I started out my grown-up life as a good teacher. I turned into a very bad teacher. Maybe I quit understanding my subject. Maybe I stopped knowing myself. Whatever the reasons, I woke up one day with mental pockets empty of the "analogies, metaphors, and images" I needed to connect what I knew and valued with the students in front of me. The awareness I was no longer connecting became inescapable about the time students became younger than my sons. Or perhaps it was when my hair turned white. I really noticed respect and attention dramatically changed when these digitized students could no longer sit through an hour and fifteen minute class without leaving -- to go to the bathroom or to smoke or to take a break, I neither knew nor cared. Or they fell asleep. It was not just that cell phones went off in class, but that students would answer and converse on the damn things while I was talking. I had to ask students to remove headphones, to put away their newspapers, and my jokes no longer worked.

After a number of wounding and frustrating years, I am beginning to be a better teacher: more professional, more visible, and more able to explain how, why, and what my students are learning. To become more professional, I have had to learn to be more intentional, more thoughtful about what I am doing, to ask better questions of myself, about my teaching, and to become more systematic about recording what worked and what didn't.

What follows is a short trek down that path from good to bad, a path I don't think I'm alone in having traveled. I also want to talk about what I needed to become a better teacher, needs I think are shared by other professors. Along the way, I cast an eye toward ways in which technology has changed how students learn and how, ideally, teachers teach.

Attempting to teach something actually is the best way to learn it. I found this to be true as a TA teaching Comp 101, as an instructor teaching "Intro to Women Studies," and as a new Ph.D. teaching American Studies. I never really understood a thing until I tried to explain it to someone else. And frequently, I didn't know I knew something until I heard myself explain it in response to a student's question or comment. Lo, those many years ago, I discovered that learning to explain the rules of grammar and composition, I had learned to write. Teaching Women's Studies taught me the political, that is, the teaching, consequences of my personal life. And American Studies helped me understand the power of my subject for helping students connect intellectual work with personal wellbeing. About this time, I learned that I need to teach and teach well, in addition to writing, or I don't know who I am or what I know.

I got my first teaching job at a 21. Those first years I was often as young or younger than my students. I talked like they talked, played like they played, and what I read and what I wanted them to read were books they did read and enjoy. The skills of writing and critical thinking and cultural analysis that I wanted to teach them they recognized as valuable. So, for teaching strategies and curriculum design, I relied heavily on intuition and a young teacher's quick ability to identify with students. I put little thought into the how or the what of teaching, trusting that I was entertaining enough to hold their interest and that my ideas and subject were of obvious relevance to their lives.

As for their learning, I understood how they learned because it was the same way I learned. They demonstrated they had "mastered" (or not) what I expected by writing papers like I would have, or failing to write them. I could explain to students why a paper failed and expect they would make the necessary improvements. We -- my students and I -- spoke the same language, were interested in the same kinds of books and poems and movies and activities.

In these early years, I discovered I really loved teaching, more than I loved research, and that I was fairly good at it. Whether I was fairly good because I loved teaching or loved it because of my (modest) teaching successes was not a question I chose to explore at the time. My teaching evaluations and what I heard of my reputation were good, and that was enough. I was convinced that I was a very good teacher.

But looking back now, I realize I was a passionate amateur, a hobbyist, not a professional. Because I was still so close to the student role myself, I remembered to pose authentic questions -- their questions -- and required them to fulfill authentic tasks: create a magazine, stage a poetry reading, teach a class, make a daybook. Any time I encouraged them to participate in the real-life activities of poets and readers and creative thinkers, I did so by accident not because I recognized that students learn best when answering their own questions.¹ Because I hated to assign letter grades to creative work, and more importantly was afraid I would hurt students' feelings or that they wouldn't like me if I did, I de-emphasized grades, eschewed tests, and kept reminding students that learning is delightful and personally significant. Because they liked me, students produced. Because I liked them and was proud of their work, I responded.

Students often came to my office to talk about assignments, to simply chat or seek advice on some issue. At this time in my teaching life, it was not unusual for me to pull out the Kleenex box and shut the door to protect a confession or a revelation or a minor therapeutic breakthrough.

The teaching strategies I used as an amateur I knew intuitively to be right, not from considered thought and planning, certainly not from examining in any systematic way whether my students were learning, or what they were learning. I habitually devised strategies based on my own interests, my own way of being. My supposed "good teaching" seemed very easy, very natural. I got students to read and do the work I assigned because classes were small and students were motivated. Conversations with them kept me in touch their backgrounds and interests, so I came up with assignments that seemed relevant, and jokes based on common cultural assumptions.

About 10 or 12 years ago, I started noticing changes. I was taking on new subjects, teaching required courses rather than electives, and teaching bigger classes. I found myself shocked and grumpy about how little time my students spent studying, how much they complained about both length and cost of my reading lists, about my requiring more work than any of their other professors. Instead of decoding this bit of information, I responded with snide comments about the way things were when I was in school: a book a week in my literature classes, for example. Not for a long time did I begin to understand how rarely they read, and almost never for pleasure. When they did homework, they did it together in front of the TV, talking on their cell phones with the stereo blaring. I didn't get it.

In conversations I had with myself about all this, I explained to myself that my interests became different from those of students and my standards higher. I became much more interested in whether they were learning than whether they liked me. As I grew older and students got younger, I forget the lessons of authenticity and trust I had first learned. Or, like many of my colleagues, I didn't seriously reconsider how these lessons might play out differently as my interests changed, my self -- physically and emotionally and intellectually -- changed, and my students changed.

Rather than reconsidering my assumptions about appropriate presentation forms, about content, about learning and learners, I became cranky: what had been easy was becoming harder and harder. Steadily, I became a less and less successful teacher. Discussions became harder to hold; the flow was gone. When students did not respond to questions I posed for them to answer, I found myself lecturing more and enjoying teaching less. What had happened to careful reading? What about reflection? Re-reading? Careful study? They would tell me they had done the reading, but it was "boring" and they had gotten nothing out of it. I no longer knew what they were interested in and found it increasingly difficult to get them interested in what I felt was valuable. I remember one class where mildly hostile students laughed, not kindly, when one of them finally got my "right answer" and another shouted out "Bingo!"

One day I caught myself making a joke with a colleague about not wanting to look too carefully "into their little minds" for fear it would be like picking up a rock. "I don't want to know too much about what or how they think," I said, and suddenly understood why grading papers had become almost impossible.

Those papers were the evidence of how far short of success I was falling. Where I'd started out teaching determined to create classroom climates that encouraged and supported creativity, my teaching evaluations complained of "busy work" and "boring" assignments and readings. What I saw as a creative open-endedness, some students saw as disorganization. Where I felt I was encouraging them to find their own voices, they saw vagueness about class and assignment expectations. I was hurt because students no longer seemed to trust me, and I no longer trusted them. Too many saw my classes as "hoops to jump through" on their way to more important and more interesting activities. Listening to other faculty complain, I knew I was not alone, but somehow that didn't help.

What had happened to me as a teacher? What had happened to students? What had happened in the world that it had become so difficult to demonstrate the value of my content?

In "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants" Marc Prensky identifies a "fundamental" reason so many of us without meaning to have become bad teachers: "Our students have changed radically. Today's students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach" (1). He claims a "really big discontinuity has taken place," even a "singularity" from which "there is absolutely no going back." Prensky refers to "the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century." Where our students are "digital natives" in this profoundly changed learning environment, we of my generation will always remain "digital immigrants," and suffer all the disadvantages and the unknowingness of immigrants everywhere.² As "digital immigrants" we can laugh at the evidence of our "accent," but what it indicates is for Prensky "very serious": "the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language" (2).

Prensky's metaphor of the digital age as a new country where instructors are immigrants and students are natives comes even more sharply into focus in his description of students K through college:

They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today's average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives. (1)