More Coffee, Please

In a field as stable as teaching is perceived to be, it’s sometimes amazing how quickly change can occur. Sadly, not always in the ways it should—but in this week it has changed for me.

On Tuesday of this week, I accepted an offer to teach at the Monadnock Community Connections school—though what exactly that means and how it will play out is still being discussed. I know I’ll be working with Kim Carter and the rest of the staff, and I know I will teach—much of the rest is up in the air.

Before I write the rest of this, I’ll preface by saying I hate change. It’s a rather odd thing to admit for an educator who spends a good chunk of time telling his kids to embrace their heroic journey and earned a Masters in school change, but I’m naturally content to have things stay the same. Same is comforting to me—even though I know intellectually it’s the one things schools don’t need.

So this wasn’t easy. I love my classes, I love my kids, and I love my school. The best part of my day is the moment I walk in, and I work with really great people. I didn’t want to leave any of them.

On the other hand, I know that so much of what I do every day in my room is not based on best practice, but on what has worked and what is traditional in the space of a public school.

If I’ve been successful, it’s been a qualified success—successful for public schools. In education circles, private schools—which to many unfamiliar with them are the bastions of truly good education and also thought to be bastions of conservative teaching methods—are the most progressive and least like public schools.

One colleague told me once that no teacher at Philips Exeter Academy lectures. Although it may be an exaggeration—there is nothing wrong with lecture as one tool—it’s a sign of the problem that public high schools (including my own classroom) remain dominated by instructional methods little changed from fifty years ago…despite generations of students who hated this experience when they were going though it themselves.¹

If I am to grow as a teacher, and truly serve my kids as I should, then it’s going to require more than just good intentions. There’s a need to go beyond what I’m comfortable with, and that’s scary, but I ask my kids to do it, and I should be able to do the same. Nothing about MC² will allow me to just use “what works” but will (hopefully) lead me to develop better practices.

At the same time, although we all admit that public schools have problems and need to be fixed, as reluctant as I am to embrace change, the public is even more so. We don’t often trust those at the cutting edge, and though MC² is based on research based best practices (the kind of thing we consistently take classes about but fail to really adopt, or can’t really adopt because of the old nature of the schools we go back to) the school is viewed as a risk, as a dangerous razor. It cuts into our perceptions of what school should be, and what defines an education. There’s a dichotomy present here…there’s a group of educators who know that there are problems and yet don’t trust something which looks to be a solution.

August 14th’s school board meeting went to midnight or so, and the primary topic of conversation was MC². It’s going to be there for at least one more year—but like almost every year since its conception, its future is uncertain.

I’m a public school educated, public school trained educator who has a chance to work in a program which seems like it promises to promote real learning. It’s a school that the kids I talk to like and value their learning. It’s also a place that hasn’t had much luck getting experienced teachers to really adapt and adopt its model (I’m obviously trusting I will be an exception). I can see why—who has more investment in existing public schools than the teachers who work in them?

I hope I can open a window into what’s going on for the people in my district, for the kids who don’t understand, and for the adults who think they do. I hope they learn as much as I think I will.

Finally, the last and most important piece—my kids. I almost said “no” because I think there’s an implicit promise made to those students who see my name on the schedule in May or June. I think those kids who sign up for my senior elective do so partly because they’re interested, but partly because I’m teaching it. Every educator I spoke to told me not to worry about this element, and I couldn’t not.

Sometimes a teacher is the only one who seems to care. Sometimes I’ve been that teacher.

No matter how I might try, there was going to be damage done to someone. I’ve been incredibly impressed with the core group of students who make up the newspaper—although they were the ones most shocked and hurt, they were also the ones who turned around and quickly said, “you gotta do it.” I haven’t met a kid yet who didn’t think it was the right decision after talking to me about it, and I haven’t met the kid yet who wasn’t hurting a little.

In education, the decisions adults make about careers, growth, jobs and schools don’t effect them nearly as much as they do the children we serve.

I would do anything to prevent that kind of fallout. We can be insensitive to the hurt and damage we cause², and I didn’t want that to be me—so much so I tried to negotiate teaching a single section of my elective. I was (wisely, I think) over-ruled, but I am staying faculty advisor to the Pawprint. I hope that the Critical Friend’s Group I’ve been training all week to coach and organize for new teachers is something that won’t fall by the way-side at MRHS if I’m not there—I’m going to be doing all new work, and I want to be there for the new teachers who will be starting their own new journey this year.

My former student teacher, who I trust explicitly, will be there. That helps.

I hope I can find that line between still being there in the building enough the kids know I care, and not there enough to let them accept and move on.

It’s all about the journey. I’m looking forward to this branch. I’m hoping a great many join me on the walk.

1 I’d point out one of the things I like most about MC² is that the kids like their school. So many people recognize the need to make changes to school, and yet are so afraid to do so—which speaks to the trap we’re in. Change is hard, we need to change…and we’d rather not have to…so we stall and we don’t. I get it, but the ones who are hurt are our children. Why do we allow them to suffer so much?

2 This week I read the essay of a student who was, in his own dimly understood way, dealing with the rage and pain of the programs shut-down at Thayer High School in the build-up to transferring to Keene. I’ve heard, through the edges, the same raw agony in the voices of adults and children when word that the Federal grant which allowed students to be taught at MC² for free from outside the district ended, and those kids suddenly realized their time in a school they love was ended. To an adult, it’s a decision, a vote. To the kids involved, it’s murder, and they’re the bodies that line the road.

Gregarious

Share This