Think back for a moment to when you were a teenager. It might stir fond memories—best friends, first dates, driver’s ed—but also a few you’d rather forget: braces, moodiness, awkward growth spurts.
As a high school math teacher in North Carolina I regularly did this myself; I tried to put myself in the mindset of a 15 year old in order to guide students toward a deeper understanding of abstract concepts. I have come to believe that most of the negative ideas associated with teenagers are a result of the view that they are not fully “adult.” As a student in the Learning and Teaching program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) for the past year, I have discovered that this reputation follows teens into the specific context of an art museum as well.
While I had previously suspected this discomfort, my fellow teachers and I came face-to-face with it—and attempted to dispel it—during the past year. Along with nine other HGSE graduate students, I worked as a graduate student teacher at the Harvard Art Museums. We collaborated with teachers at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (CRLS) to bring high school classes to the museums several times throughout the semester for visits tailored to their course curriculum. I worked with courses ranging from U.S. history to studio art to Greek mythology. Although I plan to continue to teach math in the future, the interdisciplinary approach embraced by the Graduate Student Teacher program has helped me reflect on the connections between seemingly discrete academic subjects.
I now see both math and art as collective approaches humans have taken to understanding the world around us. One could argue the same for science, literature, and even religion. Each of these disciplines has something to teach the other about ways of searching for answers to the biggest questions in life. In my work as a math teacher, I have found that high school students are especially attuned to these questions and that they constantly crave connections between people and between disciplines. I set out to learn how other subjects are taught in order to inform my own practice as an educator, and that is how I found myself in the one-year Graduate Student Teacher program.