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For
my first Holy Communion my Aunt Kitty bought me “The Golden
Book of Catholic Saints”. I read and reread the stories
of those men and women... the drama of their deaths and the inspiration
of their sacrifices. My six-year-old self secretly longed to be
St. Patricia, but I agonized over my low tolerance for pain and
my addiction to ruffled dresses. And besides, I had no idea what
I could possibly pull together for my three miracles.
Now flash forward decades. There have been twenty-one Caverly
winners since I came to Brookline and each year I have listened
to their stories. To me they were philosophers, poets, authors,
inventors, and heroes.... and way out of my league.
When Dr. Lupini, Skye Kramer, and Bob Weintraub walked up to
me in the hallway a month ago, my first thought was “They
know about the telephone call. I’m being terminated.”
This has been one of my most difficult years of teaching, with
the death of my mother, personal crises in the lives of both my
children, and parent criticism over my curriculum. But instead
of being fired, I had won the Caverly. The teachers in my department
and former students had written beautiful letters of nomination.
My friends and students were my miracles, and I had made saint.
My words today are for the teachers, young and old, in this
audience who sit where I once sat. . I do not have deep thoughts
about education. I don’t read educational journals. My successes
over the years could not have happened without failures and mistakes.
I have my definite strengths and weaknesses. What I offer you
this afternoon are the confessions of an ordinary classroom teacher.
CONFESSION #1: I never planned to be a teacher. I was
chosen by God.
It was l971 and I was in my senior year of college. I wanted to
be an anthropologist and live in Latin America. But my husband’s
draft number was picked, and he had to do his alternative service
as a conscientious objector to the war in Vietnam. I would have
to get a job. Since there were no pre-Columbian Indian civilizations
in Pittsburgh, I gave up my dream and applied for a teaching position
at a small Catholic high school in a working class neighborhood.
I arrived at my interview with a half page resume and not one
hour of teaching experience. When it was my turn, I handed Sister
Maura O’Reilly my pathetic half page and 2 recommendations.
“Oh, I don’t need to look at those,” she whispered
conspiratorially. “I already know you’re the one.
God told me.”
Thanks to the Holy Spirit, I had my first teaching job - Spanish
1, Spanish 2, Spanish 3, Spanish 4, Latin, and physical science
- six classes a day, six different lesson plans. I was the entire
language department. I also moderated cheer leading, Spanish Club,
National Honor Society, and the school newspaper. It was a baptism
by fire. I had never taken an ed course and I knew nothing about
classroom management. But I had the nuns and the parish priest,
and as in all cases of “divine right”, discipline
and control were less of an issue since God was involved.
Those two years at St. Joseph’s were transformational. I
worked with children who had never seen the ocean, never flown
on a plane, had never seen a cow face to face. We learned together
- I learned to teach and they learned just how wide the world
was. Sometimes I look back on those two years and wish that I
could write a letter of apology to each of those kids. Other times
I look back and see their faces the first time that I showed them
slides of the pyramids of Teotihuacan, or when we cooked tacos,
or the day we white-water rafted down the New River in West Virginia.
My first lessons in teaching came from these students: listen
well, take risks, don’t be afraid to love us, and set the
bar high.
CONFESSION #2: I love adolescents.
They are complicated and unpredictable and so much more interesting
than adults. After thirty three years, I still fall in love with
my classes every September and cry every June when I have to let
go. (Well, there are some exceptions when the crying is more out
of relief than sorrow...) I know that as educators we are warned
with words like “professional” and “distance”.
But for me, teaching is an intimate experience. If I don’t
know their stories and they
don‘t know mine, how can I ask students to trust me or to
take risks? I seldom use the word “students”. I call
them “my kids”. Jesse and Josey have had to share
the designation “my kids” with a hundred other children
every year of their lives.
CONFESSION #3: I think of teaching as an “imperfect
art” and myself as a work in progress.
There is so much trial and error to teaching. There is no one
sure way to get students to learn and no real way to measure success.
As teachers we see our failures so clearly, but it’s hard
to put our finger on what produced our successes. I am not talking
about test scores, MCAS, or college acceptances. I’m talking
about our most important teaching of which we never really know
the results. Did the students learn to think deeply and with a
critical eye? Do they love themselves, respect others, and care
about our world? Are they life-long learners?
CONFESSION #4: I have bad days.
First there are the ones that produce tears.....the very students
that I love made me feel worthless and boring....the lesson plan
that worked so well in A block is a complete disaster in D....the
pile of uncorrected papers means staying up all night.
Then there are the angry days.......no place to park my car....garbage
in the hallways...a salary that after 30 years can’t support
a family of three...a money proposal for the next three years
that is demoralizing. I call those my “Whole Foods”
days. They are the days that I fantasize about waking up, putting
on my farmer’s overalls and purple converse high tops and
working at Whole Foods in Cambridgeport where all I do is pack
groceries and only use my language skills to ask “papel
o plastico?”
CONFESSION #5: I hate my computer and I hate e-mail.
I long for letters with stamps and telephone calls that I can
ignore. I have been to three workshops and still cannot do a power
point presentation or edit an i-movie. The technician in the language
lab theorizes that i am my own virus and what I have can be passed
from human to machine. But my frustration and technological disasters
have taught me what it means to struggle as a learner and what
it feels like to try a task and to fail.
CONFESSION #6: Surviving in teaching long-term has meant
adjusting what makes me happy and satisfied.
When I first started teaching I imagined my students filing out
at the end of class and, one by one, thanking me for such an exciting
lesson. I imagined a clean, creatively decorated classroom. I
fantasized that someone might want to turn my lesson plans into
a book. But now I’ve learned the subtler side of happiness.
A strong paper from one of my fragile students. A class when no
one ever looked at the clock. Toilet paper in the bathroom stall.
A xerox machine in which someone has forgotten to erase their
number.
CONFESSION #7: There is nothing that I would rather teach
than Spanish.
In the olden days learning a foreign language meant endless translating
and conjugating. Each day was spent studying the trees without
even knowing that there was a forest. But now language learning
is about giving the students the building blocks to talk and write
about anything. The curriculum is the whole world, and the classroom
can be a doctor’s office, a Parisian cafe, a discussion
on ecology, or a critique of Garcia Marquez’s scathing letter
to George Bush.
CONFESSION #8: I am old enough to remember the Ed Sullivan
Show on Sunday nights.
I confess that because whenever I try to explain high school teaching
to non teachers, I need the Plate Guy from the Ed Sullivan Show.
The Plate Guy spun plates on the end of long sticks. He would
start with one plate spinning on top of a long pole. Then he would
add another spinning plate on another long pole. And another.
And another. But as each plate slowed down, he would race back
to spin it again before it fell off the pole. He ran backwards
and forwards in a frenzy of adding poles and respinning plates.
We are the Plate Guy. In a fifty minute period, we provide a learning
experience while managing the behavior of two dozen adolescents,
challenging students at different ability levels, building a classroom
community, honoring diverse learning styles, maintaining our school’s
core values and common practices, loaning a pencil, checking off
homework, giving permission to go to the bathroom, stepping over
backpacks, and searching for kleenex for a kid with a runny nose.....all
of this at the same time. And we teachers do that four or five
times a day. It’s actually a miracle when you think about
it. And that makes us all saints.
Members of the Brookline Foundation, Dr. Lupini, Bobby Weintraub,
teachers, staff, my wonderful family and friends: Thank you from
the bottom of my heart for this honor and for this day.
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