Time to get rolling. With teachers back at school after a holiday break and in the second semester of their licensure program, it's time to do the prerequisite classroom observations required for their licenses and/or endorsements. Once I’m sitting in their classrooms with my computer poised on my lap, I am deeply appreciative of this aspect of my work. I sit and peck away, typing what I’m hearing and seeing. For the most part, it’s like eavesdropping with permission on lots of everyday heroes.
Like a lot of you, I loved hearing about the pilot, Sully, who heroically landed the big airliner in the Hudson River recently without one fatality. After a couple of geese hit his plane, a mixture of skills, experience, and pure instincts took over with little thought about what he should or shouldn’t do. He didn’t have the luxury of extra time.
I see this kind of scenario over and over with teachers, exhausted though they may be. First of all, rarely do they have that luxury of time. From the get-go of a teacher’s day the clock rules. While students are filing out of one class, other students are bumping into them arriving for the next. Planning period is consumed with making copies, calling parents, filling out incident report forms or other endless paperwork, consoling a student or a colleague, grading, and if you’re extremely lucky, maybe making a few plans. Going to the bathroom feels like an indulgence. Dawdling or water cooler talk isn’t a common activity for most teachers. Gone are the days of smoke wafting out of teacher lounges while teachers puff and commiserate.
The real treat in today’s world of education is when a teacher has somehow managed the time to carefully think through and prepare a lesson. But whatever plan she/he has at hand, most often the pure determination, tenacity, and strong, open heart anxious to teach someone something is readily observable. The unadulterated joy of watching a young person learn something is what keeps most of us coming back, day after day, year after year.
The teacher is often excited and quite enthusiastic about what she/he will be doing with students. A bell rings, students wander in, often moodily wearing whatever has happened to them throughout their lives, during the last week, last night, or becaue of an incident/exchange that just happened in the hallway. Teachers understand this, and know who is most vulnerable to disruptive behavior. They are well aware of how it can be a crap shoot as to who will be able to shuck off interfering attitudes and shift into being a receptive learner. They're constantly on the look out for the saboteurs. Teachers become masters at the control panel, checking the gauges and quickly making even the slightest adjustments instinctively to steer the take-off and entire flight of a lesson in a successful direction.
Geese come out of nowhere. One, two, plowing into our best intentions, threatening to disintegrate a lesson easily within nano seconds. An offensive side comment from one student to the next, an exasperated “this class sucks” from a student needing some extra attention for one reason or another, too many students not having read an assignment or brought their materials, a cell phone ringing and a student obstinately answering with the all too predictable response of “It’s my mom!”
Over half of the teachers in the alternative licensure program where I am an instructor and teacher evaluator work with adjudicated youth at minimum or maximum security lock down facilities (for those who have committed more serious crimes), or at residential treatment centers (for those with severe emotional and behavior problems to help them manage the impact of traumatic experiences and/or mental illness). Many of these students are master manipulators, and when you have an entire classroom of such, imagine the genius required of the teacher in this cockpit.
Regularly the take-off happens and the hour flies, usually not without some turbulence, sometimes major. Most teachers, so beautifully earnest with their dreams and honorable intentions for their students, do the best they can with what they have, frequently working with youth that have largely been discarded by the rest of society. So many teachers navigate their way through the geese and storms, with outdated equipment in less than desirable physical environments, often receiving only minimal direction from air traffic controllers, yet they fly and land safely hour after hour, regularly making emergency landings, unbelievably managing to teach many children every day. I bet that even Captain Sully calls these people his heroes.
Like a lot of you, I loved hearing about the pilot, Sully, who heroically landed the big airliner in the Hudson River recently without one fatality. After a couple of geese hit his plane, a mixture of skills, experience, and pure instincts took over with little thought about what he should or shouldn’t do. He didn’t have the luxury of extra time.
I see this kind of scenario over and over with teachers, exhausted though they may be. First of all, rarely do they have that luxury of time. From the get-go of a teacher’s day the clock rules. While students are filing out of one class, other students are bumping into them arriving for the next. Planning period is consumed with making copies, calling parents, filling out incident report forms or other endless paperwork, consoling a student or a colleague, grading, and if you’re extremely lucky, maybe making a few plans. Going to the bathroom feels like an indulgence. Dawdling or water cooler talk isn’t a common activity for most teachers. Gone are the days of smoke wafting out of teacher lounges while teachers puff and commiserate.
The real treat in today’s world of education is when a teacher has somehow managed the time to carefully think through and prepare a lesson. But whatever plan she/he has at hand, most often the pure determination, tenacity, and strong, open heart anxious to teach someone something is readily observable. The unadulterated joy of watching a young person learn something is what keeps most of us coming back, day after day, year after year.
The teacher is often excited and quite enthusiastic about what she/he will be doing with students. A bell rings, students wander in, often moodily wearing whatever has happened to them throughout their lives, during the last week, last night, or becaue of an incident/exchange that just happened in the hallway. Teachers understand this, and know who is most vulnerable to disruptive behavior. They are well aware of how it can be a crap shoot as to who will be able to shuck off interfering attitudes and shift into being a receptive learner. They're constantly on the look out for the saboteurs. Teachers become masters at the control panel, checking the gauges and quickly making even the slightest adjustments instinctively to steer the take-off and entire flight of a lesson in a successful direction.
Geese come out of nowhere. One, two, plowing into our best intentions, threatening to disintegrate a lesson easily within nano seconds. An offensive side comment from one student to the next, an exasperated “this class sucks” from a student needing some extra attention for one reason or another, too many students not having read an assignment or brought their materials, a cell phone ringing and a student obstinately answering with the all too predictable response of “It’s my mom!”
Over half of the teachers in the alternative licensure program where I am an instructor and teacher evaluator work with adjudicated youth at minimum or maximum security lock down facilities (for those who have committed more serious crimes), or at residential treatment centers (for those with severe emotional and behavior problems to help them manage the impact of traumatic experiences and/or mental illness). Many of these students are master manipulators, and when you have an entire classroom of such, imagine the genius required of the teacher in this cockpit.
Regularly the take-off happens and the hour flies, usually not without some turbulence, sometimes major. Most teachers, so beautifully earnest with their dreams and honorable intentions for their students, do the best they can with what they have, frequently working with youth that have largely been discarded by the rest of society. So many teachers navigate their way through the geese and storms, with outdated equipment in less than desirable physical environments, often receiving only minimal direction from air traffic controllers, yet they fly and land safely hour after hour, regularly making emergency landings, unbelievably managing to teach many children every day. I bet that even Captain Sully calls these people his heroes.
Your compassionate witnessing of these courageous and heroic civil servants is inspiring. What has to happen in our society to bring teachers to a place where they receive the support and appreciation they so deserve? I fear it will not happen in my lifetime; but I feel some reassurance that with witnesses such as you providing a mirror for them and their critical work, there is hope. Thanks for the work you do in recognizing them.
ReplyDeleteSo much of the challenge seems to come from a loss of the vital ingredients of honoring the individual and learning how to live well in community. Referencing Parker Palmer's work with Circles of Trust, I strongly feel that we have veered so far away from authentic acknowledgment of and care for the other and from healthy community. If valued and taught with intention, these ways of being could transform our interactions and our appreciation for the contributions individuals make at the level that is fundamental to creating them.
ReplyDelete