I am very excited about a new project. Three colleagues and I are working (with the assistance of our wonderful principal and a great group of kids) on a new, experimental, multidisciplinary course for next year.
21st Century Symposium will be led by four core-area teachers (math, social studies, science, and me, English) and will incorporate aspects of all subject areas in a study of real-world themes and ideas that is student-driven. Kids will determine projects, grading, topics, readings, (ideally) everything. And we will learn right along with them--teachers as learner-leaders. The ultimate goal is real world understanding, participation, and publication.
We're starting with a blog. Wish us luck and follow our progress.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Friday, May 16, 2008
The Primary Race and Issues of Race in West Virginia
At this moment, facing national news coverage of the West Virginia primary elections, echoes of racism, ignorance, and prejudice sounding throughout the national media, I am saddened and afraid.
An Associated Press exit poll found that “one in five white Clinton voters said race was an important factor in their vote and about 85 percent of them voted for Clinton against Obama, who would be the first black major-party presidential nominee.” In a state that is 95 percent white, this might be expected: one can argue that it’s human nature to fear the unfamiliar. We’ve made national headlines for this. We have also made national headlines for some of our residents’ overwhelming lack of information. On Wednesday, The Daily Show openly mocked interviewees’ ignorance, and with valid reason. The ideas represented are obvious examples of what my friend Pete refers to as “ignorance with confidence:” the worst possible kind of ignorance.
So I sat in my car this morning, in the parking lot at school, listening to West Virginia Public Radio’s coverage of recent press. In their piece on West Virginia Morning, “Racial, religious prejudice hurt Obama in W.Va.,” Scott Finn and Anna Sale presented the issues frankly and clearly, and I watched the rain and felt a stone of hopelessness growing in the pit of my stomach. I listened to interviews with the state Democratic and Republican chairmen, and cringed as they expressed the idea that West Virginians aren’t really racist; that if a person were to ask the question directly, West Virginians would deny being racist—the interviews just came off incorrectly. This made me feel even worse, simply because that thinking—the direct question of prejudice versus the ingrained and slippery submerged reality—obscures and oversimplifies the problem. It’s the same when people say: “I’m not racist, I have a Black friend,” yet still exhibit prejudiced behavior. Kids do this all the time: “I’m not racist, I just wouldn’t trust “a Mexican”… or “a Jew”… or “an Arab.” Fill in the blank. It’s frustrating and frightening, the lack of logical thinking: again, ignorance with confidence. I see it when I teach a Holocaust unit and kids express sympathy with the Jews, yet prejudice against African Americans… When I show Hotel Rwanda, and they voice the opinion that those Africans are different from Blacks here… And I’ll not even discuss the stereotypes that so many hold about West Virginia, which now seem to smack of some truth! People exhibit a strange inability to translate thinking across barriers, to see how hate is hate, no matter where and how or why it rears its ugly head. And that hate is destructive, always.
As a teacher, I think it’s my responsibility not so much to teach what’s “right” (too subjective and close to indoctrination for me) but to teach kids how to logically evaluate all the information they’re given, and how to seek more information when a logical solution is evasive. I’ve written about this before, but it’s critical in a discussion of prejudice because hate is clearly illogical. Like the woman on The Daily Show who stated she wouldn’t vote for Obama because she’s “…had enough of Hussein,” we don’t always have the ability to distinguish between distortions and facts. A shared name does not equal shared beliefs; why isn’t this obvious? What if his name were Adolf? Maybe it’s the result of culturally faulty synapses, but, according to current media evidence, we’re just not making logical connections in West Virginia.
It’s distressing and daunting. It’s another task to add to the list of things that I must do as a teacher. It’s culturally ingrained and deeply concealed, and it takes a national political issue to reveal it. When I discussed it with my class this morning, their thinking was that only the most outrageous, most controversial interviews were excerpted on the news, and that only a small cross section of voters must have been polled. But this is oversimplifying, as well. And maybe it is true, too, that press coverage is biased, but again, it doesn’t account for the fact that hate is here, it’s our problem, and we’ve gotten very good at avoiding actually dealing with it.
My rainy parking lot moment, listening to the radio, my sadness at the already poor national image of West Virginians, my responsibility as an educator—all these lead me to the same place. I have got to turn that stone of hopelessness into a grain of hope. I am only one, but I hope I make a difference. I hope the kids who leave my classes can see logical patterns, and communicate those to others. I hope my kids won’t embody and reinforce those awful stereotypes about West Virginians; they can change them by not stereotyping other people. I hope for the future, because, even with all the progress we’ve made nationally, the West Virginian present just isn’t good enough. Ignorance with confidence? Not in my classroom.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Signposts
I can hardly believe it's almost over. I feel relief, some sadness, and some excitement to really be a teacher again. This is the text of my speech from the 2008 Teacher of the Year banquet, at which I turned over my "crown."
When I addressed the guests at this banquet last year, I was in a considerable amount of shock. In fact, if I had known I would be selected, I probably would have not filled out the application, nor would I have agreed to attend the finalist interview in the first place. The truth is this: when I attended this banquet last year, I had seriously been considering whether I was on the right path. In my heart, I did not really believe I was a good teacher. I did not expect to be selected. I did not know that something would happen to hold me in my classroom. Now, I think it happened for a reason.
It could be that I am a superstitious person. I do look for extraordinary messages in everyday events; I am an English teacher, after all. But I believe there are paths we are meant to follow, and we don’t always get to choose them ourselves.
On September 12, 2006, I drove the hundred miles from my home in Morgan County to my parent’s home in Morgantown. The whole time I was laboring over the silliest thing: not the speech I had written, not whether my students would actually work for my substitute, but what jewelry I would wear to the banquet. It does seem silly, doesn’t it? Let me explain. When I was a teenager, my grandmother gave me a necklace--she called it a lavaliere--that had been given to her by a student in her first year of teaching: 1929. It was cheap, five and dime costume jewelry, but she knew that the child who had given it to her had probably not been able to afford it. It was a testament to the relationships she built in her classroom. This seemed an obvious choice for me to wear to this dinner, but I also saw it as a sign of commitment to a career about which I was having serious doubts.
The second jewelry choice was a gift from a friend who was aware of my conflict. It’s a raw stone set with a simple silver wire wrapping. The stone is called chrysoprase, and it’s a “heart stone,” which signifies the power of the heart over all others. It is representative of finding success in following new paths. Again, facing professional uncertainty, this seemed an obvious choice, but a polar opposite to the first.
It was with this conundrum that I drove the two hours to my parents’ home. I brought both necklaces and intended to ask my folks for help in making the decision. To me, these represented two clear and contrasting paths, neither of which I was sure I wanted. So I arrived, and I took both pieces in the house, and I asked the question. My parents, who had incidentally just returned from Alaska, responded by making the decision easy. They presented me with a gift—a third necklace, the one I am wearing now, and the one I wore to this banquet last year. It is a jade carving, in miniature, of an Inuit symbol, called an inushuk: these are signposts, used to mark dogsled trails. Travelers use these signs to find their paths and to stick to them. "So you don't lose your way," my mom said. And as a result of the events at this banquet last year, I did find my way—in so many ways.
Fate toys with us, I think. Being a teacher is hard, and being an award-winning teacher is even harder. It has been a test of my talents, my constitution, my teaching techniques, and my convictions in the deepest sense of myself. Standing here, last year, there were some things I needed to know that I ended up figuring out mostly on my own, so, for the 2008 West Virginia Teacher of the Year, these are some things I need to tell you:
You will hone skills and talents you never knew you had: for example, you will become an expert at winging a speech, churning out thank you cards, throwing together substitute plans, and getting by on very little sleep. You may gain other skills: you may move audiences to tears, you may find you are very skilled at moving yourself in 1/6th gravity at Space Camp, you may learn to be photogenic for the first time in your life. You will learn to ask for—and accept—help from unexpected sources.
You will face disappointments: when you tell your students you’ll be out for the 20th time this semester, they may look at you with frustration and say: “We Hate This.” Your significant other may wonder who you are. You may see a drop in student test scores for the first time in your career. You may ask for help and not receive it from sources you most expect to give it.
You must rely on all your resources: Dave Perine, Liza Cordiero, Jason Hughes, and Alison Barker will be of immense help to you, as they were to me. I am a resource for you, too. You will meet fifty-five other amazing teachers of the year who will awe you with their talents, caring, and devotion to our profession; you may be stunned to realize that you are one of them. You are one of them.
You will find that most of what you do will be up to you: your best resource will be yourself; you have to trust in your own abilities to find your way. There may be moments when you find yourself stretched so thin that you feel you can’t do anything well, but you will do well—you will shine.
I wish you luck on your journey; I’m ready to go home.
Know this: It will be Hard. You will feel undeserving and discouraged.
It will change you. You will be a better teacher.
It will be whatever you make it.
It will be worth it.
And when you find yourself waffling between frustration and fortitude, between dedication and destruction, remember this:
Your path has found you.
Now it’s up to you to see the signposts.
Thursday, August 2, 2007
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.
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.
Monday, July 2, 2007
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 47th 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 21st 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.
Friday, June 29, 2007
Sometimes...
Sometimes kids save me, and they don’t even know it.
One cold, January day, I am feeling strained, stressed, and awful. I have been working for several days on a major report due in response to a fellowship I’ve received. The package is to be postmarked the next day. I scramble to finish typing, and I need to proofread before I send the thirty plus pages out. I print to my desktop inkjet. No ink. I print to the main staff room laser. A malfunction. I print to the media center laser. Out of service.
Frustrated, I rush down the hall, clutching my flash drive, looking for anyone who might have an available and functional printer. As I’m about the charge into the office, a parent stops me. “Hey!” she smiles, “It’s my son’s favorite teacher!” Her son is largely silent in my class, and he often struggles with his grade. Before this moment, I have no idea that he even likes me. I instantly feel better. When I see him, later, I thank him, and I send his mom a short note, thanking her, too.
Thanks to a very kind colleague, I am able to print, proof, and post my report on time the next day. Yet, more importantly, the kid comes into school and says, at the beginning of class, “My mom says to tell you that you have a beautiful soul.”
As a teacher, much of my job is to make connections with kids and their families, to build communities of learners that extend beyond my own physical reach. This seems obvious to me on a practical level, but I don’t always see evidence that my efforts work, until a kid or a parent says something unexpected that changes my perspective. It’s amazing to me how we touch and are touched just by virtue of the nature of the profession. Yeah, I think moments like these are why I teach.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Say "Cheese!" or My Photographic Learning Curve
When I was recognized with a teaching award, I was not prepared for many of the new roles I would have to play. I was not ready to smile for the camera, to answer reporters’ questions, or to have to present myself as a representative for state education at all times. Still, I learned. I wear make-up. I smile in pictures. I wear colors besides gray, brown, and black. In fact, there is a visible learning curve in the photographs of me as I have become more and more comfortable.
When a cameraman blinds me with a spotlight, I no longer scream: “CarolAnn! Don’t go into the light, CarolAnn!” That went over well, for the record. When I had publicity photos taken with the car that Toyota lent me, I resisted the urge to climb on the hood like Tawny Kitaen. I also exercised extreme restraint when presented with a giant novelty check; I did not ask to be photographed beneath it, as if it were crushing me, and I did not make jokes about trying to cram it into one of the tubes at the bank drive-through. I have had difficulty learning to keep my thoughts to myself (no matter how funny I think they are), and keeping track of my face and body has presented a double challenge. I have learned to stand up straight, finally, after all those years of my mom harassing me, and I have learned, somehow, to lose that frantic, strained look I have always had in front of a camera. Amazingly, about six months into this thing, I have begun to look relaxed, natural, and—for the first time in my life—pretty in pictures.
My past, devastatingly bad photogenic record, however, has made me wary of having my picture taken. Part of the problem is that I am extremely expressive, so the likelihood of a camera catching me making some gruesome face is very high. I once had a student entitle her final reflection for my class “The Many Faces,” and another time, when an album of a special event in my life came back from the photographer, I actually yo-yoed between laughter and tears because of the pictures of me. Hideous. Anyway, it was with years of photographic tragedy weighing on my shoulders that I entered the Oval Office to have my picture made with President and Mrs. Bush.
I guess it didn’t help that I’d had multiple discussions with one of my friends about crossing my eyes and sticking out my tongue when I turned to the camera. Or that I chose to wear very high heels to prevent the world from seeing how short I really am. Or that I’m at the end of the alphabet when we’re in order by state, so I had 53 photographs worth of time for my makeup and hair to wilt and for my brain to consider all of the absurd things I could not say. Or that the whole experience was about eighteen seconds long. The extent of my conversation with the Presidential couple was about three sentences, consisting generally of the words “good morning,” “West Virginia,” “congratulations,” and “thank you.” It was a handshake, a smile, a click, and that’s it. There were no retakes.
When the e-mail attachment of the White House photo came, then, I opened it with much trepidation. What face might I be making? Miraculously, I looked happy, relaxed, and confident. When my principal forwarded it to the whole staff, one of my illustrious colleagues replaced the Bushes’ heads with the ones from Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic, copied it, and distributed a print in everyone’s mailbox—but he left my face alone. My state coordinator had a huge color copy made and framed for me; “That’s your best picture so far,” he said. The kicker was this: when I showed it to my kids, large as life on the whiteboard, they said, in every class: “You look good, but we don’t think you really met them because they look like they’re made of plastic.” And not one of them laughed at the picture of me.
When a cameraman blinds me with a spotlight, I no longer scream: “CarolAnn! Don’t go into the light, CarolAnn!” That went over well, for the record. When I had publicity photos taken with the car that Toyota lent me, I resisted the urge to climb on the hood like Tawny Kitaen. I also exercised extreme restraint when presented with a giant novelty check; I did not ask to be photographed beneath it, as if it were crushing me, and I did not make jokes about trying to cram it into one of the tubes at the bank drive-through. I have had difficulty learning to keep my thoughts to myself (no matter how funny I think they are), and keeping track of my face and body has presented a double challenge. I have learned to stand up straight, finally, after all those years of my mom harassing me, and I have learned, somehow, to lose that frantic, strained look I have always had in front of a camera. Amazingly, about six months into this thing, I have begun to look relaxed, natural, and—for the first time in my life—pretty in pictures.
My past, devastatingly bad photogenic record, however, has made me wary of having my picture taken. Part of the problem is that I am extremely expressive, so the likelihood of a camera catching me making some gruesome face is very high. I once had a student entitle her final reflection for my class “The Many Faces,” and another time, when an album of a special event in my life came back from the photographer, I actually yo-yoed between laughter and tears because of the pictures of me. Hideous. Anyway, it was with years of photographic tragedy weighing on my shoulders that I entered the Oval Office to have my picture made with President and Mrs. Bush.
I guess it didn’t help that I’d had multiple discussions with one of my friends about crossing my eyes and sticking out my tongue when I turned to the camera. Or that I chose to wear very high heels to prevent the world from seeing how short I really am. Or that I’m at the end of the alphabet when we’re in order by state, so I had 53 photographs worth of time for my makeup and hair to wilt and for my brain to consider all of the absurd things I could not say. Or that the whole experience was about eighteen seconds long. The extent of my conversation with the Presidential couple was about three sentences, consisting generally of the words “good morning,” “West Virginia,” “congratulations,” and “thank you.” It was a handshake, a smile, a click, and that’s it. There were no retakes.
When the e-mail attachment of the White House photo came, then, I opened it with much trepidation. What face might I be making? Miraculously, I looked happy, relaxed, and confident. When my principal forwarded it to the whole staff, one of my illustrious colleagues replaced the Bushes’ heads with the ones from Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic, copied it, and distributed a print in everyone’s mailbox—but he left my face alone. My state coordinator had a huge color copy made and framed for me; “That’s your best picture so far,” he said. The kicker was this: when I showed it to my kids, large as life on the whiteboard, they said, in every class: “You look good, but we don’t think you really met them because they look like they’re made of plastic.” And not one of them laughed at the picture of me.
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