The Elephant, the Diva, the Foot Fetishist, and the Teacher Hero*

Abstract

It is difficult to capture the life of a classroom. Schools usually measure the performance of students and teachers alike through numbers, quantifying students’ attendance and test scores. But what of each individual student’s experience, their unique understanding and life concerns in and out of school? Building on the work of Vivian Paley, who encouraged teachers to become students of their students, John S. O’Connor tries to understand each of his students as individuals, even though he, like many high school teachers, has a “student load” of 125 students, each with their own unique intelligences and their own set of pressing personal concerns. Focusing primarily on a particularly “difficult” classroom, dominated by students with exceptional circumstances, O’Connor tries to understand the story of the unfolding classroom without reducing students to easy labels and without reducing himself to the common teacher stereotypes of teacher-hero or -martyr. This search, he argues, is as impossible as it is necessary.