Writing community and the teacher's roles

Teachers have very high social status in China, and also in many other eastern countries. Everyone respects teachers, not only in schools, but also in the society. Many girls wish to be teachers for teaching is a well paid, well respected and a very stable job, plus, this profession may possibly bring them a good husband – men always want to marry a woman with over three months’ vacation each year. And the men, themselves, also enjoy the stableness, good salary and the power in the classroom this job may bring them.

In the classroom, teachers are regarded as the absolute authorities, who are supposed to be the major source of the knowledge. Teachers need to know everything, and are supposed to be able to answer all the students’ questions; otherwise, they are not doing the job and will lose face in front of their students.

According to whole language philosophy and Boice’s article, teachers need to reexamine their roles in the classroom; they need to readjust themselves to be not only facilitators, but also co-learners. Frankly speaking, I was more fascinated by this idea that teachers could, and should learn together with their students than I was relieved to comfort myself that teachers do not need to know everything.

However, at the same time, I realized that we, as writing teachers, seldom write, or say, seldom write together with our students, not to mention we share our writings with them. Why wouldn’t teachers share with students their own writings? On the one hand, teachers should be superior than their students, and reading their own writings out aloud to the whole class might be thought of as showing off in front of a group of lower-leveled learners; on the other hand, probably due to the fear, and the embarrassment, even the teachers wouldn’t have sufficient confidence and courage to share their articles.

After I came to the U.S., I was surprised to find that not only we were often asked to write, and share with our peers, the classroom teachers would now and then share with us their writings, even though it was just an improvised paragraph she finished while we were writing. I was amazed not only by how good the improvised article was, but also by the teacher’s willingness to merge into us students as a writing community. I felt we were connected and our distance was suddenly shortened.

Um…I am thinking of overcoming my own fear and sharing one or two pieces of my own writings with my future students. Hopefully I won’t be too nervous or embarrassed to have my voice trembled…