February 15, 2016
Over the weekend, a heart-shattering video from a “no-excuses” New York City charter school–part of the plutocrat-adored Success Academies network–provided a shocking inside look at an abusive first grade classroom. It is hard to watch, but important to look at. Is this what it takes to be considered a “high performing” school for poor kids of color?
Coincidentally, local teacher and writer Julie Landsman sent a guest blog post my way. I will post it here below because it asks us to think more about what teachers teach, how teachers teach, and how relationships–not harsh discipline–inspire learning that matters.
Julie Landsman: Can We Talk About What Kids Are Learning?
Teachers today are told to respond to an array of time-consuming mandates, from redoing an attendance procedure to implementing a program for graphing student response information. But what I have found, as I talk to educators from around the country, is a desire for concrete materials and curriculum that will capture students’ hearts and minds. Instead of a quick –fix reading system, they want to know what actual books, starting from the youngest to the oldest kids, will motivate their students to become engaged in their lessons. Teachers are trying to find a way to reach students who are not graduating, or not doing well on tests and in some cases, not attending school at all. An overly regimented program, combined with a lack of real connection to students from multiple cultures, often turns away many of those children teachers struggle to reach. And teachers are aware of this.
However, an emphasis on what is being taught can change attendance patterns, graduation rates, and progress in basic skills. There are personal reasons we get into teaching; for me it was love of the kids themselves, and love of my subject area, literature. It was not systems or standards. It was not scripted lessons that needed no input from me. I got into teaching because I wanted students to learn to live in this world, to make their way to college or law school or culinary school: to entertain their wildest dreams.
On the best days, classrooms are vibrant, surprising and even humorous places. On the best days a teachable moment comes, when the structure you have created as a teacher, provides a safe place to explore; and a quiet student says something that galvanizes everyone else to think in a new way. And on this day your lesson is shelved and you create a new assignment on the spot to help students develop the standard, the skill, the focused learning you have been told to teach that day. Your class engages in a dialogue that moves into territory you had dreamed of for them. And you are reminded that this is why you stay in education. 
Such days come as the result of listening to students. They come as a result of creating concrete experiences, using what we have learned about their lives, that will get them reading, or inventing or debating, or researching or writing. If it means creating a class for African-American Males, or adding African-American History, we do this. If it is developing a rigorous science course around climate change, we do that. Others may record oral histories of elders from their neighborhood. But teachers need training, time and encouragement to create such places, such schools.
There is no abstract system that will solve our educational problems, no canned instructional recipe. Rather what our students need from us is fearlessness, persistence, and support for change for the long haul. The language itself needs to go from abstract to concrete; from academic plans to plans and methods that come from concern, from talking, from laughing with the kids and their parents, their community leaders.
Teachers are rarely asked what we think or feel about our work, our students, our families. This must change, as messy as it may be. Teachable moments happen all the time, almost in spite of the prescriptive formulas, the canned curriculum. Let’s talk in real language about how to make those happen more often.
Julie Landsman (www.jlandsman.com) is the author of three books on education: Basic Needs: A Year with Street Kids in a City School (Milkweed Editions, 1993) A White Teacher Talks About Race (Rowman and Littlefield 2001) and Growing Up White; a Veteran Teacher Reflects on Racism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). She is also the editor of many collections of essays stories and poems, the most recent being Voices for Diversity and Social Justice, A Literary Education Reader, with Paul Gorski and Rosanna Salcedo, (Rowman and Littlefield 2015) She is a retired teacher from the Minneapolis public schools, and consults and teaches seminars on education, writing, race and culture.
