Me and Mr. Milby

I’ve come to realize the problem wasn’t the desk. It was how Mr. Milby used the power of the desk.

I’ve been a teacher for 10 years, and in that time I’ve never had a teacher’s desk. I’ve had plenty of desks that served as a place to work and to store pencils and paper clips. But that’s not what I mean by a teacher’s desk. A teacher’s desk is a thing of power. Inanimate power, but power nonetheless.

And it’s that power, or the misuse of that power, that kept me from having a teacher’s desk. That and Mr. Milby.

When I was an undergraduate, I worked for a program that placed math and science majors in high school classrooms to act as in-class tutors. That was how I met Mr. Milby (a pseudonym). I was a tutor for one of his algebra classes.

At our first meeting, Mr. Milby came across as very formal. Maybe it was because of his British accent, conspicuous in a California beach town. Maybe it was because he didn’t say much to me besides telling me where I should sit. And maybe my own nerves — this being my first time in the classroom in a non-student role — made his manner seem especially daunting. His demeanor did little to calm my nerves, so for the first few weeks I mostly just sat in a student’s desk in the back of the room and observed.

The students sat in crooked rows, so tightly packed together that walking between them was like walking down the aisle on a crowded airplane — awkwardly bumping the seated students with my elbow or butt while tripping over backpacks and stray books. We all faced a projector screen that hung on the wall at the front of the room just above Mr. Milby, who sat at his teacher’s desk facing out toward us.

And he almost always sat at his teacher’s desk, using his laptop and document camera to project his lessons onto the screen above. If students needed something, they came to him. When passing out papers, he usually only handed them to the students in the front row. I never saw him move from the very front of the classroom.

The seat of power

I was only with Mr. Milby for a semester, not long enough to really question what I was seeing. But as I progressed through my undergraduate degree, observed other teachers, and learned more about teaching and learning, I began to realize that something was off in Mr. Milby’s classroom.

I used to think it was the desk. To me, it seemed like a physical barrier he placed between himself and his students — almost as if he were afraid of them. And that’s why I didn’t have a teacher’s desk for a long time. I saw a teacher’s desk as a barrier between students and the teacher.

But I’ve come to realize the problem wasn’t the desk. It was how Mr. Milby used the power of the desk.

Mr. Milby used his desk in a way that kept him separated from his students and imbued him with unearned authority. Not only did this influence how students saw themselves and their place in the world, it also, through a mostly unconscious process, influenced my nascent teacher identity.

When Mr. Milby ignored the disengaged and gravitated toward the diligent, I learned that it’s acceptable to use my attention, or lack thereof, to motivate students. And when he openly argued and fought with a group of boys, often kicking one of them out of class, I learned that exclusion is an effective pedagogical tool and that ostracization is an acceptable form of punishment. And those he kicked out or ignored learned that they didn’t belong.

Examples and traditions

As a new teacher, I had to determine which of the many examples from my formative classroom experiences would serve as reference points for my developing teacher identity. There were moments that answered the question, “Who do I want to be as a teacher?” For example, the host teacher for my student-teaching placement taught me a lot about high-quality mathematics instruction, but watching her set up a portable electric griddle in the classroom and, with an apron on and a spatula in hand, make pancakes for the students as they came in to take their final exam — that was a powerful moment. And I do the same thing now for my students. Another teacher at a different placement learned to speak Spanish so that she could build relationships with Spanish-speaking migrant students and their families. And her example is the reason I learned to speak Spanish.

But there were also powerful counterpoints, illustrative of who I would not be as a teacher. Mr. Milby was one of them. For years, I consciously rejected the obvious displays of power I observed in his classroom, like the teacher’s desk. But identity is complicated, and my rejection of certain practices did not stop me from unconsciously maintaining systems that kept me in the seat of power.

For example, I offered the option to retake tests, but only to students that I thought would use the opportunity to learn what they’d missed and improve. When students arrived for class, I warmly greeted those who were compliant and easy to work with, but I checked email on my phone and offhandedly mumbled “good morning” to those I saw as difficult. And I referred students who misbehaved to the office, without first talking to them in hopes of understanding the root cause of the behavior. I used exclusionary practices, but I saw them as an acceptable part of my teacher identity. In other words, I spoke Spanish and made pancakes, so it was OK to let struggling students opt out.

It wasn’t my intention to engage in exclusionary practices. It was tradition. It was the norm. It was inherent in how we talked about struggling students in staff meetings. It was in our attendance policies and bell schedules, in our grading policies and placement tests, in all those nearly invisible practices that maintain teacher power without regard for its effects on students. It was obvious that I shouldn’t do what Mr. Milby did. It was less obvious how to challenge the very system in which I operated. And so I validated that system without questioning what was complicated.

Questioning — and using — my power

Since coming to that realization, I’ve learned how to use the power of the desk, the power of my role, to question both the system I work in and my role within that system.

I finally changed my test retake policy. In fact, I changed my entire approach to assessment. I now use short, targeted formative assessments of specific skills and give students lots of feedback. The end-of-unit summative assessment is usually a performance task or project that allows students to demonstrate creative thinking, depth of knowledge, and applications of their learning. It’s not yet a perfect system. But the process makes students feel supported, and I still am able to assess their learning. So it’s a step in the right direction.

And the students I used to ignore? I find a common point of interest, which often consists of me telling self-deprecating jokes, and then I patiently wait, sometimes months, for the relationship to develop. Pancakes — and warm greetings at the door — also help.

I start my class each day with a quick social-emotional check-in question that allows students to reflect on how they feel and how that might affect their performance in class that day. While that hasn’t made discipline issues disappear, it has changed my understanding of them. Instead of labeling a student as “defiant,” I now know they didn’t get much sleep because a younger sibling was up all night crying. Instead of writing off a student with a “bad attitude,” I now recognize them as a young person suffering from the emotional repercussions of an argument with a parent. What used to be a discipline problem has become an invitation to check in. An opportunity to build relational trust. A moment to connect as humans rather than as student and teacher.

As I write this, I’m preparing to welcome my students back to the classroom after a year of distance learning. And while there is no teacher’s desk in my classroom, the power of the desk is still there, granting me the authority to designate a student as “good” or “bad.” To decide if an atypical or obtrusive student behavior is a sign of defiance or anxiety. And to decide if I will carry out or question inequitable practices in my classroom. The teacher’s desk is neutral in its power. I am not. And admitting that, admitting both my power and my fallibility in the use of that power, is the most important step I can take to disrupt the inequities that so often pass for the norm.