This Week in Education, Politics and Philosophy

This week my evil ex-supervisor stopped by my classroom to pay me a short observation. Old habits die hard. Later she told me that I must have taken some kind of vitamins over the summer because I was so animated in my teaching. She said that my demeanor had completely changed. I wanted to tell her that what had changed was my supervisor.

My newfound confidence and self-assurance is not merely due to the feeling that I'm safe from unwarranted attention from an unbalanced evaluator, though it certainly helps. My students, at least for the first week, are making me look like the teacher I've imagined I could be. Funny how that works. Except for my Creative Writing class, I have all honors students this year. So far they've come to class prepared, alert, eager to learn, responsive and genuinely appreciative of their teacher. And my Creative Writing students, oddballs that they are, bring their own kind of off-beat, lively energy to class. My attitude may have changed, but so have the attitudes of my students.

The current laughable mantra of the ed reform crowd is "a great teacher in every classroom." For a while in my classroom, I had on the board the slogan, "Down with slogans!" You want to instantly turn an average teacher into a great teacher? Give her honors students. There is nothing harder than teaching unmotivated, "reluctant learners," and even very good teachers sometimes look bad doing it. I should know. These are the kind of students I taught for three years, and I think I was fairly good at it. Helping students who are in desperate need of guidance can be deeply satisfying in a way that teaching honors students isn't. However, what wore me down, in the end, was not the students but the system. In my own experience, the system is set up to punish teachers who are unable to perform daily miracles with struggling students. If an unwise supervisor, having drunken the ed reform cool-aide, happens to walk into your classroom and finds a bunch of unmotivated students, it must be the teacher's fault. I would have gladly stuck with the job I had last year, and this year I would have been better at it. But I'm too old to allow myself to be hounded by misguided, deluded nincompoops. So there.

In the meantime, I'm using my position as a union representative to take on some of the politicians who have sucked up to the ed reform establishment. The School Board and the superintendent are on the defensive, and I plan to make the most of it. I chewed out a couple Board members in a speech at a Democratic meeting last week. I'm in the process of bringing out a Board member to our school for a meeting with the teachers, who are very ready to give him a piece of their minds. I'm organizing teachers to support a legislative candidate who is opposed by an ed reform Democrat. And I'm doing what I can to prepare for next year's Board races. I will consider it a major victory if I can persuade our district's Board member to decide not to run so that he can spend more time with his family, etc. My tactic is to convince him that the traditionally genteel air surrounding School Board races will be replaced by an atmosphere of unrelenting viciousness. I am not kidding. I'm very angry about what's happened to public education and teachers, and I want politicians to pay a dear price for drawing on the seemingly endless piles of money that the ed reformers have to offer its spineless lackeys. Needless to say, my retirement from politics has ended.

And what do I do for myself? I get up to the mountains as often as I can. My wife, who keeps track of these things, says we've hiked 260 miles since July 1st and 425 miles since the first of the year. I love nothing more than that feeling of starting out in the morning in the high clear air, with the whole day ahead. After thirty-three years of mountain hiking, I still find alpine country to be a place of wonders upon wonders.

For intellectual amusement I'm rereading Robert Nozick's "Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?" What a hoot. He argues that this seemingly unanswerable question deserves "extremely weird" approaches. I think that's why I so enjoy the essay. "Extremely weird" is right. Somewhere buried in this question is the question, "Why Am I Something Rather Nothing?" Perhaps we're under the illusion that if we can answer the more general question we can answer the particular one. As my haircutter (a woman named "Liberty") told me today, only teenagers and philosophers seriously try to answer such questions. And teenagers, she said, are "little philosophers" themselves. I think I'll have to go back to this haircutter. She's a lot smarter than the politicians I've been speaking to lately.