39/365 What We Want for Students, We Must Want for Teachers

A friend of mine, a classroom teacher with more than 15 years of experience working with students at all grade levels, found herself a new school in a new city after years of experience in another school system. Because of tough economic conditions, few teaching positions were open, and she took a job at a school about which she’d heard mixed reviews.

A few months later, she resigned from the school. She left it broken in places no teacher should be broken by a school.

What we want for our students, we must want for our teachers.

Within her school, my friend was constantly being evaluated and given feedback that she had not met the expectations on the school-wide evaluation form. During one observation, when a student spoke out, rather than awarding that student with a demerit as policy dictated, this teacher approached the student and spoke to him as a person about community and what it means to be a member.

At the end of the lesson, the teacher’s observer commented that she’d failed to follow school protocol and would be marked “unsatisfactory” as a result.

This is a story of a particular time and place, but it could easily be the story of innumerable schools across the country. We are treating our teachers, practicing professionals, as though they step into the classroom devoid of wisdom, care, and creativity.

We must stop this. Teachers must refuse to subject themselves to this kind of treatment. When teachers are not trusted or allowed to connect with their students in human ways that help to model how to be members of a community, when they are forced to award consequences devoid of conversation, when their professionalism is called into question when they treat children as people – it diminishes our democracy let alone the professionalism of teachers.

In many cases, it is our youngest teachers, drawn to the profession (often with minimal training) who find themselves in these schools. As it is there first foray into professional teaching they may not know to be insulted by the feedback they receive. Indeed, because of the feeling of treading water that comes with any novice teachers, they may welcome the feedback as the only chance to improve.

In time they may become dependent on this feedback, relying on the outside judgement of others in place of developing their own since of success based on their professional opinion. Worse yet, some may master the criteria of the observation form, receive “outstanding” ratings in all areas and come to think of this as a mark of completion. For those teachers who were, themselves, the schooliest of students, counting success as the approval of their assessors will make perfect sense.

We must want more for teachers.

We must want more for teachers because we want more for students and for society.

Oftentimes, those who call for the improvement of the teaching profession employ the same deficit model of thinking they apply to rhetoric about those students who come from communities in poverty to the teachers they’re attempting to “improve.”

I am reminded of the passage from Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation where he describes fast food’s attempt to alter their production lines so that workers with no experience and limited or no English proficiency can prepare food based on a system of pictures.

While the school reform movement has not made it this far, such a horizon is not as distant as some might think.

Scripted curricula, check-off observation forms – these tools and those like them not only generate a stifling “one size for all” mindset about schools, but they ask less and less of our teachers, not more.

And we should ask more of our teachers – more creativity, more imagination, more inquiry, more investigation.

As it sits, though, we are asking for more conformity, as though our children come from one mold, as though our teachers should as well.

28/365 ‘All Wretch and no Vomit’

My days, as of late, have been spent deeper in the study of “why X isn’t happening” than I’m used to or comfortable with. I knew a piece of this would likely happen when I moved from teaching and the daily amazement of the classroom to the life of a graduate student last year. I knew the conversation would likely become more insular when I started a research doctoral program this year.

Still, I’ve never felt comfortable not making things, not doing things, not moving. My elementary school report cards (the last ones to include narrative feedback) noted this discomfort: Zac is a joy to have in class, if he could just stay in his seat and curb the talking.

While those are tasks I’m able to master when fully focused nowadays and the talking is usually questioning, they’re not my default. I like to do things.

Dense readings and statistics assignments, though, have a way of asking you to sit down, shut up, and then do that some more.

Today, Anthony (a friend I’ve not spoken to since I finished undergrad) posted the video below to the book of faces, and I watched it. This is a rarity. Most Facebook videos elicit a scroll-by from me. For whatever reason, I watched it. I’m glad I did, and I wish I could make it so that every next faculty meeting planned at schools across the country start with this video and then proceed to a deep conversation of, “How can we help our kids answer this question and realize their hopes?”

I’m not familiar with Alan Watts (yet) and infinite voices are likely able to list the myriad reasons why what he describes isn’t possible for so many of the children in our care. I find myself uninterested in those reasons or at least not paying them the insurmountable heed  most conversations in education tend to lend them.

What other reason to work in education than to be aspirational? I can think of no word or sentiment that so finely describes what drew me to the classroom each day or what I hoped for my students. And, while I aspired for their success, education and teaching were about my own aspirations, that I might be the better version of myself that I hadn’t quite become the day before for whatever reason.

Let us do more with aspire than emptily attach it to the name of some new school. Let us enact it. Let us use it to drive our decisions, our questions, and our care.

Thanks, Anthony.