To High School and Back: Some Notes on a Teacher Exchange

Abstract

LAST YEAR I ARRANGED a teacher exchange between me and one of the English teachers in a local high school. The swap was fairly simple: during the fall semester Don Rutten, the high school teacher, was to take my freshman composition course at the University of North Dakota and help me team-teach our Methods and Materials course; and I was to take over two of his classes at Central High School, a tenth-grade composition class and an English literature course for juniors and seniors. I was going there in order to learn, from the inside, what it was like, but I had a rough idea of what to expect. Through my work with English Education I was prepared, at least partially, for the culture shock. What I was not prepared for, as it turned out, was something else, something I discovered, not about teaching in high school, but about teaching in college. And that's what I'd like to tell you about. Let me be more specific. I was leading a double life. Every afternoon, for eighteen weeks, I drove across town to Central High School where, in Room 103, I struggled to teach something about literature and composition to some fifty teenagers. Every morning I was at the university, on my own turf, doing the things that I presumably already knew how to do. One of those things was teaching a course called Introduction to Fiction, a fairly typical sophomore survey course for non-English majors. There were about thirty students, most of them pretty bright but a little awkward when they talked about literature. It was my job to keep them reading and writing and to get them talking about the readings. I had done it all before. Even the classroom was familiar: good old Merrifield 114, with its bolted-down desks, pastel walls, and pleasant view of the flowerbeds out front. Whereas Central High School seemed to pose some mysteries and raise my anxiety level, Introduction to Fiction seemed easy, safe as my own backyard. I should have know-n better, for I had been teaching long enough to know that good teaching is never easy-at least not for me. Had I not gone to Central High School-had I not been given the opportunity to look at my college teaching from a special vantage point, comparing and contrasting it to what I was doing in high school-I might have been able to preserve the illusion that what was familiar was