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Graduate students learn more than just planning on MFA project

Jessie Paskiewicz

Connector Staff

Amid an unusually quiet O’Leary Library, graduate students Kayleah Morrisey and Chelsea Graham fondly recounted stories about class with their advisor and professor, John Brown. “He throws lesson plans out the window. He is really radical like that. He always reminds us that there is so much more to do once you leave the classroom,” said Graham.

And leave the classroom they did. This past semester, Brown took an experimental leap and presented his class with a new challenge: plan and chaperone an entire field trip to the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston for a class of high school sophomores. Sounds simple, right? Morrisey initially thought so, too. “…contacting the bus company, getting permission from all the parents, getting permission to take pictures, coordinating lunch, coordinating the bus schedule, coordinating their schedule, what they’re gonna do on the field trip, what they’re supposed to learn on the field trip. Everyone took one thing, but normally, you have to do all of that yourself,” she said.

This kind of real-life immersion is not unusual for Brown’s classroom, who often has students teach a mock lesson to their fellow classmates, who are encouraged to misbehave. “We’ll throw pens at each other and swear at each other, but what do you do if you don’t know how to do it now?” said Graham. Morrisey chimed in, saying, “I don’t know if a high school class has ever been taken out by a field trip by a grad school class.” She smiled as she said, “It’s a John Brown thing.”

Graham and Morrisey agreed that working with Amesbury High School brought the graduate class out of the hypothetical and face-to-face with the real, daily challenges of being an English teacher. “You can’t plan for it, you just kind of have to do it in the moment. When we were on the MFA field trip…we didn’t have behavioral issues, but you kind of have those strategies in the back of your mind,” said Morrisey. “We learned to kind of think on our feet when we were doing it. We planned to have lunch outside because if you have lunch in the MFA, you have to pay and they don’t allow large groups…and then it poured,” recalled Graham.

The graduate program – which licenses students with a Sheltered English Immersion (SEI) Endorsement and to teach English to grades eight through 12 – is a labor of love for both Morrisey and Graham. Morrisey “fell into it” after working various office jobs and realizing she was “an English nerd” who wanted “to make other English nerds.” Graham, who has known she has wanted to teach since she was little, reminisced about arranging her stuffed animals in a line and teaching them letters or reading to them.

The passion, though, has not been without its struggles. “In this program…there’s so much work to do, and some days you go home and you cry, and you feel like a failure, and then you say, ‘I’m gonna fail my kids because I can’t even do this for myself!’ And then you have really, really good days that remind you, ‘Ok, this is why I’m doing what I’m doing.’ And the MFA was kind of like that for me because it kind of makes you think, ‘Ok, it’s not just about sitting and reading’ or you know, following the cannon or whatever,” said Graham.

Morrisey agreed, also citing that some solace has also come from Brown’s own advice on teaching. “I love English, but I don’t know it that well. I’m not an expert. And he’s like, ‘No, you don’t have to do that. You don’t need to know everything, you don’t have to tell them that you know everything…you learn just as they learn,’” she said.

Both Graham and Morrisey agreed on the success of the project and considered its impact on future graduate classes. “I think this is new for everybody. It would be better in future years with smaller classes,” said Morrisey, adding that the current English graduate class is double the size of previous years. “Being in the program, I want to do it more now, because I’ve actually had exposure to being in a classroom, and what happens in a classroom and how students learn.”

Despite the challenges of the program, both students look forward to their future as teachers. “The pride that you feel at the end of the day when you go home, it’s not for something that you did, it’s for something they did and that you helped them get to,” said Graham. “That’s what makes a huge difference between teaching and doing just about anything else.”