of WHAT I teach is prepackaged and piped to me in a PDF file: the learning outcomes for my courses are not up for discussion.

This disconnect does not make classroom teachers powerless; it certainly does not absolve us from thinking about WHAT. Nowhere in the English 3U document does it say we have to teach Shakespeare, or even read a novel. So when I do either of those things with my class, I should have good reasons besides "that's what my English teacher made me do in Grade 11, a millenium ago." Funny thing is, though, the rationale for choosing a text, an activity, an assignment, never comes from the WHAT. It comes from the WHY, the WHO, the HOW and WHERE of education.