Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach

JOIN THE CONVERSATION—DAWN’S JOURNEY

Questions to Consider:

1. Which of Dawn’s journal entries comes closest to addressing your concerns as you pre-
   pare to student teach or become a beginning teacher? Explain.


2. Dawn appears to arrive at a new level of understanding of material she read in her
   teacher education program as she teaches and reflects on her experiences in the class-
   room. Have you found the articles and books you have read about teaching useful? Ex-
   plain. What do you think of Dawn’s discoveries?


3. In your experience, is keeping a journal such as this one useful to you as an individ-
   ual? Explain.
   4.Write a letter to Dawn responding to her experiences and discussing your own.

SECTION C: RECOMMENDATIONS FOR NEW TEACHERS

As a teacher you will attend many graduations and hear a number of speeches offering ad-
vice or challenging the audience to go off and remake the world. Perhaps the most famous
speech of this kind is by a character named Polonius in William Shakespeare’sHamlet.
Polonius sends his son off to study at the university with the phrase, “To thy own self be
true.” Few people realize when they quote the speech that Polonius was a bit of a buffoon
and Shakespeare was poking fun at his pomposity. Realizing the risks involved in final words
of advice, Stephanie Hunte (whom you met in chap. 2), Michael Pezone (chap. 1), and I want
to offer some parting thoughts to young teachers as they voyage out into the “real” world.

FIG. 10.1 Polonius’s advice to Laertes.
By William Shakespeare,Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3

Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,

Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;

But do not dull thy palm with entertainment

Of each new-hatch’d, unfledged comrade. Beware

Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,

Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;

Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,

But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;

For the apparel oft proclaims the man,

And they in France of the best rank and station

Are of a most select and generous chief in that.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;

For loan oft loses both itself and friend,

And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

This above all: to thine ownself be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

STRUGGLE 263