Grandma Mercia, Mother Jones, and Teaching West Virginia

The recent teachers’ strike in West Virginia has me thinking about my Grandmother, Mercia Dunmire. She taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Monongah, West Virginia, a community framed by mountains and mines, teaching the children of coal miners and subsistence farmers in a multi-grade classroom. As family mythology tells it, after noticing children coming to school hungry, Grandma Mercia organized an effort to feed everyone every day. Parents who could do so donated from their gardens and pantries, and older students cooked lunch, learning to prepare food and sustain the group by working and eating together. In the guise of a daily home economics lesson, Grandma Mercia’s students learned service and community, caring for each other as an act of equity. She fed others’ children even while she struggled to feed her own, racking up debt for groceries on credit at Manchins’ store after her husband died, sealed in a fire-filled mine. Grandma Mercia was like that--she saw opportunities out of need and struggled to help her students in ways beyond teaching them to write and read. She filled my shelves with books, but, more importantly, she influenced me to be aware in the world, to see and struggle against injustice, and to teach.

Mercia Dunmire in her first year of teaching, 1929.

In 2007, I represented West Virginia as our state’s Teacher of the Year, attending several events and conferences where teachers from all US states and territories gathered together to learn from each other and raise our collective voice. At one of our events, we dressed to represent our home states. Given that so many recognizable costumes related to West Virginia are caricatures grounded in stereotype, I wanted to choose a memorable and impactful way of representing our heritage and history. I dressed as Mother Jones. I pulled my hair in a bun and donned a black dress and wire rim glasses. I carried a sign marked with her words: “Sit down and read. Educate yourself for the coming conflicts.” I found myself explaining many times who she was, what she meant to miners, what she meant to West Virginia, and what she meant to me. Like Grandma Mercia, Mother Jones taught me through her legacy about how to be in the world.

Today, I’m thinking of Grandma Mercia, Mother Jones, and teaching in West Virginia. Today, teachers are picketing and rallying, closing down the schools for the 8th day in a row, fighting to raise pay from 48th in the nation and for adequate healthcare for all public employees (myself included, since I’ve moved to the university classroom). Today, our governor owes more in back taxes than a teacher will see in a lifetime, our state legislature refused to pass a severance tax that could fund public health insurance, and a coal boss runs for senate with the blood of 29 miners on his hands; our world doesn’t look much different now than it did 100 years ago, echoing with injustice. Today, it’s our teachers, red bandanas around their necks and holding signs, who are waging the fight, yet they are still caring for students, even out of the classroom: packing lunches, spreading word about how we can help through organizations like Morgantown’s Pantry Plus More who are feeding students while they’re out of school.

These are my thoughts and my experiences, but I know they resonate with other teachers. This is just my story, except when it’s not. I can see, in this moment, that West Virginia teachers are standing in the light of Grandma Mercia and Mother Jones. Whether she is a hellraiser heroine on the picket line or an everyday activist peeling potatoes for the soup, a West Virginia teacher is an agent of change and a fierce advocate for students. And, at the heart of it all, is literacy. Reading is revolution. Writing is power. We must remember, as Mother Jones said, “reformation, like education, is a journey.” Teachers do the work of progress every day, in and out of the classroom. Especially in this moment, our teachers are educating us: these strike days are readings in civic literacy, in social movements, in what it means to be a West Virginian. The teachers walk the line, writing the people’s history, and we are students, all.

All Roads Lead to Home: Reflections on Space Camp

I spent the last week of July in Huntsville, Alabama, at The US Space and Rocket Center’s International Space Camp for Educators. While there, I stretched beyond the limits of anything I ever thought I would do. Among many other activities, I learned to read topographical maps of Mars; helped to create and launch a rocket; worked to build a heat shield out of copper mesh and tinfoil and test it with a blowtorch; performed an extra-vehicular activity to build a structure outside a space station on a mock mission; collaborated with others in mission control to launch and land a space shuttle as my team’s flight director; and experienced 1/6th gravity in a moon walk simulation. Along with 23 international participants, the 56 American teachers of the year went non-stop for seven days, from 7 am to 10 pm each day. After seven days, I returned wired, inspired, and exhausted.

When I recovered enough to actually start thinking about the implications of my week as a mock astronaut, one lesson seemed to shine above all others: the further away I went, the more signs I saw of home.

It started on the first day of camp, when Sang-Ki, the educator from South Korea, sang “Country Roads” to me on the bus at 7:30 am. This in itself did not seem unusual, since people all over the world have a tendency to break into their best John Denver renditions as soon as one mentions being from West Virginia. It's true: I’ve personally had it happen in Japan and in Thailand.

Another unsurprising West Virginia reference was frequent discussion of Chuck Yeager, a Lincoln County native and the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound. This, too, was expected, since Yeager was the director of the first Space School at Edwards Air Force Base, the training program responsible for producing the first astronauts.

During a break one afternoon, I went for a walk with the teachers of the year from New Hampshire, Tennessee, and Rhode Island, and we wandered onto a field used for testing student built rockets. Near the launching frames was a monument to Homer Hickam, the author of Rocket Boys, which is set in his hometown of Coalwood in MacDowell County. While we know Hickam primarily as a West Virginia Writer, he is better known in Huntsville as an Aerospace Engineer and astronaut trainer, dedicating much of his adult life to education and exploration. His books were on the shelves in the gift shop, and many of the other teachers had read them and shared them with kids.

Again, I had expected these references to home. Then things started to get more surprising. On Wednesday, we had a presentation from, a discussion with, and books signed by Ed Buckbee, the press person for the first manned space flights, and the founder of space camp. Mr. Buckbee is a native of Hampshire County and was educated in Morgantown (my hometown) at West Virginia University.

At Space Camp, teachers are divided into teams of about 15 people, and these teams work together in classes and on missions. Each team has two leaders, Space Camp employees who facilitate activities and serve as guides. One of our team leaders, Dan Oates, lives just over the mountain from me in Romney, WV. He has been a teacher-leader at Space Camp for seventeen years. He has also been fundamental in creating opportunities for thousands of children as the creator of SCI-VIS, a Space Camp experience for the visually impaired. Dan, along with Ed Buckbee, was inducted into Space Camp’s Hall of Fame as part of the 25th anniversary celebration this summer.

As one might imagine, I was beginning to feel a little stunned in the shadow of so many amazing West Virginians. And then things got weird.

On Friday, I had the chance to briefly visit with a little league team with members from Paw Paw, a town in the county where I live. They were passing through on their way to a tournament and had arranged for the afternoon at the Space and Rocket Center museum. We took a few photos, and I was again reminded of home.

And then, on Saturday morning in the airport, Dan stopped me to introduce me to a little boy from Romney. He was a fifth grader, and his favorite subject was science. As we posed for a picture in the terminal, he was clearly nervous at the thought of the adventure ahead of him. I was still coming down at the end of mine, and I told him that he was going to have a great time. When I explained that I had just had the most amazing week doing everything he was about to do, he looked at me—really looked at me—making eye contact for the first time in our conversation. I hope I left him a little less afraid, and I know that he has been changed by his week in Huntsville, as I am, though maybe not in the same way or for the same reasons.

Anyone who knows me knows that I look for greater meaning in simplistic images; English teachers do that. I look for signs and symbols, evidence of the universe at work in my daily life. In the air as I headed toward West Virginia, I tried very hard to piece together the meaning of all these encounters with home. I was supposed to be exploring the cosmos, right? But these connections kept me grounded—and not just grounded on Earth—grounded at home. With each connection I made, I felt the umbilical pull of my home state. And in these connections, I’d seen changed lives, and West Virginians who changed and will change them. I met pioneers of the past: Yeager and Hickam, who changed America’s technological and exploratory capabilities. I met visionaries who are making a difference in the present: Buckbee, who directly touched the lives of half a million people, as Space Camp celebrated its 500,00th participant this summer, and Oates, who saw a need and filled it to touch the lives of over 2000 visually impaired children. And I saw the future: children awed by the dream of possibility and the ways in which learning can be authentic and purposeful.

As part of our orientation, Dan Oates showed us a video news piece from Southern Living about Space Camp for visually impaired kids. I was very moved when one little girl spoke about her experience, saying that in her normal life she was a person who couldn’t see well, but in the SCI-VIS environment she was able to see better than others, and the vision she had enabled her to lead.

Good teachers are like that. We see things clearly when others can not, and we use the vision we have to lead others to see, too. All it takes is one person with one vision and the effort it takes to express it in a way that other people can see it, too. Some people see opportunities, or needs, or possibilities, or potential—whatever we see, it’s up to us to do something with our vision. To find the vantage point where we see best and project the image of our vision as far and wide as we can is the only thing—the greatest thing—we can do. As Christa McAuliffe so eloquently stated: “I touch the future, I teach.”

So here I am in the middle—looking at the past, present, and future—and trying to figure out where I fit. I spent my time at the Space and Rocket Center with 55 other American teachers who are the same as I am. We won the same award, went through the same program at Space Camp. We were in constant contact for the duration of our stay: we played together, worked together, learned together, ate together, and even slept in the same rooms in a dormitory. Yet I am different too, and I’m different in a way that is distinctly West Virginian. I believe in sense of place, and that place shapes who we are, and that as West Virginians we see things a little differently. Maybe my perspective is affected by the way the hills surround me, or by the way the leaves move in the wind, or by the fact that I, unlike so many other Americans, can actually see the stars when I stand in my backyard at night.

I don’t know what it is that sets any one of us apart, but I do know this: NASA is planning to send a human mission to Mars by 2025, and the person who may next set foot on the Moon, or on Mars, may be that boy I met in the airport. More fantastic yet, that Martian explorer may be a kid in my town, in my school, in my class. And if she—or he—is, I want to know that I’ve helped instill the drive to do whatever the heart says, the vision to believe it can be done, the determination to go and explore, and the sense to see and recognize the signs that lead us home.

Twisted Words and Teacher Pay

Be very careful about releasing your words into the wild. Once you’ve made a public statement, it’s no longer yours, and anyone who has an opinion and a pen can use it any way he likes. In January, I was interviewed by Jessica M. Karmasek, a writer for Charleston, West Virginia’s Daily Mail newspaper. We had a long phone conversation about me, my teaching, and, among other issues, the cost of living disparity between the part of the state where I live and other parts of the state, which are in a population decline. When Jessica’s article was published, she quoted me accurately, and, with the exception of adding three years to my age (Gasp!), presented me in a realistic and positive light. I was flattered by how she saw me and was impressed with her writing skills.

Something I said to Jessica, however, struck a nerve with people: that I would rather teach in West Virginia than cross the border into another state where teachers make more money. The story was picked up by the AP and spread to other state papers. Most of these short pieces were of the “thumbs up” type, applauding my selflessness in taking a pay cut to teach at home, like this one from the March, 2007 issue of Graffiti magazine: “IN: West Virginia teacher of the year, Sarah Morris, English teacher at Berkeley Springs High School is making a commitment to stay in the state despite the lure of higher salaries in neighbouring states. Sarah is committed to her students, her community and is keeping her considerable talents at home.” These sentiments continued to spread, and USA Today picked the byte up, too, in their state blurbs.

Strangely, as the words moved farther away from me, they became more and more condensed, truncating my thoughts into one, single (and twisted) message: Good teachers don’t need more money. Then, to my surprise, the words grew again, were editorialized and leveraged by both sides of the teacher pay issue in my home state. I was discussed in editorials and in blogs. One Dominion Post letter to the editor very bitingly criticized me as being naively unaware of the issues teachers face when they have families to raise and live in other counties. As the state legislature, the governor, and the state teacher unions negotiated for a pay increase, my words become more political. They did so without my consent.

In March, teachers across the state staged a planned, one-day walkout to vie for a pay raise for West Virginia teachers. Fourteen of the state’s fifty-five counties participated in the walkout, but, in spite of the growing population, mine was not one of them. Teachers in my county, in contrast to the rest of West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle, voted to stay in school that day for a number of reasons. Some base facts of the teacher pay issue, statewide, are these:

We currently rank 47^th in the nation in terms of teacher pay.

On March 10, 2007, the WV legislature approved a 3.5% pay increase (which ends up being somewhere between $800 and $2000 annually, depending on degree and level of experience). Something, but not much.

As a whole, the population of West Virginia is in decline, but the population in the Eastern Panhandle, where I live, is growing exponentially. These facts apply to me and other teachers in my county:

Morgan County, West Virginia, where I live, has a community which supports an excess levy that allows our first year teachers to start out at about $2000 more than the state average, and we have been granted a pay increase two out of the last three years due to that levy. This almost compensates for the cost of living increase in our area, which has become a bedroom community for DC.

My school voted 30 to 8 against the state wide walkout (although many teachers did not vote at all, as this represents a little over half our staff). There were many reasons for this, and some of our individual reasons for not walking out were documented by students in their weekly program, NewsTeam.

I am lucky to live in a county that believes in supporting education. I am lucky in that I am single, childless, and able to do work that I love. If I wanted a fully loaded Lexus, a McMansion, and a state of the art technological arsenal, would I make enough money to have them? Not in a million years. Do I want these things someday? No. I would not leave work that I love in order to have material wealth. If I had a family to support, would I make enough money to do so? Probably not, and I want to have a family some day. If teacher pay does not change before I am ready for these things, maybe I will find a more lucrative profession. Or maybe my children will live with less, even though they shouldn’t have to. I do not know what will happen. I have enough experience that I am very aware of poverty’s territories, and I never want to live there.

Still, what I said was meant to be personal, not political, regardless of the fact that I can now hear the adage “The Personal is Political” ringing in my head. I was raised by proud West Virginians who know the debilitating effects of poverty and believe that the way out of it is education; therefore, I identify as West Virginian and believe in the power of education. As far as my altruism goes, my reasons for staying at home are maybe not as noble as people think. The belief that I’m making a difference in West Virginia makes me feel good. I do it because it makes me feel like a purposeful, dedicated West Virginian. I think I am opening doors for children who may have lives like the ones my parents worked to climb out of, and I am making a difference for those kids. That feels good. I teach to feel good, just like I exercise to feel good, read books to feel good, write in my journal to feel good, spend time with the people I love to feel good. I’m not sure that’s so noble. In fact, it might even be a little selfish.

I am writing about this because it raises a cultural issue for me in terms of the way we read and report the news. When I interviewed with Jessica Karmasek, I was talking about myself, not the teacher pay issue as it pertains to any other teachers. This is clear in the article, which was published under the headline: “Teacher of the Year Says She Is Committed to Teaching West Virginia Students.” The focus of the first article was me, not teacher pay, and addresses the fact that money is an issue, but I have the luxury of not needing much money right now. When the AP picked the piece up, however, the headline changed: “West Virginia’s Top Teacher Here to Stay, She Says, Despite Lower Pay.” This second article, run statewide the very next day, is less than a quarter of the length of the original and contains three sentences worth of quotes, yet it changes the focus from me to pay. How’s that for spin? The editorials followed from there, and most of them did not quote me at all. Questions follow: what’s truth, then? I was not misquoted, but parts of my story were missing. Who is responsible? Which article is most accurate? How can I teach students to tell the difference? How can I tell the difference myself?

In an era where everything is a joke or a hot button issue, when we’re more interested in watching the latest Britney Spears trainwreck rather than learning anything, when news is not news, how can we be responsible teachers and learners? If everything’s satire (including, ironically, my school’s student news show, which I think is great) how do we know what’s serious? If we even want the real story, how can we sort through the muck to locate it? Education in the 21^st century is a daunting task. The media literacy and critical thinking required in our information age can’t be measured by standards based assessments, yet these skills are absolutely necessary for cultural survival. Just thinking about the tasks ahead of me makes me want to sink into the couch with the remote and a big bag of fat free Doritos, but… I can’t, partly because I don’t have TV, and, also, because I have a job to do.

And just to clear the record: teacher pay is a more complex issue than a single editorial or essay (this one included) can easily address. At the risk of oversimplification, my feelings are these: teachers in West Virginia do not make enough money. Teachers do not make enough money anywhere. We devalue education as a culture, which is why Paris Hilton makes more money than I do and is better liked than I am. (What is her job, anyway?) The teaching profession reaches every American life. Every life. And yet we are at the bottom of the professional pay scale. Don’t give me a pay raise, give me a paradigm shift.