 |
Superintendent
Silverman, Members of the Brookline Education Foundation and the Brookline
School Committee, Grant Recipients, Colleagues, Friends, and Family,
I am truly honored by this award. We all share this together today
as we celebrate teachers in our community.
A
few myths to resolve before I begin: No, I am not standing on
a telephone book. Yes, I had Steve Barrasso as a math teacher.
And no, this is not my bar mitzvah tie – I wear that on
parent’s night.
I’m struck by how this speech has, in ways, become a pronouncement
about the state of education in Brookline, and thereby the world
. . . Well, I won’t let you down. The state of public education
in Brookline is GOOD! I play poker in a card game with a few teacher
friends and can now report that we now have a majority of Caverly
Award winners around our table at our next game.
Is
there a connection between playing poker and receiving this award?
Perhaps. I believe that there is a lot of chance and risk in teaching,
and thus the loosely titled theme of my speech today, “The
Risky Business of Teaching”. Gambling in teaching? You bet.
I
have an important confession to make – I never started out
as a teacher. No, I came to our profession by chance. Sitting
in a stadium that seats 106K at my college graduation, my parents
asked how they might identify me in the sea of caps and gowns.
I told them to look for the large carefully secured aluminum foil-wrapped
question mark atop my mortarboard. As I drove back to Brookline
in a rented U-Haul with $80 in my pocket, I stopped by my grandfather’s
house in Pennsylvania. A wise, traveled, medical doctor with a
strong work ethic and sense of family, I thought my visit with
him was a sort of, “Hey, I made it!” . . .. until
he asked, “So now what?” I had to say something. It’s
just who he was. It was then that it came to me. I blurted out,
“Teacher”, not really considering what I’d just
said. It worked. Grandpa Meyer promptly wrote me out a check for
$1000 and wished me well. If he were here now, I think he’d
be pleased. But he would still ask, “And now what?”
My
first brush with teaching came in the fall of 1984. My father’s
wife, also a BHS graduate and school teacher, suggested substitute
teaching to supplement my evening job as a door-to-door canvasser.
In fact, I come from a family of teachers, my father a college
professor and my mother an arts teacher and Jewish educator. In
retrospect, subbing was great: Lots of new students to meet, each
day is different, and no papers to take home. Later that year,
a math teacher at the High School had a long-term illness, and
I was drafted to replace her. For the next three months I took
on five math classes, some in rooms I’d sat in as a student
several years before. By necessity, I worked out how to write
lessons plans, design quizzes and tests, establish a rapport with
a class, and seek support from my new colleagues when needed.
I was doing all the stuff of teacher training, and without supervision.
It was tough work, but having been a student not too long before,
it just made sense what to do. Kids gave instant feedback about
what worked and what didn’t work, and offered as much support
as fellow teachers. Assigning grades, associating with new colleagues
in the faculty cafeteria (I grew a beard to distinguish myself
from kids and to convince some of my former teachers to now take
me as one of them), and responding to parents seemed so . . .
mature. I recall one interaction with a parent, a single mom,
who called me at home one evening desperately looking for a ‘fatherly
influence for her son’, and could I be that influence. Having
just turned 22, no one prepared me for any of this.
I quickly realized that teaching was tough. My former teachers,
whom I’d always respected, were now gods. I had no idea
the number of decisions, dilemmas, and responsibility. As my colleague
David Moore has said, ‘No one said this job was easy, just
important’.
Upon her return, Ms. Lane settled back into her classroom three
months after her leave, thanked me for taking over her five classes,
and as I
walked toward the door asked if I’d found in her desk all
of the quizzes, tests and daily lesson plans she’d carefully
put together for the substitute in her absence.
As
a former student in the Brookline Public Schools, I was urged
by many of my colleagues to share some stories. Perhaps at the
expense of several professional relationships, I’ll save
those for another time and place.
Yet I do reflect on my student time in Brookline frequently. It
took a while to shake off the flashbacks to pop quizzes, lab write-ups
due, and paper re-writes in the same rooms where I was a student.
Just as a river can never rise above its source, I could not stand
here today without acknowledging those teachers, my sources, whose
practice I draw from each year.
-
Lynne Yanity, my fifth grade teacher, taught us in an open
classroom, an early 1970s experiment with risk-taking from
the other side of the desk. Mrs. Yanity was pregnant then
with her first child, and we joked about watching each other
grow throughout the year. I’ve kept up with Lynne, a
tri-athlete, and still innovative in the class after more
than 30 years of teaching, and learned much later that she
was a finalist for the first teacher in space on the space
shuttle Challenger.
-
I honor Wally Gleekman, Myron Tupa, Jim Smith, Bob Wiggin,
and Sydra Schnipper, who made all the difference in math class,
even if she called on Lew Schneider or that Conan guy more
than other students. I honor Iain Ryrie, former coach, teacher,
friend and confidant, and Abby Erdmann, who is always there
and continues to challenge me while asking all the important
questions.
Beth
Thompson, previous Caverly Award winner, has noted that there’s
a fine line between being an award-winning teacher . . . and getting
fired.
We classroom teachers, in fact all of us who work with children,
are constantly presented with chance and challenges that involve
informed decision-making, care, and risk. Taking risks and inviting
challenge is just good teaching. I can say this because, following
Beth’s words, I stand before you as the recent award-winning
teacher instead of the recently fired. But, like any job, there’s
a temptation to settle into a sort of cruise control after teaching
several years. This is anathema to our practice. Doing what is
easy, that doesn’t challenge, is our certain professional
death. I’m grateful to the Brookline Public Schools and
the Brookline Education Foundation for urging us to take risks, and for
supporting the need for constant re-examination of what we do
collectively to educate our children.
Richard
Elmore, of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, writes
about schools’ ‘Communities of Practice’, groupings
of educators who share common values and theories of action about
learning. These communities serve to build trust, create confidence
and support, and share with its members a common language that
inspires reflection about good teaching.
I’m proud to be part of several communities that include
the High School Science Department, School Within A School, the
BEA, the Athletics Department, and yes, the teacher card game.
These smaller communities offer support to us as we challenge
and take risks in our classes.
Sometimes it works, other times it doesn’t, but we learn
all the same.
And knowing that I am learning with my students is important.
For if we as teachers stop learning, our students follow. And
our students are always watching us. Communities of practice,
formal and informal, allow and encourage risk taking. And we must
both work with chance as well as model and take risks as educators
– to remain conventional and prescriptive is just ordinary
teaching, which creates merely modest learning; Albert Einstein
once said, chance favors the prepared mind.
Here
I must distinguish between chance and risk. Chance is the students
you are dealt each September; risk is the willingness to go beyond
the curriculum with them and develop meaningful relationships
built on trust, caring, and concern. Chance is the colleagues
who you work alongside daily in your practice; risk is opening
up your door to them.
And risk? Challenging peers and administrators about notions of
learning, educating, and evaluating. Brookline offers incredible
license to its professional educators, but our conversations about
how to do what’s right by our students are lacking. Continue
to question and challenge the achievement gap, student by student,
and don’t accept the default explanations of differences
in access or privilege. Run into parents in Coolidge Corner and
challenge them about the difficulty educating children in the
age of Internet, high-stakes testing, and a culture that places
increasing value on name colleges, as they challenge us about
the difficulty of raising children under these same conditions
. . . risk turning on your classroom TV on a Tuesday morning in
September to watch the twin towers collapse, then ask students
WHY others can hate so much.
Every
now and then, chance pays off.
-
I’m
proud to share my room with the weekly meeting of MCAS protestors
who raise awareness of the meaning of educating in an era
of conventionality and conformity.
-
I’m
proud to bring a few seniors every year to perform a chemistry
‘road show’ for the grade schools. It could be
to David Weinstein’s first grade class at Pierce or
Francesca Stark’s 5th graders at Driscoll. It’s
only with a few students each year, but these teaching moments
for these few seniors are profound, all in an effort to have
students understand just how difficult it is to approach and
grasp the art of teaching. Some of these seniors have since
become teachers.
-
I’m
proud to have been asked to teach in the High School’s
Opportunity for Change Program several years ago (though I
declined this honor due to scheduling conflicts), where risk
and chance as an educator are woven into the daily routine.
I recognize that a true master teacher is one who can teach
to all, and especially to those who find the daily rhythm
of school a constant struggle.
-
I’m
proud to risk-take with Phil Katz and the BEA, which continues
to challenge and support our contract, and argue for teacher’s
rights, despite a sometimes uncaring state bureaucracy.
-
I’m proud to be able to teach science to my daughter’s
4th grade class during my free periods, even if risky chemical
demonstrations set off school-wide fire alarms, but I won’t
get into this . . .
-
I’m
proud to have the chance to teach in a smaller school within
a school, where questioning the meaning of our education and
our purpose in schools is a common subtext to our curriculum.
When we call our far-flung alumni back for the occasional
reunion, many report that they’ve become teachers, professors,
educators, or social service professionals because of the
questioning they did in SWS as teenagers.
-
And I’m proud to be able to take risks as a father,
son, brother, and husband because of support at home—knowing
that at the end of a long day at school, there’s still
much to learn about raising family, listening, and caring
for each other.
I
reflect on walks home from school with friend and colleague Ric
Calleja early in our teaching careers. As we walked down Harvard
St., past places where we’d both worked as busboys or store
baggers as kids, we pondered this difficult job together along
side beginning our own families. On days when our teaching lagged,
we’d rent and watch “Stand And Deliver” or some
other movie that actually glorified the teaching practice (as
opposed to stereotyping us as underpaid, overworked, and disrespected).
Or we’d watch each other teach for ideas. It didn’t
matter that Ric taught Spanish and I taught chemistry. We had
the same mission. We questioned, and continue to question, a lot
of what we did in our classes and, following the then-recently
published A Nation At Risk in the mid-80s, felt the war cry to
do better by our students. As fellow teachers across disciplines,
we supported each other, and I know that this has made the difference
for us.
Teachers,
ever malleable in our mission, are asked to both solve education’s
problems while bettering our individual practices. Is this possible?
I am convinced that top-down reforms from the State House and
Washington, D.C. do more damage than good as they punish us by
substituting innovation and personal curricular values with mandated
directives, labeling teachers as sources of school’s failures
instead of promoting them as potential saviors. Until policy makers
truly listen to the voices from the schoolhouse instead of shaping
mandates without direct input from teachers and students, teachers
will continue to unrightfully take blame for school’s failures.
We can do better. I laud our school committee for taking thoughtful
public stands on external accountability in our schools, and I
urge them to continue to take risks and question the political
agendas that far-away policy-makers pass onto our children. Our
schools are already so rich with what’s right about education.
The
system of awards and punishments in the era of high stakes testing
sees the world, much like our current administration in Washington,
as good or evil. Not nuanced and complex. Either you pass or fail.
I seriously question this all-or-none view. In fact, as David
Brooks wrote in a recent New York Times editorial, many of the
traits that allow students to excel at high-stakes tests and succeed
in a broad range of subjects or demonstrate teacher-pleasing competence,
may in fact be the qualities that will only take them so far.
Many who are successful think differently, instead of following
what the teacher said, were not prudential, but instead took risks
and thrived where there was no supervision. Being forced to see
our students in neat categories doesn’t acknowledge the
complexity of each individual. I love the quote hanging behind
my desk in class from Vladimir Nabokov, himself both a trained
scientist and, of course, noted writer, “There is no science
without fancy, and no art without facts.”
Casting
aside the conventional, I return to my primary community of practice
on the fourth floor in SWS, that enclave of intellectual, social,
and sanitary unruliness that has persisted since I was 7 years
old. My colleagues Richard Goldberg, David Moore, Ellen Kaplovitz,
and Abby Erdmann are family, and my practice as a teacher (and
ideas of education that were formed with them as a student), support,
question, and inspire daily. Our connection through our students,
our shared educational values, and an overall mission to create
questioning, thoughtful, responsive student-citizens is the simple
reason I continue to love my work.
And when the chips are down, I forever seek to at least break
even with school’s tensions and dilemmas, risks and chances,
yet I am comforted knowing that all of you as teachers struggle
to seek similar balance. In this sense, teaching – like
the card game – is merely a forum for shared chance, risk-taking
with much higher stakes, and an opportunity to challenge students
and teachers with care and support.
I am truly humbled by the honor of this award and I thank all
of you for being part of my very personal community of practice.
Thank you. |
