Portland Magazine
Alumni
Education
September 23, 2020
John Stewart ’06 teaches ninth grade English and junior-level advanced placement (AP) language and serves as chair of the English department at Clackamas High School in Clackamas, OR. His 15-year career as a teacher has been marked by many challenges and rewards, but the closure of Oregon schools due to the COVID-19 outbreak has presented a unique set of challenges and impressions. We spoke to John shortly before the end of the spring 2020 semester.
I miss my kids a lot. I decided years ago that I did not want to go into administration because I wanted to be around kids. I want to spend nine months getting to know a group of kids and their strengths and weaknesses and I love that, it’s why I wanted to become a teacher, so losing that has been super challenging for me. A good part of my identity is my profession, the pride and joy I take from being in a classroom teaching. It has been weird not having that. I was more of a provider of information and less of a mentor. It was very hard to recreate the same kind of role and relationship and setting professionally that I really take a lot of pride in. My classroom’s a great place, I love it! I feel just as much at home in my classroom as I do at home, and a lot of my kids feel as much at home in my class as they do at home. Some even more. So, to lose that space was tough.
But it was interesting; some kids loved not being at school. They much prefer being at home, in the anonymity of their bedroom or not being around classmates. I have this one freshman, he’s an awesome writer, the kid is super bright but very socially leery, he’s got this sarcastic wit that you would imagine a disgruntled 79-year-old would have, and he was just all about it. He was three times more prolific than he was during the regular school year.
I had my students do a dystopian unit after reading some dystopian pieces which obviously relate to our current situation. They had to create their own dystopia, and this student created this incredibly vibrant world, full of media propaganda and fascism hidden as democracy. He’s obviously very aware, but none of that would have come out if he had not had the kind of safe, comfortable space where he’s able to produce at home.
For every kid that’s thriving there’s a group of kids who are really struggling because they escape home by going to school. I also had kids who struggle with anxiety, those kids did worse. They need the continual interaction with teachers, positive reinforcement, the structure that a daily schedule provides, because they don’t have to think about it—“at 10 I need to be going to my second period class”—it just happens.
We need to think so carefully about different learning styles. Susan Kane’s book Quiet, for instance, is instrumental in understanding the value of introverts and how society values extroversion even if there’s no value there. I have these conversations with my colleagues all the time. Sometimes, these introverted kids, it’s not that they’re not learning, they’re thinking. Even in group projects I intentionally always give some individual work time because some of my kids will do their best work on their own. Some of these students have done well without distractions or the social stress or the pressure to be more extroverted than they are, but also sometimes they don’t communicate comfortably with teachers. They’ll email me more or leave notes on their Google assignments. They communicate with me in a way that’s more comfortable to their learning style.
University of Portland
5000 N. Willamette Blvd.,
Portland, Oregon 97203-5798
503.943.8000
This website uses cookies to track information for analytics purposes. You can view the full University of Portland privacy policy for more information.
