Personal Narrative: My Experience Teaching versus Learning

Last semester I led a ninth-grade class room through a reading of Romeo and Juliet. I had little time to prepare for this unit of study, and had never formally studied or written about the play. I worked my way through each scene, preparing prompts and discussions that seemed relevant to the content of the play, to its connections to private and public social issues (both Elizabethan and modern), and to why the play was written in poetic form, or what the poet was trying to do with language. The play is rife with paradox, oxymoron, and ambiguity, so finding a focal point or common theme to unify the various lessons was difficult. However, as we approached the final act, everything that the students and I had explored in this play seemed to me to be pointing back to a line early in Act I, "Part fools! You know not what you do."

Born into a world of contradictory and opposing forces of control, authority, and traditional obligations, a young person does not have the means to make judgments but is swept along on the tide of what others say must be done. If one's heart or conscience cries out for a different course, lack of experience and of developed judgment can be fatal. Role models are required who can model the skills of weighing the pros and cons, of balancing the heart and the head, of inquiring and seeking out knowledge before a final decision is made. Friar Lawrence spoke this lesson, but cryptically, through the metaphors of poison/medicine and haste/patience, yet he did not model the exercise of inquiring, balancing, and weighing before acting. It suddenly occurred to me that the wisdom that Friar Lawrence advocates but does not exactly inspire, is exactly the sort of wisdom that we were exercising in the classroom as we...

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...ts' enjoyment of reading and writing and also their desire to participate in language arts.

Another experience confirmed my belief that learning and teaching is not a one-way street in the classroom. Teachers are not the privileged literati who are desperately trying to inculcate knowledge into the uneducated mass of students. Teachers need to respect the human mind in any stage of development and accept the fact that they can learn things from someone who is not an expert in the field. The teacher is a learner, and the students are teachers. The study of Romeo and Juliet during my student teaching experience was a collective effort to examine and interpret eternally recurring human achievements, failures, struggles, goals and desires. I learned a great deal through reading and discussing the writing of the students, and I hope that they learned something from me.