Guilt

The first summers were the worst, especially as a career changer with no long history of two months off. In my first couple of years teaching, once the infinite relief of summer sank in, I woke up each day with the odd sensation of not having to drive frantically off to make it into the hall before the 7:45 bell, not worrying about the IEP documents I hadn’t written, the giant pile of papers I didn’t have to prep for my classes.

During the school year, by May I was usually already fantasizing about my summer break: the great intellectual projects I would be working on, (this summer I think I’ll reread Shakespeare, or study the War of 1812, or write a book, or learn Sanskrit) and mentally listing the dozens of house projects (gutters, refinish the porch, hang doors, paint the entire house, lift it off its foundations with my bare hands, the usual) or vowing to get in shape (maybe I can run a marathon, which usually by August would be downgraded to, I might be able to run around the block.) Into this mental frenzy was interlaced the requirements of my kids in the summer (take the boy to day camp, take the girl everywhere within a 400-square mile area least once to play music.).

My wife told me to relax, but I felt guilty because she was at work and I wasn’t. “How are you?” she’d ask, during a lunchtime call, and I’d rattle off a spastic litany of tasks I had completed, had planned out, and was about to begin, along with minor injuries sustained in the process. There’d be a brief silence, and then she, ever wise, would say, “You need to chill.”

My sister-in-law, and mother-in-law, as veteran teachers, became my role models and sanity checks. Covered with sawdust, an unopened new history of the Spanish-American War on the kitchen table, stuffing two crackers with cheese in my mouth to serve as lunch, a partly-hung door blocking the hallway and one eye on the clock because it was almost time to get my son from half-day music camp, I would get a call from my sister-in-law, looking for my wife, maybe planning one of our vacations out west.

“So, what’s up?” I’d ask her. “Oh not much,” she’d say, an icon of calm after 17 summers off. “I was reading the New Yorker. Maybe later I’ll bake some cookies.” My mother in law, a retired veteran of 35 years teaching high school French, might call, also looking for my wife. I’d tell her what I was doing, and she’d say “Relax, sweetie, you've earned a rest.”

But after working continuously since the age of 12, when I started pulling weeds at a ranch down the street, I had huge trouble with that concept. Ranch hand (read stable cleaner), paper boy, sailboat delivery crew, busboy, dishwasher, ice cream parlor counter guy, lifeguard, library assistant, writer, editor, archaeology assistant (digger and sifter), copywriter, boatyard worker, help desk technician, middle manager, teaching aide, tutor, coach, licensed teacher, always something. But teacher, that was only job on my life list that came with a 10-week vacation.

And it messed with my mind. I knew I needed the time off, felt as though by June 15^th every year, wonderful as my work is and however much I love my students, that my soul had been beaten with a rubber hose, in a small room, under the dim light of a single bulb.

I would go out in public after 9 am everyday, and once in line at the coffee shop, remembering that I hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, wonder if the baristas thought I was unemployed. I started wearing a t-shirt I bought when I was getting my license, the name of my university and School of Education written proudly across it. (See, I’m not a lazy bum, I’m a teacher.) Sometimes I would carry the teacher’s edition of my algebra or science textbooks with me, and display it spine side out at my coffee shop table as I read something else entirely. (Usually it wasn’t Shakespeare or the history of medieval ship design. It was usually some beat-up old used copy of a military science fiction series, or a windsurfing magazine.)

I’d go to pick my son or daughter up at whatever camp or activity they were signed up for, and there were two different looks I’d get. The mid-day Look, at the back door of the Children’s Museum, or Chamber Music Camp, or the Children’s Theater came from either the moms, roughly the same age as me (either perfect hair, yoga clothes and mat, clean SUV; or harried, many young children, dirty mini-van) or the summer nanny (college girl with hair in ponytail). It was a quick assessment (he’s a middle aged, off-white Male, 6’2”, unshaven, dressed like a 25-year-old surfer in shorts and Hawaiian shirt, driving a small, dirty Toyota with roof racks: is he a creepy predator?) No, probably not, he’s carrying a copy of Hamlet. Though he hasn’t read it, apparently, the receipt is still hanging out.

The afternoon pickup looks came from Dad, in a pressed collared shirt, summer weight slacks, dress shoes with tassels, who also gave me the Look (same thing basically, although with the added certainty that though I wasn’t a child molester, because I wasn’t leaning on a white conversion van, I was definitely an unemployed left-wing intellectual, because of the Hamlet, which he had been forced to read at the U, and which irritated him because the language didn’t make any sense). Dad managed the Look, even as he stayed on a conference call, kissed his child, and handed them into the Lexus. Fine multi-tasking.

This sixth summer, though, I think I have finally come to peace with it all. I have a very long list of house projects I have just scratched the surface of, I have actually read Hamlet, (and some bad military SF) I am learning to cook, and when I get the Look at the back door of the Children’s Theater I take my sunglasses off and look back, and smile.

Now they look away. Maybe it’s the ever-increasing grey in my hair, the lines around the corners of my eyes, or just something in my glance that says, “You try teaching Earth Science to thirty 8^th grade boys for nine months as your school cuts its budget, lays off teachers, tries to deal with No Child Left Behind, and then talk to me.” I think what I would see in my eyes is the tiniest, dimmest echo of something you’d see in the eyes of a kid walked around Fallujah with the Marine Corps, an ER nurse, or steelworkers who walk the high iron.

I don’t put myself in the class of those people, who become heroes just by surviving, but teachers survive, too, 185 days at a time, one school year at a time, and blessed be, one summer at a time as well. I may not be entirely guilt-free, but as a Catholic, I don’t think I’d be entirely comfortable with that. In the meantime, I think I’ll go ignore the back porch refinishing another day, maybe read a little, defrost a chicken to cook later, and, whoa, look at the time, I need to go to pick up the boy from Children’s Theater.

The End of Knowledge

When I was a kid, growing up in a sugar plantation town in Hawaii, on a barely paved road, the ocean on one side and sugar cane on the other, I knew where to get information. I could ask my parents, or read a book. I could ask a teacher, if it was about a subject I was studying at the moment. I could also ride my bike three miles to the Waialua Public Library, right by the sugar mill, and ask Mrs. Terukina for a book. If she didn’t have it, then I didn’t either. For mass media, there was AM radio, and the fuzzy signal of KGMB Channel 9 in Honolulu, which in the days before cable TV, just barely reached the North Shore of Oahu, providing us with a narrow stream of other information.

So for me there was true utility in becoming a person who collected a lot of information: books, documents, education, memories. Because if these sources I mentioned above didn’t have it, it just wasn’t there. My mind was starving. If I was interested in the Civil War, there was a book or two in the library, but not many, because in Waialua, the Civil War was as exotic a subject as Kamehameha’s campaign to unify the islands would have been in Mississippi.

At that time (which by the way, was the mid 1970s) the amount of knowledge we now have access to: past, present and future, all facts possible (correct and incorrect), images, video, primary sources, other states, nations, continents, planets: would simply have been impossible to grasp for the 11-year-old Chris.

Many people have written on the change in the nature of knowledge. In education, though, the legacy of the information repository paradigm affects every aspect of a school year: pacing, culture, teaching kids at risk and even the question of whether public schools can prepare a child to be a 21^st century adult. Why?

Because the idea of a classroom teacher as the sole repository of knowledge on a single subject, in a single classroom, is an iconic and unaltered one. Kids may routinely use their smart phones to instantly find song lyrics on the Net (anyone old enough to remember playing the vinyl, over and over again, picking up the needle, and scrawling lyrics in a spiral notebook?) but they still believe their science teacher (along with their textbook) to be the single source on earth for information on galaxies, air pressure or tornadoes.

Other adults, be they special education teachers, advisory teachers, or support staff, need to prove to a student that they too know about science, math or geography. Not that the classroom teacher particularly wants it this way: if students realized how they could verify and augment their own learning it would create a depth and richness to their education that a single teacher and textbook cannot match. We need to directly instruct them in this idea of one student to many sources of information. The Internet and the knowledge it provides also blow the single-repository model out of the water. It also allows a truly one-to-many relationship of a subject to its sources of knowledge.

This has both advantages and dangers. The dangers are clear: textbooks are carefully written and edited for clarity and accuracy, though with the recent growth of textbook adoption states it is no longer possible to say they are relatively objective. History in particular has always suffered from political omission: science and other subjects are now undergoing the same fate.

But the proliferation of other information sources is the antidote to a potion of ideological influence designed to provide students with a limited subset of selected facts. The dilution of textbooks, the conquest of school boards by interest groups, and with the limits of the single teacher-textbook model together provide us with the path to follow, which is this: We absolutely must, consciously and carefully, teach the kids thinking as a skill, with the same rigor and accountability we use now to teach them any other subject.

We should just give them any background information they need—no more memorizing vocabulary words-then provide them with a curriculum that forces them to synthesize, analyze, compare, evaluate. Entire occupations (individual tax preparer, accounts receivable, real estate broker) are becoming commoditized by outsourcing, offshoring and internet applications that have eliminated monopolies on procedural knowledge and process completion.

If we do not want public school to produce kids only suited to become an underclass (and there are no teachers that I know who do), we have to break the box, use all the technologies and information we can provide. Some information is junk, but it always has been. We now have the opportunity to guide them through some of the process of becoming discerning consumers of thoughts, ideas, proposals, ideologies--before they leave school.

We have the chance not only to level the playing field once and for all, but to change the game of public education permanently. We can no longer afford to operate as a factory, producing industrialized minds. That paradigm lies in rust. We must bring the world to our kids, that they may face it, develop the skills to manage it, and have a chance to prosper in a world without informational horizons. If we don’t, we as teachers will only be riding our school systems down into obsolescence.

The Real Master Calendar

It may seem, looking in from the outside, that the schedules chosen by the public schools of America are pretty obvious: most often semesters, trimesters, or quarters. There are long holidays (Winter [no, not Christmas or Hanukah] and Spring), there are two-day holidays (Thanksgiving and the State Teachers Convention) and one-day holidays that are never numerous enough.

All these dates, along with assemblies, sports events, the National Honor Society meetings and staff development are written in a Rosetta-Stone like document called the Master Calendar, that spells out the exact sequence of the school year. It’s all organized, perfectly sorted out, up on a giant white board in a back hallway of the main office.

This perception, of course, could not be more incorrect. Within the walls and halls of the school, teachers and students alike know the real master calendar is unwritten, and follows no state or district guidelines. The real master calendar? It goes something like this.

Honeymoon/Recon (Day 1 to about mid Week 2.)

After running around frantically setting up the classroom, sitting in meetings and making copies and powerpoints, you greet students, lead them in engaging community building games, and hand out textbooks. The students usually do everything you ask, and you think, “This is looking pretty good. I have some good groups this year.”

That’s because The Class, the one that varies each year, but which by mid-October you will be calling “my ____ Period” (sometimes with @$! added) has not yet revealed itself. No, they are watching you, scoping out the weaknesses in your classroom management like Ukrainian hackers looking for backdoors into bank accounts. They are looking for cracks in the system, the cross-currents in the classroom that show in no lesson plan. They are looking for opportunity. Will he lend out pencils? How many times? What about the nurse? Can I go whenever I want? Does he have Teacher Ear, so he can hear whatever we say from the front of the class? How hard will he push if we don’t finish something? What happens to kids who misbehave?

The Class sits. They watch. They wait. Their patience, especially compared to how it manifests itself in mid-February, is endless. Then, it begins.

True Colors/Run Up To Halloween (Week 2 to Week 7)
This is point when things settle down, and both teachers and students suddenly realize, Oh My God, were are here, all together and with very few breaks, for the next 170 days. In six, roughly hour-long chunks of time will we move, all together, slowly sliding across the Ocean of Time like an iceberg blown by a gentle wind. No Exit, with No 2 pencils.

The Class, knowing somehow on a cellular level that the time has come, begins to bubble up. First sporadic episodes of stubborn resistance to a single task, then group resistance. Then hallway drama brought in from the breakfast line or lunchroom that explodes in a thermo-biological nuclear blast 15 minutes into the period after lunch just as you were going over the sequence of star evolution. A daily walk through Valley of the Shadow. At the same time, all the other classes seem to give a collective sigh, settle in, and begin to run like a well-oiled machine. And so you are left with one period each day that defines your day. I will be fine until/after Period ___.

In the school as a whole, leaders emerge, hand-written posters announce student government elections, the first sports teams are chosen, and the newest grade to the building stops getting lost all the time. The great voyage is underway, and things are going fine.

Halloween/Thanksgiving/Christmas: The Golden Times (Week 7 to Week 18)

And thus, except for Period ___, and unraveling the mysterious demands of the latest pedagogical initiative (there will usually be one, requiring professional development sessions with a visiting expert, often a poster or other papers you have to hang on the wall, usually certain things you have to say and do), things are good, most of it useful. You enjoy the day-in, day-out joy of just plain teaching, the rush of kids learning things, the spark of discovering a new way to do something that works, the flow of it all.

The seasons change, Halloween comes and goes, Thanksgiving runs smoothly into the holiday season, the first grades are out--there is still time for kids struggling to do better, and you get to know you kids and how they learn. Maybe you learn a little about their lives, and they, as you tell stories that tie in to whatever you are teaching, get to know you. Still, every day, Period ____ lasts ten thousand years and leaves you with a headache, but that’s only once, for less than an hour. Holiday (Christmahankwanzahkah) Break comes, and you enjoy your time with the family. If only, if only, this was the end of the school year. But no.

The Long Abyss (Week 18 to Infinity)

Sometime in early January, students and staff return to face the grim reality of weeks and weeks with no holiday, classes when you feel like you need a taser to wake people up, and the feeling that it will go on forever, world without end. In some places it snows. In others it rains. Everywhere, hours pass like years. Days, mysteriously, pass like seconds. You begin to get to the bottom of your bag of teacher tricks. You begin to think that, in fact, none of them will work. And yet, minute by minute, the weeks pass, and suddenly, it change is on the horizon.

Spring Break (Week 30?)

Heavy drinking, and travel if you’re lucky. Heavy drinking and gardening if you are on a budget.

Fire in the Hole: Standardized Testing Time (Week 32-33)

Back mid-February or so, uneasy sleep begins for administrators and district officials. On the horizon, looming like the stormclouds of an incipient war, the standardized tests. Dreamed up by pyschometricans determined to create a perfect core sample of the academic skills of middle-class white kids, but, oddly, taken by everyone else also, these tests are an excellent predictor of future success. Not necessarily academically or professionally (SAT scores of famous people [Craig Vetter, Nobel laureate biologist 550 math, 500 reading]), but for the ability to endure boredom and pain. Like a root canal. Or a five hour presentation on your company’s new sales commission structure.

The central office people send out posters that ask the kids to Show What They Know, hand out mints, and encourage all the kids to do their best. The subtext remains unspoken (Please, Please Pretty Please so they don’t put our school on the List and we get torn apart.)

The kids take hours and hours of tests, leaving them simultaneously groggy and belligerent for the better part of two weeks. Then, with a few weeks left of school, we all struggle with an odd feeling. Having been immersed in messages designed to make students and staff believe in the importance of the Tests, we then feel like this: So, I guess we’re done then, since none of the rest of the stuff we are doing will be tested.

Of course, there are many weeks yet to go.

Field Trip and Award Ceremony Season (Week 35-38)

This is the part of year when your lesson planning internal dialog sounds like this: “OK, Monday I want to start Chapter 15. Let’s see, but that’s College Fair, so I’ll be missing half the kids, so I can start, Tuesday is OK, but Wednesday is a half day because of African-American Community Assembly, and so half the guys will be gone, Thursday is an Early Release Day, so there will be a dance, and Friday I’ll have a quiz. So I’ve got about a day and a half.”

Then, there are the small field trips. The bell rings, you walk in from the hallway to get rolling and you have maybe three students out of 22. You ask, “Where is everyone?” The kids tell you it’s Cinco De Mayo, so some kids are there, it’s also the Service Learning picnic day so that’s some other kids are gone, six kids from the Mentor Program went to see a baseball game, the Student Council people are electing their officers for next year, all the girls went to the Girl Power assembly and two guys are suspended since they are so sick of school they threw food all over the cafeteria and got two days. So you have the three pull up their desks and go, “So, remember when I said we could talk about the possibility of Life On Other Planets some other time? I think now is good.”

Hand over the Candle/Let My People Go (Week 38 till the Last Day)

How long O Lord how long? Not few enough days to release the Gulag-like grip you have on the students. Suddenly, with the end in sight, students and teachers develop a rush of good feeling. Kids who used to tell you daily that they hate you and the school, and would greet your questions with “Shut up talking to me!” are now hugging everyone and greeting you with a big smile and “What up?” In the last three days you convince yourself that movies and pizza parties, are, in fact, pedagogically sound.

And then, suddenly, they are gone, the building is quiet, and you find yourself strangely moved. I can’t believe it, you think. I really will miss them. And then, you do something even more inexplicable. You start planning.

Thinking Time

So that is the last part of the Real Master Calendar: No much in June, but more and more in July and August, as you drive your kids to soccer or summer camp, you find yourself mulling over new ideas. Maybe next year I’ll do that lab differently, maybe I'll…until, it all begins again.