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The first week of Institute has ended with a whimper, as I shuffle back to my apartments on the Georgia Tech campus after a Friday dinner social with little will to do anything but bury my face in a pillow. The grueling schedule since Monday will only continue, but at least the teaching routine will accelerate and begin to produce results.
Despite a classroom and students on my horizon, I have to reflect on the Institute curriculum as reminiscent of Woody Hayes’ old Ohio State teams: “three yards and a cloud of dust.” Hard-nosed, relentless pushing against your own limits shapes the seminars, drills and planning happening here. As much as I have drawn strength from the content and taking on the identity of “teacher,” Institute presents some imperatives for still more questions to ask and have answered in order to become an educator.
Here are the educator imperatives I’ve seen this week:
- Students yearn for learning: Yesterday we had the chance to observe the classrooms in which we will be teaching for three weeks during Institute. Ours had a substitute teacher, and consequently no valid conclusions could be drawn from what we saw. However, what I did notice were the layers of emotions, interests and efforts of students which are the first and necessary condition to set a strong direction and mission for the classroom in a given year. Sure, the layers may be complex, contradictory and unrefined, but they are ALIVE. Teachers must serve the classroom, and serve the genetic, socialized need to learn and grow in a protective space.
- Teaching requires inspiration: If there is one element of the Teach For America mission in which I became unexpectedly invested this week, it is the power of transformational change in its smallest parts. Experience, discretion, resilience, expertise and selflessness in the profession of course have no substitute, but inspiration can leaven the bread of knowledge in the classroom. Rita Pierson gave a passionate TED Talk on the importance of teachers in this respect to students through anecdotes and her own emotional investment. If we are talking about raising student academic achievement, allocating education budgets and creating healthy schools, we should also be talking about education from the psychological strengths and needs of children. Teachers are on the front lines everywhere, sweating in the immense pressure of often adverse conditions.
- Naming “failing schools” conceals failing systems: One of the most influential books I’ve read in the past year, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, frames social science problems like the human body: complex yet bounded problems with innumerable relationships but purpose and solvency. Education falls into this category. As I have spent a week around my Institute school, I have witnessed examples of the strongest and weakest performances of education in urban schools in South Atlanta. But when we say “failing school” we really connote a reluctance to admit schools themselves really have no causal weight and keep the problem at arm’s length. What really causes failure? Teachers in conjunction with the community can push against the true driver of failure which comes from external and internalized oppression.
To leave these promises with solace in the possibility of future success and because the soccer World Cup qualifiers have started, I have to quote the 2010 World Cup official song by K’Naan (the non-Coke version, sorry Atlanta). This is just one of thousands of powerful stories of deprivation and opportunity”
” Out of the darkness, I came the farthest / Among the hardest survival / Learn from these streets, it can be bleak / Accept no defeat, surrender, retreat / So we struggling, fighting to eat / And we wondering when we’ll be free”
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
