Guest Blog on Teacher Collaboration and Growth

Today is our first guest post on the Golden Apple blog, by Jacob Gourley! Jacob writes in Dom’s place while he takes a well-deserved vacation.

I wish Dom a well-deserved rest.

“In the current political and educational climate…” one could say many things.

I could begin on a negative note and write about the caustic “blame-the-teacher” voices that I so badly wish would redirect their energies toward Golden Apple’s mission of “transforming teachers and teaching.”   But, one lesson I have learned is that many have become so vociferous in their posturing about the reform measure of their tribe that they tend to be more agenda focused than student focused.  So I write not to the entrenched camps and instead to the progressive thinkers and doers.   The following are two areas that I see having tremendous potential in improving our schools:  teacher collaboration and teacher growth.

Teacher Collaboration

“The secret is to gang up on the problem, rather than each other.” – Thomas Stallkamp

I shared an Op-Ed piece in The Catalyst earlier this month where I told the story of an experiment in collaboration at the secondary level that transformed teaching and learning at Thornton Fractional South High School in south suburban Lansing.  For one academic year, teachers in shared content areas were given a common period to work together.  During this structured time, we were able to share and develop innovative classroom practices with our content peers.  Communication opened both vertically as well as horizontally as we worked together to shape what the four year experience should entail for a student moving through our progression of courses.  We developed meaningful assessments that not only informed us about what our students were and were not “getting” from our content areas, but also allowed us to work on improving our students’ writing and reading comprehension abilities.  We worked as a team to craft and tweak projects, units, and simulations.  Each teacher contributed his or her “whiz-bang” moments to a newly enriched curriculum that, due to our collaboration, became full of multiple “whiz-bang” experiences for ALL students.  Think back to a memorable lesson, where a wonderful teacher did something creative and lasting.  Now, imagine that teacher, and every other teacher in a department or school, sharing with students not only his or her best lessons, but the best lessons dreamed, adapted, tested, and refined by other great teachers.

Though the budget could not sustain our shared collaboration time beyond that one year, it had a lasting impact.  Teachers now communicate with one another differently and more frequently than they did before.  We continue to work on writing and re-writing assessments that both accurately reflect our interaction with students and, in turn, help us to be more determined in our teaching and for them to be more successful.  We learned enough from one another that we try our best to find time to collaborate, but it doesn’t happen with the regularity it once did when it was built into our daily schedules.

Teacher Growth, Not “Professional Development”

“It is the studying you do after your school days that really counts.  Otherwise, you know only that which everyone else knows.” – Henry L. Doherty

Today’s most popular educational catch phrase (and education industry, second to commercial testing corporations) is “professional development.”  In order to maintain our certification, Illinois teachers and administrators must complete a number of hours of such training (among a menu of other options) during each renewal period.  Many school districts have opted to spend countless dollars contracting with outside for-profit “providers” to sweep in, share their dose of educational wisdom, and then head on to the next district.  The problem with this “silver bullet” approach to true professional growth is that there is often a gulf between the skill, strategy, or tool provided and the specific professional needs of the individual teacher and the multitude of student needs in any particular school.  Don’t get me wrong—there are many “providers” who excel at what they do.   Golden Apple is one of them.

What I think we fail to do is recognize and encourage the treasure trove of human capital that exists in our teaching force.  If you’ve ever had the privilege of attending CORE, observing the interactions of Fellows and Scholars during a session of Summer Institute, brought a future educator to a Teachers for Tomorrow Conference, or watched Fellows share among themselves at an Academy Quarterly, you know exactly the treasure of which I speak.  Passionate educators interacting, each bringing his or her ideas, techniques, mannerisms, and styles, sharing and exchanging ideas—these priceless exchanges are the times when I have absorbed so much into the sponge of the human being and teacher I am.

While Golden Apple has been a pioneer in the true growth of educators and future educators, I look forward to a future when teachers in every school (and teachers-to-be across Illinois) have the opportunity to grow and share and absorb and inspire in the same traditions those of us associated with Golden Apple have been able to benefit from, and contribute to, for the last quarter century.  With 1,350 Scholars (soon to be more!) and nearly 270 Fellows spread in schools and communities throughout our state, members of the Golden Apple family are uniquely positioned to be not just voices in education reform, but active participants in guiding every current and future teacher in Illinois to the kinds of experiences that a recent study by the Parthenon group found made a significant positive impact on the effectiveness of teachers and the learning outcomes of students.

The time is now, the talent is ripe, and the students keep coming over the barren fields, thirsty for something more.  Let’s all do our parts to keep the water clean, quench their thirst for something better, and plant as many orchards as we can in the days, and decades, ahead.

The teacher of the future detailed—and I smell mothballs about me

The Alliance for Excellent Education recently published a report entitled “The Digital learning Imperative: How Technology and Teaching Meet Today’s Education Challenges and I am at once heartened and disheartened by their prediction of what the school experience needs to be including digital learning. Few could argue with their definition of digital learning (“any instructional practice that is effectively using technology to strengthen the student learning experience”) or of the need to change the way teachers teach and school exists for students. They repeat the woeful statistics (72% of Americans obtain a high school diploma, only 58% of Hispanic and 57% for African American students, and 25% of students reaching college-ready levels in core subjects). They artfully depict what they term “the leaking pipeline” to report that for every 100 9^th graders, 20% will earn a college degree, “but 63% of jobs will require some college or more by 2018.”

So we know the dire.

And they make a sage point in arguing that “as the US economy struggles to recover from a deep depression, progress is stalled by the fact that applicants lack specific qualifications….in (STEM) as well as those requiring an application of statistics and mathematics in a wide range of business activities.”

So the employers have chimed in with their don’t-blame-us-for-off-shoring-when-we-can’t-find-those-that-can-do-the-math mantra.

What is not as well known as they report is that while “effective teaching is the most important school-related factor in student achievement” their simple truth is that there is a paucity of such effective teachers in this country. “The state of Georgia, for example, has 440 high schools but only 88 physics teachers.” I remember when starting our alternative teacher certification program in 1998 I learned that at that time CPS had fewer than a dozen in the entire system. They repeat an Ingersoll study that purports that “today’s typical teacher has just one to two years of experience, compared to fifteen years in 1987.” (Three years before Teach for America began, just sayin’.) Rural schools, poor school districts just don’t have the access to superior teachers.

Enter technology.

The authors convincingly state how technology could provide the access to course work content and experts to deepen the learning of those for whom space and circumstance denies them that content and that expert. They also state that digital learning will offer the opportunity for more tailored learning options for students and their teachers.

All good. But it’s when they refer to the teachers of the future I start sighing.

It starts when the authors state: “Some researchers refer to teachers moving from ‘sages on stages’ to ‘guides on the side, or ‘facilitators,’ but a fuller description is that the teacher now becomes a true ‘educational designer.’”

For some reason I think of Tom Hanks’ manic angry comedian character Steven Gold  in Punchline (1988) mocking himself pejoratively with “I’m not a comedian. I’m a comic stylist!” when I hear those terms.

The authors continue to gush about the teacher of the future: “many are finding a ‘flipped’ classroom model in which students watch or listen to the lecture on video or podcast at home provides teachers with the ability to take on a different role in the classroom….the teacher becomes more of a facilitator of learning who can guide individuals….an opportunity to rethink the use of teachers and their time.”

Some impressions of this image:

1. Students will watch a lecture at home? Really? Won’t that interfere with the social networking and mass pretend killing of enemy soldiers, presuming  they even have a device to network upon?
2. Is it just me, or does facilitator in this image sound like someone who knows how to activate the power source and get the heck out of the way of students?

It may be the predominant image of teachers embedded in this now we embrace the future image—that we are basically in the way, too slow, too not with it, too disconnected, too irrelevant and just not an essential part when compared to the glories found on the internet—when you can brush all the porn and the titter and the twaddle, the chatter and the advertisements aside. Perhaps this is what bothers me—the presumption that the bulk of the wave of the three million plus American teachers is mostly mediocre, pedantic, irrelevant.

Still, the authors march on with how it should soon be: “Transitioning the teacher from a passive, teacher-centric role of largely disseminating content knowledge to being actively involved in the student’s discovery and application of information creates a powerful learning experience that positions students to see themselves as innovators and creators.”

I couldn’t disagree with the second half of that statement. But the teacher? The subtext is clear: get out of their way. Look at the New Holy Trinity: Zuckerberg, Gates, Jobs—all got to their throne despite you simplistic teachers.

Enter the mothball smell.

I will admit to being old school, and I guess on the base of my Ozymandias- like stone there will read “a sage on the stage,”  a mantle that seems to reek of foolishness amidst such projections of the way-it-should-and-will-soon-be. My old school way came from semanticist study like that of S.I. Hayakawa, who believed teachers offered students two things: “a body of knowledge and a way of holding that body of knowledge.” New School thought has us turning on the lights, making sure they’re on task, uncovering the far groovier and relevant and insightful that is but a few keystrokes away, turning us into a being not all that far removed from Brother Leo scratching his ample and hairy belly, reading the Sun-Times at St. Patrick High School in 1968, ignoring we naked and deranged teenagers (yes, naked, as all you Catholic high school men can remember, hilarious stories for another time)  practiced our swim strokes in Beginning Swimming. His approach was  a true guide on the side, turning his head in our direction to offer individual guidance when needed (mine: “Put you’re head in the water and don’t be a girl, Belmonte.”) We certainly learned by doing, and despite, not because of the good Brother.

Perhaps I’m just waxing nostalgic about all the fascinating and dimensional teachers I have known who not only taught you how to think and care but cared about you, and offered through their depth of wisdom and reflection the dimension of caring human contact. I guess the teachers of the future will direct their students suffering existential angst to an appropriate Tony Roberts video on YouTube.

Waits and Matthew On Unforgiveness

For twenty-five years I have been an adoring fan of the music and lyrics Tom Waits, an acquired musical taste if there ever was one. Growling voice, neo-beatnik persona, the protector of the downtrodden and champion of the bizarre, as a teacher I would tell many a student that this was an artist worth considering. Many an eye-roll greeted me when my students, deep in the groove of their present day, tried for a few seconds the snarling voice and Germanic-inspired found sounds that populate Waits music. He has a cult following, to be sure, even in this town, and I rank a personal favorite sharing a moment with him at the old Park West. I told him I was a teacher who taught his lyrics. His wry response: “Whatever for?”

In Tom Waits’ song “Down there by the Train” a metaphor is presented of forgiveness possible for all: the seemingly unforgivable.

There’s a place I know where the train goes slow,
Where the sinner can be washed in the blood of the lamb,
There’s a river by the trestle down by Sinner’s Grove,
Down where the willow and the dogwood grow….
And there’s room for the forsaken if you’re there on time,
You’ll be washed of all your sins and all of your crimes
Down there by the train, down there by the train,
Down there where the train goes slow.

Even the seemingly unforgiveable is given a chance in Waits’ metaphoric landscape for redemption:
There’s a golden moon that shines up through the mist
And I know that your name can be on that list.
There’s no eye for an eye, there’s no tooth for a tooth,
I saw Judas Iscariot carrying John Wilkes Booth
Down there by the train, down there by the train,
Down there where the train goes slow.”

It’s an arresting image of the sense of a place where even those who while alive spark hatred and anger and un-forgiveness can achieve expiation.

In the painful drama that we observe and sometimes take part in these dolorous times for teachers and for schools and those who say it must be this way and those who say that way be damned, as well as those who advocate that way, the rhetoric rises to the hyperbole, the damning and the spiteful.

Among the quotes I’ve gathered from the melee: “They do not care about your children. They will step on them and they will step on you.” “The union will be noisy but ultimately ineffectual.”

And those are the G-rated ones. I’m sure you’ve heard others. I’m sure you said others as well.

Where we once granted forbearance, in this arena and on this subject we go for the jugular. The unforgiving demand and repudiate. It seems we will not be satisfied until those we think are wrong in education on how best to teach or assess children, those promulgating charter or turnaround or the traditional school, those of the union or Advance Illinois or collegiate or business leader stripe must to the unforgiving stand in the rain of the public square and shout “I am sorry for all that I have done!”

And even that will probably not suffice.

We who paint each other in terms of evil and malice, business-agenda motivated or union-brainwashed, will we when all is said and done however what will be done be able to board the train?

I have been implored of late to move Golden Apple off its perceived elitist perch of neutrality on most issues save that espoused in our mission. I have lost the regard of those I admire for my perceived intransigence. To defend the position of the organization I lead requires more words than usually suffices for these posts.

But in closing, and perhaps in words less obscure than those of Waits, I offer Matthew’s opening of his 7^th chapter:  

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? … first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

The Modern Classroom, The Traditional Teacher

Ever wonder sometimes how the teachers you admired when you were growing up would fare in today’s classroom and with today’s maelstrom of competing pressures and challenges?

Picture your favorite teacher. Usually that image is replete with the gauzy and opaque addition of our emotional recollection of our past. Could that kindness, that insight, that faith shown to us by our favorite teacher withstand the onslaught of the test-manic culture of today’s teaching? Would that teacher still succeed or will she succumb to the inanities and insults teachers daily face?

I’m old enough to rue typing that my favorite teachers are either in deserved retirement or deceased. But in my mind’s eye I see them transcending the hilarity and the inanity and, in the kind of guerrilla fashion I witnessed as a kid, do what they thought was best for us, testing mania be damned.

Father Joseph Lee was one such teacher, my French teacher for my four years of high school. An amazing man, who escaped Communist China hiding in an empty barrel of liquor that a bribed official allowed through by his wealthy family, who made his way to Rome knowing only Mandarin Chinese and learned seven languages fluently, Father Lee was unconventional and memorable. Perhaps being in such perilous times gave him a perspective about what was important for his students was more important than any other consideration. So in that pursuit, he put his students’ learning over administrivia. He would, I imagine, look over  the landscape of today’s education cacophony, smile and nod, and do whatever he thought was best.

You would think from that tribute that I was a doting, sycophant acolyte of Father Lee, and nothing could be further from the truth. I and my colleagues loved him, but teased him mercilessly, hilariously in our juvenile sense of what to us was unfathomable wisdom. We all learned French, and I could forty years from those days recite prayer or poem or dialogue in French, all with the Chinese accent I learned from Father Joe. We played golf with him on occasion. We went to The Bakery restaurant (remember that Louis Szathmary marvel in the DePaul neighborhood?) on his dime for dinner. We piled into his quarters on our last week of senior year and allowed us to sample liquor from around the world (“Here, Belmonte, try this sake. Knock your socks off.”)that he collected.

Bits of memory altered by time are what we collect from our favorite teachers. Are our students today collecting such pieces? Are you being remembered by your students today, or is today’s classroom world antipathetic to such memory making?

Studies show excellent teachers matter. You don’t say?

The study by Raj Chetty, John Friendman (Harvard) and Jonah Rockoff (Columbia) of one million students followed from 4^th grade to adulthood is sure getting the tongues wagging.

The results indicate that the stronger the teacher in the lives of those students, the better off those students became in life outcomes. The researchers predict from their evidence that a fourth grade teacher of merit and dimension makes those students more likely to go to college, less likely to become pregnant as a teenager and earn $25,000 in their lifetime.

The intimation that this study concludes that effectiveness was studied by determining the students’ success on state test scores should set some teeth on edge and some teeth bared. It implies that there is a value in having a teacher strong enough to have her students do well on such tests, because reputably success on those tests open up wider avenues of possibilities (college attainment chief among them) that then open up wider avenues of societal gains (increased earning).

Critics may no doubt argue that such tests are by themselves no indicator of the worth of a child, and neglects the impact poverty and parenting have on a child’s educational development.

Still, in the world of empiric evidence it’s hard to say such findings are meaningless.

We at Golden Apple have since our beginning claimed that the single most important factor in a child’s educational experience is the quality of the adult in the classroom. Great teachers transcend so much, even transcending the political maelstrom of our modern time, in providing students with a sense of purpose and accomplishment.

Stretch the politics of the moment as befits your particular uniform. If you see an excellent teacher, you are proud. If your child has an excellent teacher, you are grateful. If you strive to become an excellent teacher, you are noble. If you are an excellent teacher, hunker down, ignore the static, and work your craft.

And the posturing resumes

The upcoming hearings on the ten CPS schools slated for turnaround or other transformations will make for democratic activation of first amendment rights at its finest. A combination of non-sanctioned union member sit-ins, community activist grassroots objections, Occupy-level fervor and parent-student-teacher led chanting, signage and singing should make the case quite clearly.

Turnaround plans were suspended for a year in order to avoid this sturm und drang during the mayoral election year. But now that pathway is clear—this decade will see a great number of schools enter turnaround.

The advocates are clear that what they provide is safety, enriched opportunity, stability and a laser-like focus on student performance improvement on standardized tests. Enemies of the concept are convinced that the process seeks to undermine public education, presenting a business-oriented model on schooling that is less devoted to children and more about limiting union influence and parental involvement.

Advocates claim schools are improved by an infusion of teaching talent and curricular enhancement. Enemies claim if that same care and coin were presented to the existing staff and students there would be no need for turning around anything.

Full disclosure here—I sit on the board of AUSL and Golden Apple, while not at all involved in the turnaround process or in AUSL activity does help prepare teachers, and some of those teachers work in AUSL schools.

We mentor our teachers in their first and frequently second years of teaching—valuable assistance for the tough beginning of one’s career—especially so in AUSL schools. All young teachers experience pressure to excel in their early years, and Golden Apple teachers in AUSL schools are not immune to that pressure.

In the months to come I will seek to find out if the claims on either side of the concept have basis of merit. I have noted fervor and foment in school issues before during my three-plus decades involvement in education, but nothing with this level of ferocity on one side and steely resolve on the other.

Passings of Note of Late

Two dear, irascible, and important people to Golden Apple have passed away during the holiday season worthy of note and praise.

Dr. Frank Gardiner was past president of the Chicago Board of Education in the mid-eighties, and one of Golden Apple’s earliest board of directors members. He ran things with authority and could be seen by some as autocratic, but he had an old school affection and respect for teachers and the challenges they faced being successful in urban school settings.

When Golden Apple was formed in 1985 during the wake of devastating criticism of the quality of teaching in CPS (ahem…), the original notion promulgated was to have the Golden Apple Award bestowed on Chicago teachers only. It was Dr. Gardner who argued the emptiness of that plan, and advised that the award bestowed on excellent teachers regardless of where they taught in Cook, Lake and DuPage Counties (expanded to Will and Kane Counties in 2005). If the teachers considered are excellent and working in Chicago, they should be awarded in consideration (and, to his mind, in competition) with any teacher from resource-rich schools elsewhere in the area.

Dr. Gardner, I think, had a fondness for me, since he never missed an opportunity to tease me when we would meet– about my longevity at Golden Apple (“Can’t you find work elsewhere?”), my ambition to lead the organization (“amazing that it has grown despite you, Dom.”) or my balding head (“Where’d that hair you had go? Can I get some from where you hid it?”) I witnessed more than once his wisdom and his crafty perspective on the political aspects of education, and I always admired him.

Martin Haberman, former professor at University of Wisconsin, Madison, creator of the Haberman Interview, author of Star Teachers of Children in Poverty and Star Principals, and father of the alternative teacher certification movement in America, died over the holidays as well.

First of all, you’d be uncomfortable in Martin’s presence, because his irascibility and plain passion for improving teacher preparation made him few friends amongst his university brethren. He quite simply found much of contemporary university teacher preparation horse hockey, full of bland uselessness presented to children too young to be  prepared to teach the too left out the too important. He was influential, and certainly was a mentor to Golden Apple when we introduced alternative teacher certification to Illinois in 1998. Before Teach for America and Chicago Teaching Fellows and AUSL presented teachers for Chicago schools, the GATE program, and its predecessor Teachers for Chicago were Golden Apple-inspired or consortium products. GATE rose after TFC was closed, and Martin Haberman was the philosophical architect whose theories colored our vision of alternative teacher certification.

And oh was he challenging! We brought him to Chicago to lecture to our Fellows, only to see him walking out, claiming “I have wasted my time here!” after fielding a question about whether good teaching transcends the circumstance of the school setting of the child that witnessed it. Years later, he remembered that moment to me in a phone call and said “I regretted my walking out, even though I was right to do so.”

His Haberman interview was a rigorous and astonishingly accurate revealer of potential teaching talent amongst the adults we interviewed. I interviewed many hundreds of adults in our decade-long run as a program. Every once in a while I would fudge in the scoring (“one wrong answer—the whole interview is a failure and that person is not quality enough to teach” he thundered to me). I would see someone with skill and promise who would give just one wrong answer—and every time I closed my eye to the moment and presented that candidate to the program—dang if that person washed out every time and every time on one of Haberman’s principles on what constitutes excellent teaching.

Conducting the interview itself was exhausting, requiring the interviewer not only to ask questions but to create scenarios, present impassioned possibilities and improvise personalities, all in an effort to see in fourteen questions whether we could trust these adults with our path to teaching. More than one person I met in these interviews called it “the most challenging forty minutes I ever spent.”  Agreed! And the 400+ we presented to teaching in tat decade (and the 600+ we rejected along the way) were remarkable for their longevity and contribution to improving the quality of teaching in CPS in a time when teaching in CPS drew fewer candidates.

Principals often disliked the interview because it universally cast the principal as the avatar of the-way-we-always-did-it antagonists. But Haberman always saw the excellent teacher devoted to students above all. He was exciting to talk to because of his unpredictable nature and his undeniable passion for excellent teaching.

Two strong educators with their fingerprints on the history of Golden Apple have died. May they rest in peace as we continue the work.

 

A holiday message for whomever happens upon it.

I really dislike holiday music, and am considered somewhat Scrooge-ish by my spouse for that distaste.

Lots of things about the holiday season rankle. The exhaustion of going and doing matches the ever-widening gulf between the “reason for the season” and the moments that lay you lower around this time of year. As Michael Buble said upon his Christmas –album release: “Christmas is money.” Sigh and double sigh.

We miss the people who are gone more, even though we may have been less than attentive or kind or regarding while they were with us.

You regret more the things said or done, unsaid and undone. I admire Bill Ayers who has stated to me on more than one occasion he regrets nothing. There isn’t much on my path I don’t regret, and that fuel burns brighter at years end.

I shudder at the holiday letters filled with the accomplishments and achievements and travels of those who seem to have accomplished, achieved and traveled far more than I ever could.

So here is my holiday wish scattered on the cyberwinds:

Be grateful for that which you have and those you are near, for many people have less, contend with more, and you don’t get to gloat or boast. Sure things could be better, should be better, and you deserve to have them better, but when you sense others getting by with less stuff or more pain, you rightfully deserve a noogie or two.

It’s poopy that so many we hold dear aren’t near, or here, and thinking of them is just fine, and your time with them was also just fine. Try to be the person others will miss when you’re gone as well.

The people who contend in education, those that try and those that criticize and those that prevail and those that trail are really all good people at heart. I have met very, very few people in education or concerned about education who I would call evil. It’s just not a place where the nefarious can hang without being noted.

Children continue to hope, and our efforts, fractious and diametrically opposed as they oftentimes are, should not be directed at dashing children hope.

And I wish you all a wonderful holiday. Call this time a Switzerland for your ideals. Give it a rest. Take a walk. Help someone out.

THE GREEK CHORUS HAS SUNG

 

And so the psychodrama concerning our former governor has reached its conclusion, with almost Grecian-like completeness. We see the tears on his wife, and the fear expressed in his child’s letter, and the part of our brain that is supposed to emit whatever chemical releases schadenfreude is muted, delayed. We thought we would be dancing, nyah-nyah-ing our way through the day. But the disruption of a family dynamic gives us pause. We think of his daughters, his brother, his parents instead.

My dealings with the former governor were not as extensive as some, but I had enough exposure as any who works in Illinois education reform. I first met him in Washington at his office, gave him a Golden Apple T-shirt, heard stories about his humble beginnings and amazement at graduating from Pepperdine. I sat with him in his office early in his career, full in his element, glad-handing and joking about how low his high school ACT score was, as if to say, look at how that doesn’t matter when you have other talents and attributes—like that suit, and that hair.

I worked the rounds as others representing non-profits must, doing the obligatory stops, dropping off the hopeful documents. His people were everywhere, all amazingly young and breath-taking in their arrogance and condescension. Their subtextual message was clear—you are of the old way and soon to die, and we are young and the future and in charge.

In 2003 the former governor, for both official and unofficial reasons, zeroed out the GA funding for our Scholars of Illinois program, putting at the time over 400 undergraduates in jeopardy of losing their tuition assistance and the benefit of our advanced teacher preparation program. The grassroots effort of Scholars and their parents, their students and their parents, the colleagues, principals and superintendents to reverse his decision was humbling to witness. 4000 letters of protest (yes, 4000) written. Editorials decrying the decision in every Illinois newspaper, and in St. Louis, and the national publication Education Week, all saying in essence, what is he doing ridding the state of such an effective program? With the help of legislators I’ll always be indebted to, the former governor, in a rare moment of reserve, reversed his decision and restored 75% of the funding he cut (requiring as everyone required in those days a signed memorandum of understanding because nobody trusted his word). We had to limit the tuition assistance we give our Scholars then and henceforward. But we remained in business. I had other indelible moments in conversation with the former governor’s people, ones where their logic moved toward questionable legality. But for the sake of our Scholars, we kept a lowered profile, did not crow over our victory, just went back to work.

From that point if the former governor thought about us at all it was through his long-standing animus with our founder, which led to decisions and political drama away from our shores that became part of his indictment. What we witnessed during his tenure was almost complete and abject exasperation and stories abounding—that he never left his home unless jogging, that he answered called while working out in his basement. Our eye rolling and head shaking continued until that amazing, awful, rainy December day when the former governor was awakened and arrested and this Greek drama sped towards denouement.

And now it is allegedly over, and I should be dancing but I’m not, should be exultant but can’t charge up for anything more than looking at his wife and daughter’s faces. And I remember the point of most of the Greek dramas I taught in high school—the absolutely worst thing you can show the gods is your pride, your arrogance, your confidence. Sophocles wrote in Antigone: “Remember in all things it is important to be wise, and to give the gods their due.” Wisdom and humility: life and career-savers then as now.

 

Chill pills for everyone! Where’s a blow gun?

My mom was definitely from the “if you can’t say anything nice about someone, say nothing at all” generation. My dad was far more cryptic, wont to giving me bromides that had a darker edge to them (“Nobody’s gonna tell you your face is dirty if it would make yours look better by comparison.”) or classics that defied my adolescent sense of logic (“Even if your mother’s wrong, she’s right.”) Wha?

In any event, about the last thing you would think any teacher or a public speaker (not paid to be outrageous a la Richard Pryor or Chris Rock) would do would be to address or mimic or mock the challenges any individual person would have. Even Jerry Lewis went to great pains to defend his comic personae as nothing about the children he championed all those years.

I harp on civility in these forums to the point that I think I’m sounding crusty (not the cartoon Krusty) but it’s still a valid point. What purpose is there in the continuing dialogue on improving teaching and learning experiences for students is there in demonizing, haranguing or outright insulting each other? What trees do those stances plant?

The classic contrarian and argument guru is William F. Buckley, Jr. One of his quotes “I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting you really believe what you said” is particularly apt here in this place and time of “Jerry Springer”-inspired hurled invective and “Cheaters” gotcha-style gonzo one-upmanship. We’re better than that, all of us who care about teaching and schools. Really, regardless of the banner waved.