I particularly responded to Linda’s ideas because right now I feel as if I am a kid teaching
kids. I know right from wrong well enough, but that does not mean that I do the right thing
all of the time. On Friday, I cursed while talking to a student, and I don’t know if I have lost or
gained ground with him (maybe a little of both). I wonder if I have the right to say to kids,
“Hey, listen to me because I am your teacher, and I will teach you right from wrong.” Who
am I to assume that position? I am probably more confused than most of my students.
I am having a lot of doubts about teaching lately. I am unsure as to whether this is for me.
However, I have decided not to make any decisions about the future until after the semester
is over.
Journal Entry 2: Where do teachers begin?
When I began reading Herbert Kohl’sI Won’t Learn From You, I did not understand what
“willed not learning” meant. I had read Kohl in the past, but I was unable to relate to what he
was saying about the way certain students felt about school. It was not until recently that I
began to understand the implications of his ideas.
When Kohl talks about students who choose not to learn because of their life experience
or experiences in school with stereotypical, racist, or chauvinist curriculum and materials,
he is taking the blame for failure off of the students. He makes it the teacher’s job to find so-
lutions. I never really thought much about this before. As a high school and college student, I
believed people didn’t learn because they had a lower ability level or because they gave in
to peer pressure; it never was and probably still is not cool to be too smart.
Recently I came face-to-face with an example of willed not learning. I met a young man in
one of the classes I was observing who did nothing all period long, day in and day out. He
was not motivated by anything related to school or school work. The only thing that inter-
ested him was dramatic performances. He was eager to play any character, eager to be
someone he was not, even if only for a moment. It was very difficult for me to understand
how he could be so unmotivated and lifeless one moment and eager to perform the next.
After observing him for a while, I noticed that this boy was extremely intelligent. When we
could get him to take the tests, he easily got better test grades than those who had partici-
pated and studied. I asked some of his other teachers about him and found out that he did
nothing in any of his classes, but they also thought he was very intelligent. One teacher told
me that he had been through some kind of terrible tragedy more than a year before and that
he had become unresponsive as a result. I could not understand why none of them had both-
ered to find out what the problem was and why no one was attempting to break through his
wall. I tried to reach out to him the best way that I could. Although he was not my student, I
remarked on how intelligent he was and told him he could do anything he tried, but that he
had to try first. I did not accept blank test sheets when he handed them in. I gave them back
to him and told him to make educated guesses. I could not change his life, but I tried to
change his experiences for a few moments at a time.
The questions I am left with for Kohl are “How does a teacher find out why a student has
chosen not to learn?” and “Where do we, as teachers, begin?” I don’t know if this young
man’s case would be considered “willed not learning” in Kohl’s eyes because his problem is
not with the curriculum or the materials, but with himself and his reality. Maybe he feels as if
he has been through enough and cannot deal with the trivialities of the day-to-day school
routine. Maybe he feels alone, so he has turned off completely. I do not know where the root
of the problem lies; I only know that I would never allow a student to choose to fail without
doing everything in my ability to bring him or her back.
STRUGGLE 259