I’ve mentioned before that several colleagues and I have been working on a project that involves conversations with teachers, administrators and teacher educators about what drew them to the work, what has enabled them to persist, often in the face of formidable obstacles, and what words they have for people who might follow the paths they’ve carved. For readers who are already in the ed biz, but are considering leaving, what can we say that would led them to persist?
We’ve now conducted conversations with 14 people and still counting, some former colleagues, others whose reputations have brought them to our attention. Some have been at it for 30+ years, others who are still in mid-career. To a person, they have found the work nourishing in some way. Often, they say that what they do makes them feel like a whole person, able to find purpose in ways that other work has not. Some are career changers, able to contrast teaching with their previous unfulfilling jobs. I’m overwhelmed with sadness when I realize how many people hate their jobs and dread being confronted with endless days of mind-numbing tasks that feel as meaningless as digging holes and then refilling them.
I am not exaggerating when I say that in my long years as teacher, school director and teacher educator there was never a day when I dreaded getting up in the morning. I say this not boastfully, but with gratitude. Yes, there were days that seemed like they would be endless, filled with unpleasant or uninspiring tasks, but I was willing to face them because they were necessary parts of a larger whole, the value of which I was committed to. A surprising number of the educators we talked to said, each in their own way, that for them teaching was a calling, not just a job. I never used that term myself, but I was feeling something similar during those long stretches from break to break that enabled me to persist with nary a mental health day or a sabbatical for relief.
Right now, the conversations are behind us and we are engaged in a different kind of slog, transforming the transcripts of those rich sessions into written text that will engage and inspire the readers we’re trying to reach. Writing this week’s blog as we speak is providing relief from one of the most challenging tasks I’ve confronted. I’ve written several books that are entirely my own words, which I’ve found less challenging than sculpting the words of others into pleasing shapes. One of my books involved editing the accounts of others who, like me, have been involved in starting new schools. That was difficult in its own way, but those authors had already taken the first step of translating their thoughts and ideas into written text.
Working from transcriptions requires moving from the spoken to the written word, two surprisingly different beasts, cousins though they may be. It’s been said of our eloquent former president Barack Obama that he spoke in complete paragraphs. Not many others do. Ideas sometimes emerge chaotically and need to be beaten into shape. The number of interjections – um, like, sort of, kind of, you know – serve a function for the speaker of buying time while his mind catches up with his speech or vise versa, but they must be excised. It’s embarrassing to see how many of these interjections clutter your own recorded speech. Virtually everyone does it.
All the while, the editor must be careful not to literally put words in the mouth of the speaker. Fortunately, when this part of the process is done, we will pass our edited text by our speakers to have them certify that we have only modestly butchered their words. Our hope is that they’ll our version a better, more eloquent representation of their spoken ideas.
What our partners in conversation will likely find as painful as we do is how much of the original conversation has disappeared. If any of you have been interviewed for a TV newscast, you’ll recognize what it’s like to see a ten-minute filming reduced to a 30 second film clip. There are many fascinating side excursions in what were often two hour-long exchanges; many of them diverge from the book’s purpose, so they have to go. We hope it will soften the blow for people to know that we hope to create an archive of the complete conversations online.
Students in teacher education programs often complain that their professors, even those who have extensive classroom or school building experience, are teaching out of a reality that has gone by. I left the classroom in the early years of the emerging testing craze that accompanied No Child Left Behind. I never had to teach under the pressure of those test scores. Similarly, what you’re communicated as a teacher educator in the pre-Trump years when the pressure to constrain your speech and ideas is intense. So, we are concerned that the time between now and the publication of this book – editing of the conversations, additional writing by the author, the long, slow process of finding a publisher and passing through the hoops of their thoughtful, often cumbersome acceptance process – will render the words of our contributors obsolete.
There’s a lot more to be said about the technological challenges the project has presented. I’m considerably older than my partners, which means that I have been the least adept at recording the conversations, gathering them in retrievable places online and doing the time-consuming whittling down process, while preserving the originals. All our interviews were recorded on Zoom which has introduced a process that yields almost immediate transcriptions of each session. This is an amazing gift, but it only gets us to second base. All the hard work comes after. We’re running as fast as we can.
