My first job: Julia Bornstein

 

My First Job: Those Who Can Do, Can’t Necessarily Teach

October 28, 2013

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My first jobs—beyond babysitting—were based on the assumption that knowing how to do something meant knowing how to teach it. I would take something I knew well and enjoyed, and I’d try to teach it to younger kids.

In sixth grade, my best friend Brooke and I offered up a cooking class for our school’s silent auction. With visions of launching a cooking class empire, we designed, but never pulled the trigger on, embroidered aprons. An unsuspecting mother of a first grader gathered a group of her daughter’s friends, and we proceeded to bake cookies and soft pretzels with them. By little kid standards, it seemed a success. We covered Brooke’s kitchen with flour and the kids left wired on sugar, but rather than actually teaching them anything, we really just led them through the process of mixing ingredients. Needless to say, we didn’t have any return customers.
My first real job came from a similar well-meaning though misguided impulse, when I was a counselor at my high school’s Harvard-Westlake’s ‘Summer Enrichment Program’ – a four week camp and summer school for fifth and sixth graders, most from inner-city LA. The kids took classes in the morning and played sports and went swimming in the afternoon. I taught swimming and then went with them from the pool to the gym for volleyball, then outside for flag football.
Not being much of an athlete myself, I empathized with the kids who weren’t so interested in another hour playing volleyball. (My serve wasn’t going to put my on the national team anytime soon). What I did love was art class, and after talking to many of the kids, realized a good number hadn’t taken art in school. So I figured, why not try that here?
So I went to the head of the program and asked that the next summer include an art class in the rotation, without thinking out who exactly would teach the class. They assumed I’d asked to teach it myself, so I went with it, thinking how hard could it possibly be to teach—didn’t it just entail sharing my love of art and passing out paintbrushes? The school gave me access to a beautiful art studio with plenty of space, paint, and paper.
I compiled a “lesson plan” of my favorite art/art history projects. But other than my experience on the receiving end of teaching, I knew absolutely nothing about how to actually do it: how to control a room, capture students’ attention, keep them engaged, and prevent them from wreaking total havoc. The kids were just a few years younger than I, some were just as tall, and most were convinced that this 15-year-old didn’t exactly deserve their undivided attention. More paint ended up off the paper than on it, and I ended the day in tears, running to my mom’s car, wondering how I could possibly return to the classroom the next day.
I did return, and it all turned out for the best. I ended up teaching the art class for two subsequent summers, the final summer added an improv dance/acting class, which was a lot of fun for both me and the students.
What happened? I went begging to my favorite art teachers, asking them not about their best tools and projects, but how they commanded attention. I copied how they started off in front of the room, then went from student to student. And I learned tips from my mom, who spent her early 20s teaching rowdy high-schoolers. I came to understand the importance of really listening to the students, respecting everyone's work, appreciating their effort more than the finished product, and finding something to praise in every project.
I stood up straight and tried to act more authoritative than my teenaged self. It worked, pretty much. But the most powerful thing anyone learned was my realization that teaching is such an art -- a skill so much bigger than simple mastery of a topic.
My appreciation for the art of teaching was reinforced earlier this month at NBC’s Education Nation conference, which focuses on the future of education. No matter what technological innovations are introduced, there was no debating the fact that nothing is more powerful than a good teacher. And there’s nothing more false than that old cliche-- in fact, knowing how to do, is no guarantee you’ll know how to teach.

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