Karyn Smith on Teaching

Detail illustration of a woman teaching geometry, circa 1309-1316.

Graphic courtesy of the British Library. Public domain image.

Karyn Smith had been teaching English at Housatonic Community Community College for about two years when she was asked by Journalism Program Adviser Steve Mark to take over the Publications course.

I was introduced to her one day during a planning conference in Mark's office. We already knew we would be working together the following semester, both of us in our own ways embarking on a voyage into new territories.

Months later, as Smith was preparing to go on maternity leave, we sat on a sunny Sunday afternoon in a booth at Café Atlantique in Milford, Conn. We were at the other end of our journey together; she had gone from being a stranger to a friend and mentor.

As we drank tea together, I interviewed Smith about her experiences, her teaching philosophy, and her thoughts on the state of education today.

The following are some excerpts from that conversation:

Bisceglia: When did you decide you wanted to teach?

Smith: When I was a kid. I always wanted to be a teacher. In high school I was accused of being a ‘teacher’s pet’ by telling the teachers I wanted to teach. Conveniently enough, I always wanted to teach whatever class I was taking at the time. So when I was in junior high, I wanted to be a junior high teacher. When I was in high school, I wanted to teach that. And so on.

I did go away from it [teaching] for a while in college. I worked for Americorps for a year, where I was working as an elementary school volunteer. And then I interviewed drug users about their risk-taking behaviors for three years. I wanted to be an experimental psychologist, but that job made me decide, ‘No, that’s not what I want to do.’

Then I got into [the University of] New Mexico, and they gave me the teaching assistant position.

Bisceglia: What was it that you liked about being a teacher?

Smith: My mom was a teacher! When I was in high school and college, I quickly realized that she was maybe not quite the best teacher.

Bisceglia: Why do you say that?

Smith: She taught the move. I remember one summer – I think this was the moment that cemented it for me. The summer after I graduated from college, she called me up and said, ‘They’re changing the curriculum.’ Now, she had been teaching for a number of years at that point – maybe 30 years at least, and she had all of her systems down.

As a teacher now, I understand that more. Once you get all of your systems down, when someone throws a new book at you, that can be daunting and not necessarily something you want to embrace. So they wanted to make the students read some new books. One of them was ‘Angela’s Ashes.’ I don’t remember what the others were, but I know they were popular titles at the time.

She called me up and said, ‘I know you’ve read these books.’ And I had read ‘Angela’s Ashes,’ and one or two of the others. She said, ‘Do you think you could send me summaries of them? I want to read Danielle Steel over the summer. I don’t want to read ‘Angela’s Ashes.’’ And I died inside at that point.

She called me up a few weeks later, and she said, ‘Don’t worry about getting me the notes. I found out there are movies on all of these books, so I’m just going to show the movies.’

That said, my mom made me want her job. For years, we would get Christmas cards from former students – students she had had in 1981, into the 90’s. She really seemed to develop relationships with her students. She worked as an adviser part of the time. There was a lot that I know she really loved about teaching and she loved about working with her students….

My teachers were always my heroes. I hate that phrase. I don’t want to be anybody’s hero; I want to teach them to write a paragraph. But my teachers changed my life. My teachers helped me see what it was possible for me to do. I never had a lot of confidence – I was very shy. When I look back and think about the things that made me who I am, I have a collection of moments where teachers singled me out.

Bisceglia: When you encounter behavioral problems or students not doing their work, of course you want to try different things. But have you ever come across a situation in which you had to say, ‘There is nothing more I can do’?

Smith: Yes and no. There are times with students where I have to let go. I can’t follow all of my students home, sit down with them and say, ‘Now would be a great time to read,’ or, ‘Pay attention to these quotes right here.’

I try to offer various incentives. Extra credit tends to be a dirty phrase, but I will offer the type of extra credit that rewards students for doing things like using e-tutoring. It’s good to get other people to read your essays, send them over to e-tutoring and here’s a little extra credit. Not enough to make you pass or fail the class, but enough that if you are going to pass the class, maybe you’ll change your B -  to a B.

…In any class, there’s going to be a point at which you can reach all of these students, and then there’s going to be a couple who you’re not going to reach….

But I do think as a teacher I do need to learn to let go more…there’s this myth that the teacher’s responsible for all of the learning that takes place in the room. This myth is really troubling to me, because I think that my job as a teacher is to help you figure out how you can learn and how you can keep learning – to create opportunities for you to learn. But I’m not there to just dump knowledge on you.

Students who have that myth sometimes think that because I don’t give them a series of PowerPoints, because I’m asking them to think for themselves, and they’re having trouble thinking for themselves, and they’re experiencing that failure….Instead of seeing that as a productive experience, they see that as a negative teaching experience, because in their other class that they really enjoyed, all they had to do was remember the definitions, or follow the pattern, or something like that.

There are merits to that, too. I do have assignments where I do give definitions, and I talk about learning the rules in order to effectively break the rules.

Bisceglia: Going back to that myth about teachers being responsible for all the learning…how much do you think, from what you can tell, there is a difference between how learning happens in elementary and high school, and how it happens in college?

Smith: I think standardized testing is where a lot of that myth comes from. I firmly believe that creativity is a skill of the future. We need to be getting students ready for things that we can’t imagine yet. My husband and I – he’s also a teacher – we talk about how students will be writing in five years, in 10 years. Should we teach them how to write tweets? We’re all stuck on the essay, when nobody writes essays when they’re in the field….What I hope I would give my students the ability to do is to more creatively imagine themselves.

We’re programmed into thinking there’s always an answer, and the answer’s clear and direct, because I can bubble in answers to everything else. Years and years and years and years of research on standardized tests tells us about all of their biases – all of their harmful effects. And yet when people start talking reform – and by people I mean people in charge who aren’t teachers – they talk about testing. They talk about numbers. They talk about things we can measure.

I can measure how many fragmented sentences my students write at the beginning of the semester versus at the end of the semester, sure. But why?

Bisceglia: At the same time, though, there do have to be some kinds of measurements involved.

Smith: It’s true. That’s the other side of the coin. I don’t want to argue against teacher accountability, because teachers who say, ‘If you didn’t learn, it’s entirely your fault,’ that’s not the right approach either. It’s a two-way street.

When my students are failing, or my students are doing so well, I do need to ask myself: what can I change? What can I do differently? And they need to ask themselves the same questions.

I often wish the way we could measure students, especially at the college level, would be to keep track of students. Maybe five years down the road we’d ask them, ‘What information from your education are you still using now?’

They might not remember teacher’s names. They might not remember textbooks. But they might remember, ‘Well, there was this one day where this happened, and I always draw on that day in my career right now.’ I know I have a handful of memories like that from my college education.

I majored in psychology, which was a lot of standardized testing. I can’t tell you the parts of the brain anymore. I knew all the parts of the brain at one point. But I know how to understand complicated information. That was because of the complicated classes I took. I know I could sit down and read a book and start piecing it together – it would take me some time, but I could do it. I don’t need to go find that professor to teach me neuropsychology again.

Bisceglia: So you learned how to learn.

Smith: That’s really what I want my students to be able to do. To learn how to learn. I don’t know how on Earth that could even be measured.

Bisceglia: What do you think teaching the Publications class this semester has taught you about teaching?

Smith: I’m still processing so much of it. One thing I really loved was that the students had a real audience. You are going to take this piece of paper, and you are going to hand it to other people. Somebody else is going to read what you wrote – not just your teacher. I’m trying to think about how I can bring that into my other classes.

Having that buy-in. One of my favorite classes was that day we did the Horizons marketing day, and all those groups of three came up with different ideas about how to market the paper. Even the group that wanted to spend a lot of time talking about “Horizons sucks” was still invested in the idea that ‘we should be this, we should be that.’

Bisceglia: Trying to improve it.

Smith: They had a stake in it. You have this physical artifact, and they’re stakeholders in that artifact. That is just so cool.

And then there are the multiple levels. There’s me, and there’s you, and there’s Dave as the editor-in-chief, and Karen, the managing editor who would come in sometimes. Then there were other editors who’d come back sometimes. Plus the editors in Pub 2, and the staff writers and the senior staff writers....

It’s a lot to learn to manage all of that. But on the days when it worked really well, you could see the Pub 2 students, when you would put them in charge of a group, they would kind of get into it. They would have authority and experience. They could be a little bit of a guide.

Thinking about the transferability of skills: students love to say all the time, ‘This class doesn’t pertain to what I want to do,’ instead of asking themselves about how it might pertain. If I want them to ask that question, I have to ask that question. I think having them communicate with their sources, just getting them to talk to people. You’re going to have to talk to people for the rest of your life, no matter what you want to do. Being accountable for deadlines and reading instructions. That’s what you get in any class, but I think that deadlines in other classes have a little more permeability. But in the Publications class, if you have a deadline and you don’t have your work done, you’re not in the paper. That’s it.

Bisceglia: So you see the result of your effort - or lack thereof.

Smith: Right, and I think that is transferable. If I apply for a job, and I don’t read all the instructions about how to apply for that job, or I don’t meet that deadline, I don’t get that job. If I don’t know how to talk to people, I don’t get through the interview process, or I’m not successful when I do get the job.