Depending on how you figure it, I’ve been hanging out in and around classrooms and schoolhouses for more than 45 years in a variety of capacities – teacher, coach, school director, project administrator. Chalk dust and magic marker vapors have left their mark on my nostrils and lungs. Every time I drive by a school, I feel the same nostalgia, tinged with jealousy, that overcomes me when I see runners and bike riders doing their thing, now that I’m officially grounded.
People who have not inhabited that world since they were students can’t really understand how intoxicating and engaging life inside those buildings can be. Tolstoy’s famous opening line from Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” is only partially true for schools because the happy schools are also happy in different ways. My friend Sara Hallman contends that at one point she had touched down in every Chicago public elementary school – 400+ in all. I’m betting she would agree that you can almost smell success and failure in the air as soon as you enter.
I once visited a school on Chicago’s West Side where I was interested in recruiting a teacher for our charter school. The hallways were unswept, the office staff unwelcoming, and the bulletin boards unattended. That doesn’t mean there weren’t classrooms, like the one I had come to visit, where the teacher had insulated herself and her students from the toxicity that pervaded the building and was doing right by her children. But success in this business requires collaboration, a whole community moving in the same direction. A teacher can only get so far on her own. It requires the proverbial whole village.
The schools where all the gears were engaged also announced themselves almost immediately. The recess play areas were free of litter, the kids smiled at you when they passed in the hallway, and the principal was not in his office but was out in the hall when classes were in motion and was visiting classrooms when learning was happening. Some schools were committed to the arts. Their public spaces were loaded with murals, student self-portraits and mosaics, while others displayed student writing that had moved through the process of drafting and revising that paralleled the work of real authors. In the happy schools, I rarely heard teachers’ raised voices drifting into the halls as was often the case in unhappy schools. When I was a school director, yelling at or berating kids reflected a serious breakdown of trust and respect between teachers and students.
I am fascinated by the dynamics of how individual families move together through the world and the same is true for school communities. Inside each of the buildings I pass there are leaders who are either respected or reviled, teachers who have each other’s backs or are at odds with their colleagues. There are janitors and school secretaries to whom the children are drawn as sources of support when teachers fall short. There are staff who are distracted by the problems awaiting them when the school day ends but are trying nonetheless to serve the children who are in their keep. There are administrators who are trying to shield their teachers from mandates raining down on them from central office, issued by people who have forgotten what it feels like to deal with the half-dozen special needs students in the classroom and the shortage of paper for the copy machines.
And there are teachers who are totally locked in on their mission to bring out the best in their students, to build their confidence and competence. In recent weeks I’ve been in conversation with two such teachers who are committed to the work and can’t imagine doing anything that would be nearly as rewarding as the work they’ve chosen. One is probably a year away from retirement after close to 35 years on the job. The other is also a seasoned veteran whose passion for the work has not flagged. Our conversations are part of a project my partners and I have embarked on to create a counter-narrative to the dispiriting image of failure in public education which is repelling potential future teachers from entering the profession and is leading teachers already in the classroom to lose hope in the efficacy of their work.
I’ve been spending a lot of my time recently reading the transcriptions of these conversations, and I hope others will be as inspired as I am by their words. Let me give you a small example of what they have to say in the early stages of this project. I should be holding back until the work is completed but I’m eager to share what has excited me.
“Teaching is my ‘joyful resistance’. I get to be with children who still look at the world like it’s full of possibility. [I can] tell kids to read a book about a family leaving Viet Nam and traveling through a river, and then have a student who came from Venezuela start crying and have to leave the room because she said, ‘that was my story.’….where else do you get to have interactions where day in and day out you can be positive, to do something with kids that tells them they’re important…. I get to work in a community where my students love me and I love them, where they forgive me and I forgive them. That does not reflect what happens outside these doors. So, right now, that’s what keeps me going.”
How many of us can say anything about their work that matches that in hope and reward?
