Why I teach

This year, when we’ve gathered as a full K-8 faculty and staff, a few educators have shared with everyone their answers to the question “Why do I teach?”.  Yesterday, I shared my answer with the faculty and staff, and here it is.

Why do I teach?

For me, much of it has to do with those that have taught me—and continue to teach me.  From my days as a student in elementary school through my first years as an educator, I’ve been taught, coached, mentored, and guided by individuals who’ve each—in ways both large and small—contributed to my desire to teach students and to work together with other adults to create supportive, engaging, and inspiring learning communities for them.  Here is what I’ve learned about teaching from those that have taught me:

Mrs. Wilson, my first grade teacher, taught me, like all good first grade teachers do, that the most important thing to learn when you are six years old is how to work together with others, and she also taught me that teachers have to make time to show you how.  For some strange reason, I used to like to wear ties to school as a first grader.  I distinctly remember one day, as we headed out for recess, a classmate made a rude remark to me about wearing a tie and I shot back with something equally as bad.  It would have been easy for Mrs. Wilson to say a quick word to us or to force us to deliver half-hearted apologies or even to feign like she didn’t hear the comments.  Instead, she took us both aside, played a game with us at recess, and then had us discuss our little exchange afterwards, when we were in a better position to talk about it.  It’s a lesson that’s stayed with me much longer than if she’d dealt with it some other, quicker way.

Mrs. Wolski, my fifth grade teacher, encouraged me to step outside of my comfort zone.  I was—and still am—a fairly quiet, introverted person who’d much rather be talking with a small group of people than doing anything in front of a group.  Back in fifth grade, a more gregarious friend of mine wanted me to co-host a school talent show with him.  After trying to get out of it, Mrs. Wolski told me that, if I agreed to do it, she’d help me to practice for it.  Helping a student to refine jokes from really bad to almost bearable and rehearse a lip-synced performance of an INXS song was probably not in her job description, but Mrs. Wolski did it anyway because it was an opportunity to help push a student to grow in important ways that had nothing to do with what we were learning in class.

Ms. Quattlebaum was the faculty advisor to the high school newspaper for which I wrote.  As we were editing a piece about the career aspirations of seniors getting ready for high school, I asked her if she knew when she was in high school that she wanted to be a teacher, and her response was, “Oh hell, no!  But someone once told me ‘Find a job you love, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life,’ and once I started teaching, I realized I really enjoyed it, and so, here I am.”  Of course, having a job you love doesn’t mean there aren’t parts of it you wish were different or days that aren’t as wonderful as you’d hoped they’d be—but for me, working with students and teachers is something I want to be doing, and therefore, most of the time, it doesn’t even feel like “work”.

Mr. Duncan, my high school U.S. History teacher, never once gave us a multiple choice test, despite the fact that we’d have to take a multiple choice Advanced Placement exam at the end of the school year.  We talked and wrote about history from the beginning to the end of class each day because, Mr. Duncan said, history isn’t filled with quick, easy answers that can be bubbled in.  He showed me that learning—about history, but really about everything—is complex and messy and nuanced and shouldn’t be watered down or made more straightforward just because that’s easier or more efficient for adults.  To do so is shortchanging students of real learning.

While in college, I took several courses from a professor named Adam Green.  Professor Green’s father had been one of the “Little Rock Nine” who helped to integrate the city’s high school in the late 1950’s.  As he taught us about the history of the civil rights era up through the 1990s, he lamented the fact that the struggles endured by his father and many others to create schools that reflected the diversity of the country were quickly being reversed by court decisions, by new policies, and by people choosing to send students to schools with peers that “looked like them”.  Because of Professor Green, I’ve learned more about and become committed to working to create learning communities that bring together students of different backgrounds.  It’s clear to me that the enormous challenges and obstacles many from a previous generation worked to overcome was not just about having access to equal resources but also about creating what John Lewis (someone whose writings we read in Professor Green’s class) called “The Beloved Community”:

“Children holding hands, walking with the wind…is America to me–not just the movement for civil rights but the endless struggle to respond with decency, dignity, and a sense of all the challenges that face us as a nation, as a whole. That is the story of my life, of the path to which I’ve been committed since I turned from a boy to a man, and to which I remain committed today. It is a path that extends beyond the issue of race alone, and beyond class as well. And gender. And age. And every other distinction that tends to separate us as human beings rather than bring us together. That path…an ideal I discovered as a young man has guided me like a beacon ever since, a concept called the Beloved Community.”

In graduate school, I was fortunate to work at the Boston Arts Academy alongside a strong school leader, Linda Nathan.  She always challenged her faculty to think hard and to think deeply about what they could do to make their school better for their students—and then she did all she could to prevent the bureaucracy of the local school district from getting in the way of her teachers and staff from making it happen.  She upset several people in the district central office, but she always did what she and her teachers felt was best for students, and if doing so ticked some people off along the way, so be it.  Linda taught me the importance of sticking to your principles about teaching and learning, especially when policies developed by people outside of your school clash with those principles.

Not only did I get to take courses with Ted and Nancy Sizer, two of the founders of the Coalition of Essential Schools, while in graduate school, I also then worked in a school they helped to create, the Francis Parker Charter Essential School.  The Sizers taught me quite a bit about schools and schooling, but a quote from one of their books sums up their biggest lesson to me: “Respect for students starts with respect for teachers, for them as individuals, for their work, and for their workplace.”  We all know that the best schools we can possibly create for students can only come to be if we listen to teachers and to consider the design of schools with their voices and perspectives, and I try to make that central to the work that I do by treating every teacher and staff member like the professionals they are.

While at Parker, I worked for another amazing school leader, Teri Schrader.  Teri consistently did three things that stick with me to this day: she celebrated students and teachers, she made time for thinking, reflection, and collaboration; and she found humor in working with young people.  Teaching at Parker was hard work, but it was filled with meaning because we acknowledged successes, were afforded opportunities to slow down and improve our practice, and we could laugh together at the ridiculous things that students sometimes say and do.  Teri helped teach me that the best schools are those that feel “human”.

There are other teachers and mentors who’ve inspired me along the way, but these few individuals stand out.  Of course, the people who’ve taught me the most and have led me to and kept me in teaching are the people in my family.  While in college, many of my classmates talked about the fact that their parents were upset with them for picking teaching over some other profession, I assume careers that were perceived to be more prestigious or lucrative.  My parents never gave me that message at all.  They’ve always supported my work in education, and, in fact, throughout my life, they’ve always guided me towards making my own choices, a lesson I’ve tried to use in my own classroom.  My wife is an educator herself, a much better one than me.  We help each other to think through challenges at school and talk about how we can improve in our work, underscoring the need for having a “critical friend” with whom you can share your dilemmas without hesitation.  And my own two children display seemingly endless curiosity about the world.  Like all children, even as they get older, when there is something interesting, important, and relevant before them, they’ll engage with it—a lesson we should always remember in our schools and teaching.

I teach so that I may hope to pass on some of the many lessons others have passed on to me in my life.