MindSpinner

Once upon a time when I was very young, I taught English in high school because teaching kids was inspiring, because we plumbed literature and learning for big ideas and for ourselves and for what mattered.

Then it wasn’t inspiring anymore. There were two many preps and too many classes, each filled with too many students. The paper piles were enormous, and there was no life past them. Even these were not the essential issue, however. The issue was the black binder containing the curriculum I was mandated to teach. School wasn’t about big ideas and explorations anymore, and it wasn’t really about students; it was about what lay between the covers of that binder. And what was there lacked vision; it was amalgamation instead. I was an artist required to paint by number. I was a puppet on strings, the binder a ventriloquist and I its dummy. Students felt alienated, disconnected. Many students, especially my African American students, saw nothing of themselves in the curriculum (mostly dead white males) and decided there was nothing school offered that was worth having. Only half the kids who started high school would stay to graduate. The entire exercise was unconscionable.

At various times I’ve taken flight from teaching high school English. I spent a heady, happy time in grad school at Duke; I taught in a junior college; I took a year off as a mother of young children; I dabbled in freelance Web design and thought about a career switch. For a variety of reasons I landed right back teaching high school English in a public school, and, of course, though there’s not a black binder anymore, I have a curriculum to cover. The problem with a curriculum dissected into skills and content is that it feels dissected - as if a living breathing thing has been taken, etherized and anatomized - you’ve got all the parts there, but the spirit of the thing is gone. It doesn’t fly. It doesn’t dance. It doesn’t promise horizons and voyages of discovery. It doesn’t speak to kids of what they long to know and do, at least not to enough of them.

As it became clear that teaching would be my professional destiny, it also became imperative that I transform my job and my purpose. I would have breathe life back into the enterprise in order to stay alive myself and in order not to damage lives. That is what I have set out to do. We teachers, we custodians of content and replicators of skill sets, must redefine our task.

That begins with making meaning and illuminating connections between the work we do in school and the world beyond. I have to bring my discipline, alive and at work in the world, into my classroom. I have to show how it really is connected to everything else, how it matters, how it means, how it must be understood and mastered, how our collective future depends on our ability to read the world, forge understandings, and express ideas in ways that effect results. As we interact with ideas and expression, I can double check to be sure we are “covering” that mandated content.

But there is more. I’ve worked in schools where student and faculty morale have been low and people have felt disconnected from what they do. Not much of lasting value can be accomplished. In such settings, there is a lack, a need unmet and often unspoken. People need to feel valued for their unique selves, for their strengths and gifts, whether they are fifteen or fifty. They need to feel themselves affirmed, to feel themselves heard, and to enjoy the knowledge that they are making a vital and personal contribution. In my classroom, I need to look for students’ gifts and interests and strengths, and find ways to deploy and recognize these, to make a home for everyone where everyone matters. A smattering of conversations with teachers recently has made me realize that teachers need this no less than students do. A classroom should be - a school should be - a gathering of gifts. (I owe someone credit for that last line, someone Bill Moyers interviewed years ago for his series World of Ideas, but I can’t remember who it is.)

Bringing deep change to fruition, however, is difficult. It takes time to rethink, time to restructure, time to gather oneself and one’s thoughts before class. Only there really isn’t time in a high school setting during the flow of instructional days. There’s hardly time to think at all. Instead, school days amount to an endless flow of tasks and interactions, so real transformation takes place by fits and starts and sometimes gets lost in the hubbub. One of the substantial benefits of working at a semi-year-round school will be having the chance to reflect and regroup periodically. Our first break is only three weeks away :->.

Schools matter profoundly. Their mission is to actualize the potential of lives, individually and collectively - to inspire, to affirm, to enlighten, to equip. Hanging on to this bigger vision during an era of testing and accountability can be like hanging on to a tree to keep from being blown away during a storm. Holding on is hard, but lives depend on it. Research shows that schools can save lives - can afford at-risk kids the resources they need for resiliency and the wherewithal to triumph over adverse circumstances - if schools are places of caring and connection, affirmation and high expectations. Research also shows that when testing becomes the be-all and end-all of schooling, school tends to alienate students and no longer serves as a protective, nurturing place of becoming.

This is my seventeenth year in the classroom. I’ve held class in trailers and on college campuses, in affluent private schools and in high poverty public schools. It wasn’t exactly a long-term plan that I’d still be meeting classes every Monday, but I am, and now, after years, I know why I am doing it. I am doing it because what I have to teach brings me joy I can share with my students. I’m doing it because a school can save a life, and I’m doing it because the future depends on the skills and wisdom of the students I teach and others like them. (OK, I am also doing it because I have to pay the bills, but that fact does not energize me to meet the day or to meet my students at the door, so that’s not enough.) Truth to tell, the first life I’m in the process of saving, at least professionally speaking, is my own.