What Tina wrote here is important. It points to the direction we want to go in:
The hardest part about this job is teaching to the eyes – looking at a kid who is in pain when you are in pain and you have to act like everything is just fine. In fact, whatever your own mental state, your eyes must convey to them that you are there for them and that their comprehension and enjoyment of the story or activity at hand is the most important thing to you. And sometimes you are breaking inside, and sometimes your eyes will meet the pain in a kid’s eyes and that will break your heart, but despite this you must be vigilant, despite the difficulty, to peel your eyes off the wall behind the kids’ heads, look in their eyes, look in 36 sets of eyes, class after class, day after day, month after month, into long strings of years on end. And this is hard. It is so hard that in order to do this well, which means to TRY and FAIL and TRY AGAIN (because it is a superhuman task to do this day in and day out so I fail all the time, I catch myself gazing off to the nice safe wall, hello mister wall, you look like you are holding up OK today.) To make this tough emotional work possible, I want to pare down my teaching to the core, so that it is a thing that I do not have to think about too consciously. I want to have my teaching in my body, so that my eyes can look at the kids. So that my heart can somehow find the strength to be vulnerable enough to BE THERE with those sets of expectant young eyes – often twinkling in merriment, often clouded by pain….
This is our little secret. Looking kids in the eyes is the ONLY ticket to comprehension. It is our ONLY way of knowing if the kids are “with us” or are “getting it” in the moment. Comprehension checks are bunk. Asking for cute ideas is no guarantee that the ones calling out aren’t just following the lead of the first callers-out. Only the eyes will tell you. Kids can lie with their body posture, with their head nods, with their five- or ten-finger comprehension checks, with their cute answers. They can try to lie with their eyes too, but not for long. So we must keep in constant contact with those eyes. But first, before we can essay that, we must be gentle on ourselves through the way we intend to interact with the kids. We must reduce our teaching plans down to the nub, down to the level of instinct, down to the human element of connection. For we must rely on our lesson plans’ being based on connection to build an invisible bridge between our eyes and theirs. So that we can reach towards our kids through our lesson plans instead of being driven away from them on rails of grammar.