Teaching Today — Part Passion, Part Selling

A First-Year Teacher Contends with Apathy, Attitude, and Adolescence . . . Often Successfully

by Cynthia K. Buccini

It’s sixth period at Elk Grove High School, one o’clock in the afternoon, and first-year English teacher Ryan Asmussen is exploring the finer points of Henry IV, Part One, with his senior Shakespeare class. It’s the only time of day Asmussen sheds his black suit jacket and sits at a metal desk among the students.

“The Percys are aggrieved over the fact that they helped Henry iv become king of England. They’re not getting anything in return; promises are not being kept,” says Asmussen (MET’02, SED’03). “What are those promises?”

Before he finishes the question, a student answers, “Money and land.”

“Money and land,” Asmussen repeats. “So that begs the question: is this about Henry not being the rightful heir to the throne, as they say it is, and the divine right of kings, or is it more about — what?”

“Greed,” another student quickly says.

“Greed, you got it,” Asmussen continues without pause. “It’s a power grab, a land grab. Is Hotspur really fighting for honor and country and God?”

“No,” the student says, “they’re fighting for themselves.” The discussion is much like the give-and-take of a college seminar, and Asmussen, who’s passionate about great literature, is in his element.

He works harder to draw out his senior Advanced Placement English students. Standing before a horseshoe configuration of desks, his back to the chalkboard, Asmussen tries to engage them in a discussion of Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Signs and Symbols.”

“How does the elderly couple feel in their American world?” he asks. Seven long seconds pass. Asmussen waits. “Do they seem very sophisticated — there’s a leading question — intelligent, on the go, and with it?” There are a few tentative responses. “No,” he says. “They’re simple people, and they’re somewhat adrift in this new America, right?”

Afterwards, he’s dispirited. The day before, he’d chided the same students for their reticence. “I wasn’t harsh, but I said, ‘What’s going on, guys? We need to be making connections and thinking here,” he recalls, rapidly snapping his fingers.

It’s a typical week for Asmussen, one of a legion of public school teachers who started their careers in the fall of 2003. (There were 349,466 new public school teachers in the 1999–2000 school year, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Department of Education.) Occasionally, he feels as though he’s connected with his students, that some point has sunk in, but often he struggles to hold their attention. “The simple truth of the matter is that this a demanding job, because we’re trying to get students hooked on concepts and on ideas that they are not particularly interested in,” he says. “And how much do you blame yourself? Could I have made the lesson more interesting? Could I have planned it more convincingly? You can really toss and turn about this stuff, especially if you’re a first-year teacher.”

	Photographs by Cynthia K. Buccini

Other novice teachers likely lose sleep over the same questions. If the statistics hold true, nearly a third of them will quit after three years and almost half will leave the field after five, according to Richard Ingersoll, an associate professor of education and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the 2003 study “Is There Really a Teacher Shortage?” Nearly half of those who left teaching cited job dissatisfaction or the desire to pursue a better job or another career, according to the study. Those who were dissatisfied pointed to low salaries, lack of support from the school administration, student discipline problems, little influence over decision-making, and poor student motivation.

Asmussen is happy to be teaching at Elk Grove, a school of just under 2,000 students in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. In 1996, it was named a Blue Ribbon School of Excellence by the U.S. Department of Education, and each year nearly 80 percent of the senior class goes on to college. But Asmussen does share one frustration with the teachers in Ingersoll’s study: poor student motivation. He becomes discouraged when students prefer to let their minds wander rather than grasp the ideas of Descartes or appreciate the art of Michelangelo. “There have been times when they’ve left the classroom,” Asmussen says, “and I’ve literally slumped in my seat. I’ve felt . . .” he ends the sentence with a gentle stabbing motion to his heart.

After the Starting Gun

For much of his life, the thirty-four-year-old Asmussen wanted a career writing fiction and poetry. He left Emerson College in Boston before finishing and held a variety of jobs, including bookstore clerk, country club janitor, and hotel night auditor. He played in a band, filled boxes with his poems and short stories, and accumulated rejection slips from literary magazines. In the 1990s, he began working at BU, mostly in administrative positions, while completing his bachelor’s degree in English at Metropolitan College.

Asmussen had been a guest lecturer at his old high school and at BU’s College of Communication and felt comfortable in front of a class. So he enrolled in the School of Education’s yearlong master of arts in teaching program, designed for liberal arts graduates who want to teach in middle school or high school. From the moment he began student teaching at Boston Latin School, he knew he’d made the right decision. “Every time I teach a class, I hear a little click in the universe,” he said at the time. “I feel like if I am meant to do something, it’s teach.” He believed that being a good teacher meant being himself — honest, firm, direct, articulate, and sensitive: “If they know you’re serious and they know you’re cool and they know you care, most students will respond. I have faith that if I play the flute, they will dance.”

Asmussen began testing this theory on August 26, 2003, his first day at Elk Grove. The day didn’t start as smoothly as he’d planned. He slept through his alarm and had to scramble to make it to school by 7:45 a.m. “I wanted to wake up, have a leisurely cup of tea, look out the window, reflect,” he says. “But no, it was like The Three Stooges.”

For Asmussen, who often compares teaching to being on stage, the day was a blur. He taught five classes — four sections of Humanities and one of Advanced Placement English — with about 120 students. “I was nervous for the first five or ten minutes, but then I felt more of an adrenaline rush,” he says. “It’s like the bell rings and you come out with the curtain.”

After introducing himself, he told his students what he expected from them, throwing in a Buddhist principle. “It’s a cyclical process: I give to you and you give back, with input, responses, and criticism about the class,” he remembers telling them. “And that extends to life, too: the more you give, the more positive you are, the more you’re going to get back. There’s a karmic cause and effect at work here.”

When he was a high school student in Newburyport, Massachusetts, Asmussen and his fellow AP classmates loved literature and threw themselves into the assigned texts. He anticipated a similar lively bunch at Elk Grove. They would read The Metamorphosis, Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice, Waiting for Godot, King Lear, Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, A Passage to India, Mrs. Dalloway, and Bartleby, the Scrivener. “You guys are my rock,” he told them that first day. “I know these texts inside and out, and I know you guys are sharp, so I’m going to be looking forward to this class every single day.” By three p.m., Asmussen was tired and a little hoarse, but happy.

It wasn’t long before he concluded that teaching was the hardest job he’d ever had. He’d been working twelve-to-fifteen-hour days, staying after school to help the drama department stage three plays, an extracurricular activity he particularly enjoyed. But by January, he was feeling more than physical fatigue. Asmussen was coming to grips with the fact that no matter how good the show, some students can’t wait for the curtain to fall. “It’s hard to make a dent, to teach someone something and have it stick,” he says. “It’s hard to deal with adolescents, who are entirely unsure of who they are, and to keep your energy level up.” The idealism of his student-teaching days hasn’t left him, he says, “it’s just sharing time with a more sobering realism.”

A Day in the Life

On a sunny day in April, Asmussen arrives at Elk Grove at 7:45 a.m. and heads for his classroom. Behind his desk, colorful prints — Picasso, Miró, Mondrian, Cézanne — crowd the wall. Taped to cabinet doors on the opposite side of the room is a Vanity Fair magazine spread featuring legendary British actors like John Gielgud and Alec Guinness and playwrights such as Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter. Three-foot-tall posters of Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane — musicians Asmussen admires — are propped against the wall below the blackboard. The artwork and photos are meant to inspire both teacher and students.

Asmussen leaves his briefcase under his desk and makes his way through the noisy halls to a soda machine to buy two bottles of water. He spies one of his Humanities students and calls out, “Are you still talking to me after yesterday’s test?” He laughs when she answers with a smile, “I’m thinking about it.”

Asmussen is the kind of teacher students like. He’s bright, articulate, and good-natured. He plays the drums, which ratchets up his cool factor, has a quick wit, and can be a bit of a ham. At his students’ request, he once read Hamlet’s soliloquy in a thick Boston accent: “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffah the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune . . .”

“They think it’s funny,” he says.

Elk Grove Principal Frank De Rosa says Asmussen has a “with-it-ness” as well as a maturity, an intelligence, and a curiosity that appeal to colleagues and students alike. “He brings a vibrance to our school,” he says. “I’ve seen him work with kids, and he is so available to them. He’s very approachable.”

On this spring day, however, more than a few seniors are peeved about the Humanities exam: it was too long; there were too many dates to remember. Asmussen handles the class with humor, authority, and a refusal to coddle the complainers. “Why do you think I gave you that exam?” he asks. “Because you’re evil,” a boy cracks, prompting laughter from his classmates. Asmussen ignores the remark. “You’re going to be taking exams like this next year,” he says. “We spent more than three weeks on the material,” he adds later. “What you needed to do was take really good notes and listen in class.”

The day goes by quickly: the first Humanities class is followed by a prep period, then AP English. After lunch there are two more Humanities sections, Shakespeare, and a stint in the reading resource room.

After the building empties, Asmussen reflects on how the year is progressing. He says he simply wasn’t prepared for how few students take an interest in the classroom, not just at Elk Grove, but at the schools where he was a guest lecturer and a student teacher. Most days he keeps the heavy green curtains closed, hoping to keep students focused on the subject matter. “They want to think about their boyfriend, or what’s outside the window, or how they’re going to do on the test in the next class, or Britney Spears, or whatever,” he says. “Very rarely do you look out and see someone really listening to what you’re trying to tell them. And that’s a real challenge, not only in terms of psychologically preparing yourself for that sort of failure to come, but mustering the energy to overcome it.”

He takes stock of his own performance as well. He thinks he mollified some of the students who were upset about the Humanities exam, but today he may have lectured too much, too quickly. “You’ve got to make it interesting for them,” he says. “The question is, how far along this line do you go? Do you make it so interesting that you lose the central importance of the subject matter in an effort to be entertaining? Or do you pull back on that and give them more of what they really need in terms of content, and risk being not so popular?” In the end, though, he has no idea how many students he’s reached over the past eight months.

The Mack Daddy of English

By year’s end, Asmussen discovers he may be making more of a connection than he thought: the seniors’ average score on the national AP English Literature test was 3.2, two-tenths of a point higher than that of last year’s class. “I don’t feel like I can take a lot of credit for that because it’s up to them,” he says. “But it’s a significant increase, and that makes me really happy.”

And although he doesn’t place much stock in them, he’s had some rave reviews on the Web site RateMyTeachers.com, where students can anonymously praise or criticize a teacher. “He’s by far the best teacher I’ve ever had for English and in high school overall. You can never sleep during his lectures,” says one. Another, “His passion for Humanities is amazing. He treats us as equals, and that is a great quality in a teacher.” And arguably the highest praise: “Mr. Asmussen is the mack daddy of English.” The harshest barb one student could muster was that Asmussen was “too sensitive.”

Asmussen acknowledges that he’s a popular teacher, “but at the same time, does that mean that I’m not as good a teacher as I could be because I’m not more demanding and strict? What I’m asking myself is, what does it mean to be a good teacher? And I haven’t figured it out. I doubt that I’ll figure it out after twenty years.”

Nor has he decided whether he’ll be at Elk Grove in five years, let alone twenty, but he says it’s likely he’ll still be teaching. In August, he was happily looking forward to the new academic year. “The bloom has not been entirely knocked off my rose,” he says with a laugh.

But he’ll be facing his “sobering realism” soon enough. “After first semester, a student said to me, ‘I’m keeping my Humanities notebook forever. I’ve learned so much. It’s like a book of wisdom,’” he recalls. “I think most teachers would tell you that it’s those moments that make it all worthwhile. The reality of the situation is, that makes me very happy for about an hour. And then I want more. Not praise, but something. I always want more from the students. I think if the day comes when I stop wanting anything from them, that’s the day I need to retire. So, I can be as tired, as frustrated, and basically as angry as I sometimes get, but I think that’s okay, because hopefully that points to the passion I have for teaching. If I just don’t care anymore, that’s when I’m out of the game.”