Occupy EDU – The Education version of Occupy Wall Street

Excellent piece here about how Wall Street and trends in corporate America impact public schools, teachers, children, and the institution of public education.

Take a read!

Teaching “Occupy Wall Street” and Being Class-Sensitive Pedagogues

An important way to be class-sensitive in our teaching is to pay attention to current events around issues of social class and poverty and bring them into the classroom.

If you haven’t already started teaching about the movement of Occupy Wall Street – the protest against economic inequality that started in New York City a month ago and has spread across the world – this is an exciting time to be doing so.

This is also a terrific time to reconsider how things such as “Stock Market” and “Monopoly” games are taught and why they have become such a staple in schools over the past thirty years promoting investment in Wall Street and a focus on “profits” without necessarily considering the consequences of high profits on people, community, and natural resources.

Check out “Anti-Monopoly” game here.

Check out “Socially Responsible” Companies here.

Like all things, there are no simple answers to the issues being illuminated in OWS, but they create amazing material for conversation and continued research in schools and classrooms.

Teaching OWS can integrate reading, writing, history, economics, geography, math, citizens’ rights, politics and the influence of money in political races, community rules, etc. and could be used at any grade level with varying levels of sophistication. (For example, early elementary classrooms might roleplay a “General Assembly” from OWS in their classroom to see its benefits and disadvantages in making decisions for the whole group, or PK and Kindergarteners might like to see how OWS is using the “human microphone” and try it during their outdoor activities).

A wikipedia entry for OWS is live and being revised constantly and offers some fun facts about the movement up to this point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street

Happy Teaching!

The end of Corporations in the Classroom? Not quite, but some movement…

Check out this story on Scholastic’s decision  to end most of their corporate partnerships for distributing curriculum materials in schools after receiving sustained critique from organizations such as Rethinking Schools and Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood. 

Some fabulous inquiries for K-12 classrooms might include:

In what ways do corporations influence children and youth directly through schools?

Study the history of advertising to better understand the strategies used to influence children/youth. In what ways have these marketing approaches been criticized or ended? What other measures could be taken toward a “commercial-free” childhood?

Are there curricular materials in your classroom/school that position you to buy/consume certain products/services?

Are there curricular materials in your classroom/school that position you to believe certain things that might benefit corporations?

What kinds of analytical tools can provide all children and youth with the ability to deconstruct texts of all kinds?

What role do testing corporations have in determining what is and is not taught/learned in schools? What can students and educators do about that?

Have fun!

“Guys like me…” a story for educators and policy makers

A tear glistened in the corner of his eye.

I looked away for a moment and he wiped under his glasses, erasing the physical evidence of an emotional history that just won’t go away.

“I might have had a hard time reading, but I could do so much,” he told me.

“They just decided I wouldn’t amount to anything so I was de-celerated. They thought my friend was good in math, so he was ac-celerated. I mean – that’s that. They just decided then and there that he was going to be something and I wasn’t.”

He hasn’t been in elementary school for at least forty years, but here he is giving a detailed recounting of a young boy in school and all going terribly wrong.

“I mean, I am really good at so many things. I build engines. I work really well with people. I am a dedicated worker. One-hundred ten percent. That’s what they say about me – no matter what it is, I give one hundred and ten percent.”

He talks about his yard at home today, the careful manicuring of it, the careful planting of flowers, the pruning of bushes and trees, the miniature fish pond.

“Even my work at home – I give one hundred and ten percent. They had no right to say I was dumb.”

You’re right, I said, I consider that abuse.

“The truth is they should have accelerated me. If teachers think someone is struggling, that child should not be put in a slower class, they should be put in a class that speeds up their learning. Accelerate them.”

I just listened.

Always moved by the insight people have about institutions, specifically schools, and why they go so wrong.

Always wondering how and why they’re able to point to gaping holes and blatant problems when people on the inside can’t often see them.

“Guys like me aren’t bad. We aren’t stupid. We are smart, we’re just smart at different things. Good at different things. And I can read, I read all the time. Give me any book or manual about work or engines and I know exactly what it’s saying.”

I agree, I said. School should be the place where everyone can be good and everyone can be smart. Schools can change to make sure the conditions are right for everyone to be perceived as good and smart – at different things.

“You agree with me then?” he asked.

For the first time I realized that he had been preparing for a debate, preparing to convince me that he was right and that schools (including educators like me) were wrong. He sort of knew me as a family friend, knew I was a college professor in another state, knew I was friendly enough but assumed I was like every other teacher he had come across in his life – in line with the school way of categorizing and labeling and accelerating and decelerating and only caring about how fast someone learns to read and how well they do on tests.

Yes I agree with you.

“Is it changing then? I mean, are schools changing now and not doing those things?” he asked.

Unfortunately not most schools – but a lot of people are trying to make changes, I said.

“Are you teaching the new teachers to be different?” he asked.

I am trying. One thing I do is have my students read chapters and books about motorcycle repair, waitressing, plumbing, and carpentry.

The first hint of a smile spreads across his face, “You do?”

Yeah. Most teachers don’t understand the intelligence and creativity it takes to work on cars, build things, work in service industries. I hope that if they understand more about intelligence and creativity in these ways they might recognize every student’s amazing potential.

We smile silently for awhile and I look away unable to stare at the deep emotional scars this man has carried with him for all these years.

“The other day I was cleaning out my garage and found a sign my mom gave me when I was younger. It says, “God don’t make junk,” and it has a picture of a little boy on it. She gave that to me. She knew the teachers thought I was stupid and she didn’t want me to think I was stupid. That’s tough.”

More silence and a wave of guilt and shame washes over me. Why do I choose to be a part of an institution that inflicts just as much pain and damage as it does joy and optimism?

I often tell my undergraduates, “Just please don’t be the teacher that sends the forty-year-old to therapy.” It’s kind of a joke and kind of not – it’s a reminder that what we do and say to people today impacts their lives in ways that we will never fully understand, and at the very least, we should aim to do no damage.

But guys like him don’t go to therapists.

They’re tough guys. Working guys. Family guys. Hanging out with the buddies and a beer guys. Mowing the lawn on Saturday morning guys.

Guys like him don’t talk about a second grade teacher and a middle school teacher and everyone in between and how those school years damaged them in irreparable ways and about a poster their mother gave them in elementary school to combat the teachers at school and how that poster just happens to still be in the garage when they’re middle-aged guys.

Until they do.

Until he does.

Then a tear glistens and escapes and a strange specimen of a woman asks, “Can I write your story?” and he agrees, if I think it will help someone.

He nods his head, “Just one person, you know. If you can just help one person know that he is smart and can do anything he puts his mind to. Or just help one teacher who can then make a difference to so many people. Then that’s worth it.”

I sat there recalling the stories told by Native Americans who experienced the Indian Boarding Schools and how they cried, sobbed, and revealed so much pain and anxiety because of their experiences in those educational institutions.

I imagined what we might learn from a 2-hour special of guys like him looking straight into the camera and telling educators how they had them wrong all those years – had it all wrong – and how teachers’ perceptions drilled holes through their dignity and confidence and courage and potential.

Perhaps I’ll work on a bigger project sometime soon, but for now, maybe a glimpse of one guy’s story might just get someone’s attention.

 

 

a thousand paths to happiness…including one little book

“There are thousands of paths that lead to happiness, but you have accepted only one. You have not considered other paths because you think that yours is the only one that leads to happiness. You have followed this path with all your might, and so the other paths, the thousands of others, have remained closed to you.” Thich Nhat Hanh’s new book, you are here: Discovering the magic of the present moment, is such a delightful treat to read and consider and I am enjoying myself immensely each day when I settle in and drink another paragraph of wisdom.

A thousand paths to happiness has me really thinking though, and I couldn’t resist jumping on the computer and pounding out a few lines (one thing that often makes me happy) about this notion and what it might mean to me – at least in this moment.

If there are, indeed, thousands of paths to happiness, then all of those thousands of paths should be encouraged and valued and celebrated and shared. In other words, diversity wins again, and not only should we encourage and celebrate diversity, but we should do everything possible to prevent any kind of restrictive ideas that limit possibilities and promote standardization of human beings and life in any way.

If there are, indeed, thousands of paths to happiness, then why aren’t we actively teaching children and youth to seek happiness, or better yet to “be free to experience the happiness that just comes to us without our having to seek it” (Thich Nhat Hanh, p. 75). This could move us a long way beyond the false promise of a “good job” so well-advertised throughout every level of education.

If school isn’t about promoting thousands of paths toward happiness, then what is it and why would we want to do something other than teach toward happiness?

Some readers are blowing me off now, huffing and puffing at their screen because they think it’s all fluff to teach happiness – so without going into excessive detail here, I’ll add that working with passion and engaging in intellectual journeys around academic content or in a workplace can be a path to happiness. Don’t worry reader – we’re not going to end up with a society of non- “workers” because everyone is sitting lotus-style in a forest seeking happiness. We might, however, end up with lots of people who refuse to sell their soul and time/life to corporations doing meaningless “work.” Wouldn’t that be interesting?

Has anyone out there ever read a school vision statement that included the words “happy” or “happiness”? I’d love to hear if you have.

And this ‘thousands of paths’ has me thinking of other things regarding “diversity” – we humans are all just different and somehow we keep trying to shove us all into the same-sized box. Just like ecological diversity is imperative to the survival of earth, human diversity is also imperative to the (healthy) survival of the species. While this is not only about the “size” of us humans (it’s also about our lifestyles, family and community structures, livelihoods, homes, interactions, relationships, physical looks, tastes, etc. etc.), diversity in size and shape should also be a consideration. I’m stuck on this a bit because of the recent onslaught of the “Obesity Epidemic” across the country and the fetish we seem to currently have around body measurements, plastic surgery, and the persistent metaphorical and literal chiseling away at natural diversity among bodies.

Just one example -

Body Mass Index (BMI)  and the push for schools to include children’s BMI on report cards even though CDC reports there is no evidence that such actions would change anything about childhood health and/or obesity.

Folks have – and will continue – to debate me that “there is a real obesity epidemic – parents need to know their children’s BMI and what those numbers mean and get control over what their children are eating.” Okay – and what role has school and Corporate America played in this heavy-ing of America’s children? Do we slap some numbers onto a child’s report card and insist that parents do something to change those numbers when kids are at school 7-8 hours a day and have to complete 2 hours of homework between 4pm and the 8pm bedtime? I might be exaggerating a bit in some contexts, and underestimating in others – but this is yet another way to tell parents how they are the individuals to blame for a societal problem that is only exacerbated in schools: over-processed foods are served for breakfast and lunch in cafeterias and recess is non-existent for most children above the age 8 and limited to only 10 minutes for children up to 8 in public schools.

Hmmmmm….schools work harder and harder to get kids to sit still and be quiet for 7 hours at a time preparing for tests and covering standards while only breaking to eat over-processed foods that are high in fat and sodium, then expect the kids to sit at home for 2 more hours at night to do homework and schools are going to “report” children’s BMI to parents so the parents can fix it?

I’m against the use of numbers for nearly everything and BMI is included – I always believe a holistic perspective on a person’s health and lifestyle is much more important than a single number that may be used to determine categories that label and blame and shame people. But let’s pretend for a moment that I accept BMI as some good indicator of a child’s health (even though CDC might argue against that). Perhaps we might allow schools to include the BMI on the report card and demand they also include a specific plan the school will take to ensure the child has access to healthy foods and sufficient exercise and physical play during the day. In other words – the BMI becomes a reflection of the way an institution operates rather than good or poor parenting.

So back to a thousand paths to happiness…

Maybe if we taught children to feel happiness, to see the infinite possibilities for happiness, to see happiness in unexpected places, and to cultivate happiness through mindful practice (including mindful practices of eating), we might find ourselves educating the most diverse, happy, healthy children on earth. What if school’s purpose was to cultivate happiness, peacefulness, contentedness, connectedness? Of course some private schools and home schoolers have been doing this for a long time, but what if public schools put these purposes first and foremost in their work? The possibilities make me smile – and happy.

Keep my kid off the computer…or, “Will computers replace teachers?”

Are computers replacing teachers already? Read this provocative article and see for yourself.

This is an education issue: the focus on memorization and high-stakes tests aligns nicely with computer-based tasks for kids; but of course most of us hate the focus on low-level “learning” and multiple choice tests that dominate schools today. I don’t want my kid tied to a computer for hours during the day – have you ever watched a kid’s positive energy level and attitude fall to below zero after spending too much time in front of the screen? For all that computer-based technology can offer us in life, it steals much away, including a focus on nature, human contact, creativity in the material world.

Recently a 1st grade teacher told me that her school’s RTI (That’s Response to Intervention) checklist of possibilities for “interventions” for struggling students included a list of 10 possibilities: the first 9 were all computer-based, and what was the 10th possibility? A human-based intervention. ALERT! If your school is naming a teaching/learning interaction as a “human-based intervention” you must know that educational aspirations are not only low, but your job is on the way out the door (and mine’s not far behind).

This is a labor issue: The more number-crunching data-seeking, statistics-acquiring folks get ahold of our education system, the more likely it will be that computers will come to the rescue with standards-based, rigid lessons aligned with tests; multiple-choice tasks to prepare children for test-taking; and repetitive “games” will lure our children into the hypnotic state of screen staring “education.” But guess what? A computer and a few games (and perhaps even the maintenance folks to take care of them…probably housed in India) are cheaper than a knowledgeable, well-educated, creative teacher who can respond individually to each student’s academic, social, and emotional needs. Get a shipment of 1,000 laptops, ipads, or smartphones into a school, set up the children on programs meant to keep them isolated, quiet, and still for hours, and hire a couple folks who don’t know a thing about teaching/learning or the content to walk through rooms filled with hunched over bodies and you’ve got yourself a really cheap way to do school.

But don’t hunch my kid over a high-tech device.

This is a health issue: I know it personally – so those of you who know me have heard this a million times, and you can even an old blog post about it. But here’s the short version – I’m still in physical therapy 2.5 years after experiencing severe pain and depression caused from neck and shoulder injuries caused from hunching over computers writing, reading, sending emails, blogging…well, you get it. For months I couldn’t carry a bag of groceries, wash dishes, or even pick up a skillet. I cried regularly and thought I would even have to find another job. I slept a lot – too much – I couldn’t bear to get out of bed some days. And when I talk to my 20-year-old undergraduates about it, they stare at me with wide eyes and share their stories of stiff fingers, cramped thumbs, numb forearms, aching shoulders, throbbing necks. Our bodies aren’t meant to be hunched over devices such as the one I’m typing on now (doing my best not to hunch, but planning to sign off for the evening very soon). We are ruining our bodies – and I don’t want my kid ruining hers before she is even finished physically growing.

So we need to do the best we can to push the hunching devices and screens (even those over-sized screens hanging in the fronts of many of our classrooms that make kids sit still and stare straight ahead), right back out of the center of education. It’s not only about the centrality of humans interacting in teaching/learning, it’s also about jobs – and thus the economy, and our health.

Listen up Reformers – Parents are looking for something completely different from what you are offering

Here’s a great article by a parent in Philadelphia - ideas I completely agree with and I really hope Reformers are listening.

 

And here’s a little story of my own:

 

I pulled my daughter out of public school last year.

It was one of the most difficult decisions I have made in recent history; one I dreamt about, talked incessantly about, and did everything possible to not make the decision I ultimately made. And even though Hayden isn’t in public school right now, I continue to fight (and scream, and blog, and cry, and work) for public education.

Hayden now attends the “Freedom to Grow UNschool” (sounds lovely, huh?), and with one year under our belt, I am so relieved that I did make that decision. Her third grade year, which would have otherwise been overshadowed by the mandatory state test, was incredible. She studied a local park, researched the medieval times and questioned economic inequities reflected in housing and fashion, she planned and carried out a fashion show as a result – from start to finish, she experienced what it was like to edit the school newspaper published once a month, she studied the Mississippi floods, accelerated her understanding of foundational and analytical math, she learned about the Children’s March during the Civil Rights and connected it to civil rights issues today and what children can do to make a difference, she learned how to compost, how to track animals, identify trees, and use some basic survival skills in the wilderness. She painted and constructed and read and danced and wrote and pretended and analyzed and experimented and inquired and sang and laughed and learned the messiness of maintaining a community where everyone is valued even when everyone doesn’t agree with one another.

All in one school year.

And in a school where there is a “no homework” policy.

Her achievements in 3rd grade were remarkable – truly impressive even if I wasn’t her mother:) And I know things would have been entirely different for her and us had we left her in the school she was attending – a Title I school under the stresses of NCLB where the 3rd grade test is all that matters, teachers were required to be “on the same page”, the gifted class is focused on state standards, field trips are rare, recess almost non-existent, and homework every night. During her 2nd grade year she cried on a regular basis; begged us not to take her to school; had nightmares in her sleep; accidents in her pants (!); regularly lost her 10 minute recess for having to use the restroom at the wrong time of day; and learned that school was a place she had to go, but she never expected it to be a place of joy, curiosity, creativity, exploration, and building a foundation of lifelong learning and engaged citizenship.

What State legislators and other Educational Reformers don’t understand is that parents, like us – even the hard-nosed-public-education-is-the-backbone-of-democracy parents, are sick of the education we have been stuck with since the NCLB hammer started pounding on local schools.

We are sick of the small-thinking.

We are sick of the stress.

We are sick of the standards.

We are sick of the essential questions.

We are sick of the pre-tests, the post-tests, the practice-tests, the “real” tests, the awards for tests, the pep rallies for tests, the “how-to-parent-during-state-testing-week” newsletters, the computerized tests, the reading tests, the math tests, the “if you can write it down on a piece of paper we’re gonna test it” test.

We are sick of AYP.

We are sick of homework that brings on tears and resistance and family misery every night.

We are sick of every child being in “intervention” – constantly – to improve test scores. (Yes, every child in my daughter’s school went to “intervention” every single day…what in the hell kind of education are we creating called intervention??!!)

We want schools to belong to us and to our children and we want inspired and compassionate and intellectual teachers to lead us.

We want our teachers to be creative, and inspiring, and spontaneous, and curious – not stressed out because they’re not on the same page or lesson as the teacher next door, or that they might lose their job because the school isn’t meeting AYP, or that their evaluation and salary might be positively or negatively impacted by students’ test scores, or that their lesson plans aren’t in the right format, or that they didn’t get all their pre- and pre/pre- and post- and post/post- testing done in time. I mean with all that stress, who can respond calmly and compassionately to a child sitting in front of you? Or who can jump up and decide that third or fourth graders studying literary uses of the weather need to run outside when it’s raining to see for themselves all the different ways rain could be used in literature as symbolism? Or who has the energy to schedule guest speakers and local field trips during an intensive study of the local economy and how a community can build sustainable practices and promote more equality amongst its citizens when they have mountains of paperwork to complete and more tests to give and prepare to give? (Oh – and sustainable communities isn’t a part of the Standards, so it’s a side-project to begin with, strategically hidden from other teachers and supervisors).

We want our children to love to learn, to read, to question, to analyze, to contemplate, to sing, to perform, to draw, to play, to have friends, to feel like school is a happy and meaningful place to be.

We want our children to have recess. (Yes, we actually believe that children and adolescents need unstructured play time during the day – we prefer not to think of our pride and joy heading into a sweatshop every day).

We want our children to smile. To feel valued. To be perceived as possibility and promise – not as a potential test score.

In short – my family specifically, and lots of families across this country have suffered because of Educational Reform. And we’re sick of it – every single bit of it. Even the incredibly condescending and superficial “family engagement plans” schools now have to have parents sign and return to school each year.

Give back our teachers.

Give back our rights for a well-rounded, rich, high-quality education.

Give back our children’s childhoods.

Give back our family’s sanity.

Listen up Reformers – you are driving us mad, and driving us away. We are looking for something completely different from the menu of options you are serving.

 

 

 

 

 

 

the trouble with language…and the beauty of trouble

“White Trash” is an insult I just can’t stomach, but then Dorothy Allison reclaimed it by naming a collection of short stories Trash and my linguistic sensibilities begin to wobble. When is White Trash being used as an insult to poor white folks, and when is it being used as an insult to mainstream society? How will I know the difference? Usually I do know the difference – it depends on the speaker’s intonation, their facial expression, their body language, and feelings of their own superiority (or inferiority as it may be). Want to know what I’ve done in the past when folks have said it in my company? I make a simple statement, “I don’t know what you mean.” “Oh, you know what I mean,” a speaker might say in response. “No, what do you mean exactly?”

But no one wants to articulate their classist and racist beliefs explicitly…so I smile and we move on, both of us well aware of what just occurred.

Words are re-voiced constantly, always carrying their legacies with each use, but then used with a particular intention of the speaker. Where’s the trouble? When the speaker and the listener have different ideas of what that word means (or, perhaps when they absolutely agree on the meaning of the word but disagree with how it’s being used).

Another word I’ve never been able to stomach is the “N” word (see? I can’t even actually write the word…). I’ve seen fifth grade African America boys shut down and punished because of their use of the word in a White teacher’s classroom – and I’ve seen White folks use the word in the most despicable ways.

Usually schools – including universities where a focus might be multiculturalism or diversity or cultural sensitivity – simply want to silence such language. Does silencing language take away the pain of words used for such insult?

I say no – and with students as young as first grade and as advanced as graduate school I’ve thrown a word on the chalkboard (yes, on an old-fashioned chalkboard, one of the most useful technologies still in responsive teaching!) and opened up a conversation about it. Some of those words have included:

Learning Disabled or “LD”

Stupid

Gay

White Trash

Black

White

Illegal

I have never had the spontaneous opportunity nor the guts to plan ahead to write the “N” word on the board and open up the possibility for the beauty that can come from such trouble. But this amazing middle school teacher did.

From Teaching Tolerance:

The Power of the N Word

Submitted by Carrie Craven on May 26, 2011

• Keywords:
• Stereotypes and bias
• Race and ethnicity

“Ms. Craven, we can put ‘nigga?’”

I pause. Images of earnest sitting-in-a-circle chats in college flash through my brain:

• A classmate from Kentucky explaining how she will never say that word, even in academic circles, because, being white, she will never be able to fully grasp its implications;
• Another black classmate asserting that the word has been reclaimed, and that when black people use it, the poison of the original use gets diluted.

Meanwhile, my 13- and 14-year-olds look at me from a class that is mostly black. They generally have heard only that the n-word is either “cursing” or “ghetto.”

“I’m not sure how I feel about that,” I say honestly.  “What do you think?”

This week my kids are working on their understanding of parts of speech by making teenage dictionaries. Slang and text-speak are all allowed, although cursing and offensive language are not. Of course, I’m walking a dangerous line. If kids were good at knowing what words are appropriate for a school setting, we’d all have one less thing to teach. I, for one, would have far fewer detentions.

But I got into this project knowing these things would come up. I decided I was okay with that. My real, true, not-in-the-Louisiana-Comprehensive-Curriculum goal for this project was to involve my students in a discussion about the power of words. And here we were. Discussion begun.

“It’s just what we call each other,” said Devonta, “It’s like, ‘Wassup, son.’”

Jared replies, “Nah man, that’s what white people called us in the slave days.”

I asked them if the word meant the same thing for everybody—if it means the same thing from everybody. Would they would be okay if I used this word, for example.  (The response was mixed.)

Quite understandably, kids who saw the word primarily as a relic of its “-er” origin decided they should not include the word. Those who saw it simply as a way friends greet each other concluded that it was okay. After all, as Sha’de put it, “This is supposed to be a dictionary of how we talk.”

My kids don’t use four-letter words often in my classes anymore. A strict policy of an immediate detention has curbed the use of your standard Showtime expletives. But I still don’t feel satisfied. I’m not satisfied because I think what this has taught my kids is that swearing in Ms. Craven’s class will get you a detention. What I want to teach my kids is that swearing and using offensive language makes you appear less intelligent, less empathetic and even cruel.

This project is helping. These discussions are helping. My students are exploring the history and implications andpower of specific words. They’re starting to understand that every time you use a word it essentially has two meanings: (1.) What you meant by it, and  (2.) What it means to the person who hears it.

I still have a ways to go. My classroom is far from some utopia of all-inclusive and tolerant language. But this is a start, this honest talk about words we know can offend. And I think it’s a pretty good one.

Craven is a middle school English teacher in Louisiana.

Fabulous TED Talk about Choice…

Another one bites the dust…

“Hey Steph, I need some advice. I hope you can help.”

That’s how the phone conversation started with a long-time friend who teaches third grade in Florida.

“Sure, what’s up?” I ask, prepared for another of our hour+ long conversations about better meeting the needs of children and families, new books that might be of interest, new professional development opportunities, and – on the negative side – all the new requirements that are constantly bombarding him and keeping him from focusing on his teaching.

“I’m ready to get out of education. I can’t do this any more.”

Silence.

He continued before I spoke, “I mean, look what they’re doing. They’re cutting our salaries, they are cutting our jobs, they are telling us to do more and more with less and less. I just don’t see how my future can be in public education.”

Tom – we’ll call my friend Tom here – came to education a little later than most. He graduated with a criminal justice degree, worked in retail and food service management (wildly successful at the kid-favorite Chuck E. Cheese), and decided in his late twenties that he would like to work with youth. It wasn’t the perfect time for heading back to school – he now had a wife and was thinking about a family – but he made the sacrifice of time and money to earn his teaching certification and never looked back.

Tom always worked in schools that have a hard time attracting the best talent, and that’s where he wanted to work. He made kids laugh (I’ve seen him in action), he made kids listen, and he inspired kids to share his passion of math and science and life.

“Boring” would never be a word used to describe his classroom.

Tom also organized exciting professional development events for himself and his colleagues. I was an honored “visiting author” to his school for one of my books they studied together – on their own time – and I had energizing virtual conversations with Tom and his colleagues around a second book of mine they studied. Again – organized by themselves and all on their own time.

Tom is a teacher we need. He is smart, engaged, motivated, and a motivator.

But he’s planning to leave education.

Folks who aren’t in the trenches of education every day have no idea what kind of crisis we are experiencing. Top-Down mandates, high-stakes testing, merit pay evaluations, and scripted pacing guides would bore even the most unmotivated person. But for teachers – most who joined the profession because they love to be creative, to continue to grow and change, to improvise their practice based on the interests and needs of students, and to inspire the next generation of citizens who might make a better world – these requirements and restrictions and reactions and punitive measures are worse than a bummer, they are depressing and anti-creative and anti-improvisational and in the end anti-teacher and anti-student.

No wonder they’re dropping like flies.

And then there are those who suck it up because they keep thinking it will get better.

I hope they are right.

When the Toms of the teaching world (and this includes dozens I know personally over the past few years) leave the profession, they are leaving children behind who will continue to be categorized and sorted through all kinds of measures that have nothing to do with real education.