Wonders
I’m just a public classroom teacher.
I’m not an academe, I’m not a theorist, I’m not an authority on the ins and outs of public education policy. I meet my students where they are and do what I can to inspire them, to enlighten them, to empower them to live lives of wonder. I grieve for the ones I fail (although I know I cannot meet the needs of each of them) and celebrate those who blossom during their time in my class (although I know I may have had nothing to do with that blossoming). I’m a soldier in the trenches rather than a captain or a general.
Day after day I invest myself in the students in my classes—not just in their academic success in a narrow course of study, but in their growth as members of the human race, of global and local societies, as whole and integrated persons—and I do it happily. I like my job, and I live for those moments when a student lights up with the realization that s/he can do something s/he never thought possible.
What I don’t like is the way politicians and captains of industry and just about everybody else try to reduce my job and me to a number—a grade, if you will—and presume to tell me how best to do it. I am a professional—I have a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in my fields, I have post-baccalaureate education in the specifics of pedagogy, I have countless hours of professional development and continuing education—yet anyone who’s ever sat in a class as a student feels competent to tell me how to do my job.
I’ve sat in a doctor’s office—does that make me competent to be a doctor? Of course not! I’ve sat in a courtroom—does that mean I’m qualified to criticize how a lawyer practices law, or dictate how an attorney must conduct a case? I don’t think so!
Like me, doctors and lawyers (and plumbers and carpenters and every other skilled professional) have invested time and energy in learning how to do what it is they do. They are experts in their field, and I lack their specialized knowledge and expertise. Likewise, they lack my specialized knowledge and expertise.
I am competent in my field—attested by certification and credentials, professional performance evaluations, and the testimony of former students over the course of some 18 years in the classroom—and I make the effort to maintain and develop my competence through continuing education and professional development, as well as professional and informal collaboration. In recent years, however, so many outside the profession have cast aspersions on the competency of teachers in general (and by extension, my own competency) based on uninformed assumptions about who and what education is for, and those aspersions have dramatically teacher efficacy, morale, and retention.
“Test scores!” goes the cry, as if test scores ever told anything beyond a student’s test-taking skill and relative affluence. “Reading” and “Math” and “Science,” oh my! College and career readiness! Never mind the effect poverty has on the developing brain, never mind the distractions of food and home insecurity, never mind the social and economic pressures that eclipse the wonders of the mind that we teachers long to share with our students. “Raise those test scores, and if you don’t, we’re going to penalize you for being a bad teacher!”
I get it. Captains of industry and career politicians know just what they want public schools to produce: compliant, competent workers and complacent, consuming citizens. But we teachers don’t work for the captains of industry or the career politicians.
We work for our students. We meet them where they are and do everything we can to kindle curiosity, to stimulate intellect, to tickle fancies, to engage students’ minds and hearts not for some pie in the sky by and by future college or career readiness, but because it is good for our students right where they are, right now (it also equips them for success in whatever future they choose).
Could we all deliver the product that so-called “education reform” asks us to deliver? Absolutely...if all our students came to us with secure lives—consistently good nutrition, proper housing, a stable home life—then we (teachers and students) could quite likely deliver the specific wonders so many seem to expect. But not all our students come to us so prepared. Many struggle with malnutrition, or inadequate housing, or a chaotic home, or all of the above. With those students, the wonders we can deliver are very different, but they are still wonders—maybe not the wonders we privileged folk hope for, but wonders nonetheless. In fact, they may be the more transformative wonders—when a disadvantaged student gets something out of school that s/he never had before, the impact is profound.
That’s why I am a public school teacher—because working wonders with disadvantaged students is every bit as rewarding and maybe even more important than those worked with privileged students. Working these wonders with all these students is so necessary and so precious and so valuable (and so hard and heartbreaking).
Will wonders never cease? Not on my watch, no.