Coffee with Arne

On this wonderful day off from school in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I just spent a few moments with my coffee and some thoughts of Mr. Arne Duncan, Education Secretary for this here US of A. Said thoughts are about the teaching profession, a subject I have just a little bit of passion for.

Here's the whole piece, worth a gander I think.

http://archive.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/winter09_10/duncan.pdf

And here are some things from the piece that make me go hmmmmm.....

"In the factory model of education, teachers are interchangeable widgets who keep the educational assembly line moving. Teachers today are not paid based on their skill in the classroom or the difficulty of their teaching assignments."

"No area of the teaching profession is more plainly broken today than that of teacher evaluation and professional development...The truth is that students and teachers don't live in mythic Lake Wobegon, where everyone is above average. Yet we have an evaluation system that pretends otherwise. As a result, great teachers don't get recognized, don't get rewarded, and don't help their peers grow."

"It's not just the students who suffer....teachers have to live with the results of other people's bad teaching - the students who don't know anything."

Hmmmm.

Learning from Nothing

"That's just like Ms. Jamie. Making us learn something out of nothing."

- D, 1st period, Playwriting

And that's why I love my job. Despite what you may have heard, all the days off and the free health insurance isn't why I teach in one of New York's poorest neighborhoods. I mean all the mind-blowing bureaucracy is a sweet perk, but if you ask my why I do this, I'll give you a full-on Lean on Me answer.

I do it for the kids.

I do it for those micro moments when D puts pen to paper to brain.

I do it because making better readers and writers may be the most revolutionary act in the world.

I do it because students like D make me laugh. I do it because she did learn something today. Along with about 50 or so of her colleagues. And I only teach 4 classes. I do it because watching my students "learn from nothing" (otherwise called ENGAGEMENT) may be one of the greatest joys of teaching. I do it because MUSIC is an amazing teaching tool. Ice T, Johnny Cash, Ella Fitzgerald as explicit instruction. Yes. I do it because watching your "good ideas" manifest in front of you feels really freaking satisfying.

I do it because inciting a covert locavore revolution in my other English class is dangerously fun. (Today we debated advertisers' role in childhood obesity. And it's only Tuesday. Come on!)

A food revolution in Brownsville?

Hope.

I do it because I'm really, really tired and yet I felt the need to write this blog post. For catharsis. For posterity. So I can remember that funny thing that D said 8 hours ago. I do it because those comments ARE my day.