In Defense of Teachers

Photo Credit: Mira Kireeva (@solarfri)

This evening I attended a virtual “Meet the Candidates” event for the people running for my local Board of Education. One of the candidates indicated that in talking with members of the community, they had heard from parents that “ a lot of new teachers” had been hired for this past school year and that there was a feeling that some of these teachers were not sufficiently experienced to educate their children. I cannot speak to these parents’ experiences, but I can speak about my own. My daughter had four “new to the district” teachers this year, and I found each and every one of them brought something to the table. In fact, my biggest fear is that many of them will not be rehired for the upcoming year. So, I wanted to take a moment and talk about my concerns with this rather generalized argument and explain my support for not only the “new” teachers but all teachers.

My first problem with this argument is that the speaker did not define their terms. The statement made was that the district had hired “a lot of new teachers” for the 20-21 school year. The implication from the remainder of the argument was that these were inexperienced teachers who were not able to provide an adequate education for the students in some way. But who were the “new” teachers? Not all “new” teachers lack experience. A teacher could be new to the district but have years of previous experience teaching somewhere else. Therefore, just because a teacher is new to the district (i.e. newly hired) is not a sufficient basis on which to judge their adequacy as a teacher. Furthermore, even assuming that the statement was meant to refer to newly credentialed teachers (i.e. lacked any previous teaching experience other than student teaching), that is still not enough information to tell whether they are a “good” teacher.

I want to take a minute and talk about “good..” I deliberately chose not to use “qualified,” because, presumably, a teacher would not have been credentialed or hired if they did not possess the required knowledge and experience to be considered “qualified..” At the same time, “good” is an extremely subjective term. Indeed, what constitutes a “good” teacher could be the topic of its own blog post. So, for purposes of this post, I use the term “good” to mean that a teacher knows the material they are teaching to the students, connects with the students, and adequately communicates both their expectations and the subject content in a clear and appropriate manner.

Photo Credit: Ian Schneider (@goian)

So, let’s talk about newly credentialed teachers. There are generally two categories: bright fresh young adults out of college, and second-career folks. I wanted to talk about the latter first. I find second-career teachers on the whole to be extremely good teachers. They have been out in the world actually using the subjects they are teaching in everyday life, giving them an extremely good handle on not only the basics but often the minutiae of the material. They can easily provide answers to the “how is this relevant to my life? when will I use this outside of school?”-type questions. They also often have great, relevant stories that can entertain. Both my brother and brother-in-law are second-career teachers in physics and history, respectively, and both of them are adored by parents and students alike. My cousin has been involved in music all of her life, providing private piano and voice lessons before becoming a full-time church choral director. This past year, she became a first-year high-school choral director; not an easy task during the year of COVID. In fact, I would argue she had what was probably the most difficult class to navigate given all of the extra concerns and cautions related to singing that come with COVID. And yet her school received a First at the state’s choral competition (among other music department awards). New is not the same as inexperienced and it is not equivalent to incapable. My daughter’s art teacher is an amazing woman who comes from the art world and has been teaching the children all kinds of things I never learned in art. She had found ways to tie projects into topics and games the children find interesting. One of the things she shared with me is her desire to teach kids that, out in the world, “art” is not just painting or sculpture or getting into galleries, but digital art, comic book illustration, toy building and modeling, animation, advertising design, and so much more. She brings a huge wealth of information to the students that no teacher, no matter how many years of experience in the classroom, could provide. To in any way suggest that she is not a good teacher because she is newly-credentialed lacks logic and merit.

Photo Credit: Beci Harmony (@bacihannah)

So, let’s move on to the last of the three types of “new” teachers—the young adults fresh out of college. First, let’s remember that all of these teachers have numerous hours of student teaching. Experienced teachers and administrators have watched them teach these subjects to other classes of students and deemed them, adequate teachers. Presumably, we should be able to trust our seasoned educators to make these determinations. If not, our problem lies not with the newly-credentialed teacher, but with the credentialing system—something over which they had no control. and, therefore, cannot reasonably be held against them. Alternatively, if we do trust our credentialing system, then we need to show it by not outright dismissing the adequacy of the abilities of newly-credentialed teachers. Each of us started somewhere. None of us got where we are without having been given a chance by a person when we had no experience or no credentials. Furthermore, our blind deference to experience over raising up a new generation has shot us in the foot in many professions. My understanding from friends in the business is that there is an entire level of experienced engineers that simply does not currently exist because the people who ought to be reaching that level right now went unhired in years past due to budget cuts and other issues. Many teachers are reaching retirement age. If we don’t begin to hire new teachers and give them the experience they need to move forward in their careers, we are doing a disservice to future generations.

Furthermore, I would argue that young, newly-credentialed teachers are precisely what this strange year of teaching required. New teachers are now Gen Z. These are the native tech users. I am Gen X and even I consider myself to have “grown-up” using computers and the internet. In a year that required trying new things and changing tactics at a moment’s notice, heavy use of technology, and connecting with students both in-person and virtually, I believe that newly-credentialed Gen Z teachers were in the best position. They had just been educated in new ways of teaching and interacting. and had experience with all of the “new” technology, but were new enough to teaching that they were not heavily invested in any particular teaching method and could easily pivot if they suddenly found themselves teaching from home because they were quarantined, or needed to teach to students both in the classroom and at home. They also had the benefit of being able to craft their curriculum knowing about the difficulties of COVID, rather than having to construct something different by modifying a curriculum to which they had already become accustomed.

Photo Credit: Kelly Sikkema (@kellysikkema)

At the same time, I want to be clear that experienced teachers were amazing this year. Many of them engaged in Herculean efforts to educate their students to the best of their abilities under unique and unprecedented circumstances. To those who have complained that teachers “had it easy” this year, I want to share with you the story of my brother, who teaches High School physics. My brother is married to an amazing, immuno-compromised woman who has worked full-time from home this entire time. They have two children who could not go to in-person school because they could not risk the children bringing COVID home to their mother. Likewise, my brother could not teach in person for the same reason. Their two children were in 5th grade and kindergarten. The kindergartener took to online learning like a fish in water and had an amazing school year. The 5th grader struggled and, ultimately, had to be home-schooled. So, my brother spent most of his mornings home-schooling his older child but spent roughly two hours in online office hours answering any and all questions from students about lessons from the day before. He then figured out the lesson for the next day and, around 5:00 p.m., went to the school to record the next day's lesson once the building was sufficiently empty. The recordings for the various different classes (he teaches both AP and regular physics) were left for the aide to show to the various classes the next day, after which he would again spend several hours in online office hours making sure all of the students understood everything and, considering what he learned in that time, craft the lessons for the next day. What with overseeing one child’s online learning, home-schooling the other, making sure both children completed their homework, responding to students, creating and adjusting lesson plans, and recording multiple class lessons for his students, I am quite honestly surprised that he ever found time to sleep.

Photo Credit: Ozgu Ozden (@ozgut)

Did every teacher teach brilliantly this year? No. Was every student able to learn as well as they may have in years past? Most assuredly not. But this problem is not unique to your child, or your school district. Your child is not “behind.” Why? Because they are all “behind.” Everyone—every school every college, every parent, every teacher, every employer, must adjust their expectations. When children are born prematurely, or experience long hospitalizations for any reason, parents are told that we need to subtract that time from their age to understand where their education and emotional growth is. What happened with COVID is that it suddenly became necessary to do this for every child. They went through something huge this past year. We all did. We all still are.

What we need to do now is stop trying to hop directly back to “normal.” We need to process whatever the heck it was that just happened. It might also be helpful to take this time to evaluate whether going back to the way things used to be is actually desirable. Maybe, since we are already in a time of change and assessment, we can use this as an opportunity to change how education work, how employment works, how health insurance works, how our social safety nets work, how our government works, Maybe we decide we like what we have. If so, great. But maybe we discover that there’s a better way to move forward. A more flexible way that won’t bring our society to a screeching halt when (not if) another global pandemic hits. I think we owe it to ourselves to find out.

We are all tired. We are all stressed. We are all starved for human companionship and touch. Let’s be careful about the generalizations we make and the knee-jerk reactions we have right now. Yes, mistakes were made. But rather than throw blame around, let’s do our best to learn from them. Let’s try to be more thoughtful. More empathetic. Let’s model the behaviors we keep saying we want to see more of in our world.

Broken

Dear friends, I am broken. I am tired and angry and frustrated, too. But the overwhelming thing I feel is broken. I have watched my country become something almost unrecognizable over the past four years, and it is becoming ever clearer that we may have another four years of this. And I cry. I cry for all the people who have been fighting this fight for longer than I have. I cry because I’m just not strong enough. Because I have reached my limit. And now I’m broken.

I have always wanted to know why people do what they do. I could not understand how people stood so firmly in their prejudices—against blacks, women, LGBTQ+, immigrants. How anyone could profess to love the values and foundations of this country while simultaneously denying others the freedoms and protections its governing documents guaranteed. And while some only passively permitted others to engage in such behaviors, others actively advocated for such things.

And I became fascinated with Germany and the Holocaust. In my naïveté, I believed that people must not have known what was happening. I believed that when we know better, we do better. I was wrong.

I recently listened to a talk given by the Holocaust survivor for whom my daughter was named. It was given a few years before I met her. I had a cassette tape of the speech that I was keeping for my daughter, so she could hear her namesake tell her story in her own words. I had already read the books she had written. I knew the things I was going to hear. The bittersweet sound of her voice, now that she has passed, put me on the verge of tears before she said more than “Thank you.” But hearing her relive her horror. Explain she couldn’t even give us a glimpse of 1/100th of the evil and horror she experienced in the 20 minutes she spoke. Impress upon us that the whole point of putting herself through the misery and emotional drain of retelling her story was to make sure people knew what happened so that in the future, those who remained after she was gone, could make sure it never happened again.

And yet, here we are. Kids in cages sleeping on cold cement without pillows or blankets; inadequate water and unsanitary conditions; denied education, medication, and air conditioning; being molested and sexually assaulted; some deported “home” without their families; dying from intentional neglect. Seeing people show complete disinterest in the suffering of these children or, worse, argue that they “asked for it.” My heart is shattered to see just how many mean people advocating for suffering and death there are—many of whom declare themselves to be “good Christians” and “Pro-life.” They either don’t see their hypocrisy or don’t care. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like someone. They do not deserve torture, neglect, abuse, or inhumane treatment. No one does. Full stop. No exceptions.

I get that others disagree with me. And that’s okay. I have never needed someone to agree with me in order to be their friend. I don’t want to live in an echo chamber. I will boisterously assert the rightness of my opinion, have it challenged, sit with my thoughts later, adopt the contrary position wholeheartedly, and admit I was wrong. That’s how we learn; how we discover if our positions remain valid or need reconsideration. What I adored about my diverse friends was our ability to love and support one another even though we didn’t agree.

Sadly, over the last four years, it feels as though every single aspect of our lives has become political. We can’t even agree to be kind and listen to one another. And although I have worked very hard to maintain my relationships with friends who think differently than I, they have not returned the favor. Only a few have unfriended me, but it has become abundantly clear that I have been hidden or muted or whatever. Direct private messages about things not even remotely political went unread and unanswered. I took time to check out their feeds and see how they were doing, commenting on pictures and memes as appropriate, but they never wrote a single thing on anything I posted.

So the time has come for me to stop. I cannot keep pouring energy into relationships that are not nourishing me. Life is hard. COVID has made it harder. I need to protect my limited resources. But I want to be clear. Disagreement doesn’t wear me out. Debate and policy discussions don’t suck me dry of energy. Ignorance, hate, and indifference, however, they leave me sick. Exhausted. Broken-hearted. Worse, I know these people personally. Have seen the love and humanity in their hearts. Shared some of my hardest and lowest moments with them. Been held up by them. And I will forever be connected to them. And I will always love them. But the time has come to say goodbye. They have shown me that they don’t need my energy; that they don’t want it. So I’m going to stop throwing it away and, instead, use it places that will feed my soul. And one of those places is going to be continuing the word of my daughter’s namesake—making sure people know and remember the Holocaust. It must never, never happen again, and we are far too close for comfort.

Black Lives Matter.

Immigrant Lives Matter.

Trans Lives Matter.

Jewish Lives Matter.

Peaceful Protester Lives Matter.

In Response to JK Rowling

JK Rowling has taken a stance for quite some time that trans women are not real women. I have always disagreed with her on this point, and continue to do so. To say they are not women is to erase them them, and that is completely unacceptable. Trans women are women. Full stop. In addition, when called out and accurately labeled a TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist), Rowling doubled down and proclaimed that “it isn’t hate to speak the truth.” With all due respect to Rowling’s talent in other areas and her entitlement to her own opinion, what she stated isn’t fact—it’s opinion. Just as generations of people have spewed hate as fact (blacks are dumber, gays can’t parent, men are stronger and smarter), she too now seeks to weaponize her opinion by claiming it as truth and then hiding behind that label as a shield. And her claim that this is not hate is not only wrong, but seeks to minimize and, indeed, erase the entire issue; preventing any discussion at all. It is the equivalent of saying “can’t we all get along” or “all lives matter.” This is disingenuous and dangerous.

That said, after reading three of her recent tweets, I found myself struggling because I agreed with one of her smaller tenets: how can we say sex doesn’t exist when we talk about sex discrimination and same-sex marriage and the like? Through discussion, I have found an understanding that I believe addresses her concerns within the context of our current understanding of gender (and similarly race and sexuality).

Historically, we have viewed the world as a series of binaries.: male/female; black/white; gay/straight. These binaries were intended to create a hierarchy for society and define preferential traits, which allowed for significant violence and discrimination to occur by men against women, whites against blacks, and straights against gays. The problem is that these binaries do not accurately describe our world. Gender, race/color, and sexual identity are more fluid and a continuum. Thus, bi-racial people, bi-sexual people, and trans-people have always experienced violence and abuse at the hands of both ends of the “binary” for failing to “pick a side”: But are you black? You’re either gay or straight. Are you a woman who like to dress like a man, or do you think you’re a man?

Our new understanding of the fluidity/continuum of gender, race, and sexual identity prevents classifying people into 1 of 2 (or any other number of) clearly defined categories. But it does not erase the historical facts of violence, abuse, and discrimination caused by our previous use of binary systems, nor does it erase the current repercussions of those systems.

To Rowling’s point that sex must exist or her lived experiences are erased, the lived experiences of women, gays, and blacks are not erased by recognizing that the binary system we ascribed to was wrong. That understanding created issues that are still causing ripples today. So we can talk about the harms and discrimination caused by the previous understanding of sex, race, and gender identity as binary without there actually being something finite and discrete as “male” or “female”, “black or white” or “gay” or “straight” into which everyone must be placed.

As a final thought, I want to address her statement that there can be no “same-sex marriage.” I tend to agree, but only because there has never historically really been only “opposite sex marriage.” Our binary system was built on the illusion that there were only two biological sexes, expressed as XX and XY, when, in fact, we have known for a long time that XXY, XYY, and various other inter-sex genetic combinations exist. We maintained the illusion of opposite-sex marriage, but in truth a trans woman (genetically XY) could legally marry a cis-gendered woman (genetically XX) because they had differing genetic codes And yet, to anyone on the street, they might well have appeared to be a legally married lesbian couple. Thus, even our previous binary system never fully prevented “same-sex” marriage. Fortunately, when we finally opened up marriage to everyone, we removed all gender classifications. Thus, the result was not the creation of two kinds of marriage: opposite-sex and same-sex. Rather, we simply opened up the legal institution of marriage to everyone, and no longer have to consider the parties’ genetic code or genitalia before issuing them a marriage license.

Dear Fellow Whites,

Dear Fellow Whites,

I want to talk to you. Anyone is welcome to read this, but this is directed to you.

Have any of you seen the movie version of John Grisham’s A Time to Kill? There is an incredibly powerful scene at the end where Matthew McConaughey’s character is talking to the all-white jury and asking them to imagine a little girl. Then he describes in horrible detail all the things that happened to the defendant’s daughter. And you, the audience, are sitting there, envisioning it with them. And then he says, “Now imagine that she is white.” There’s this deep collective gasp because you know, you *know* you were envisioning a black girl and you also know that once you imagined she was white, your feelings changed. Did it make you uncomfortable? Did you sit with that, or did you blow it off as a nifty trick of cinema and storytelling? I’m here to tell you that that was no trick. That was our ingrained centuries of racism peeking out. And it is long past time to deal with it.

The first thing I want you to do is to watch the news and, after every story, regardless of the victim’s gender identity, race, religion, reimagine the story so that both the perpetrator and victim are white men. If any of those new scenarios makes you feel differently, stop and ask yourself why. The answer is: all of us have been socialized to value white male bodies over all others. And after generations of both blatant and subtle indoctrination, we have a *lot* of work ahead of us to fix this.

I have always considered myself extremely liberal and progressive. I wasn’t just a person correcting friends from the shadows. I spoke out. I donated money. But I have been remiss. I have failed to realize how exhausting simply existing in our society must be for all melanin-enhanced individuals in this country, let alone excelling and achieving as many of them do. I want to share with you something I learned recently and hope it helps you, too.

Most of you know I have lost a child. My son died just shy of 11 months old from heart failure related to his CHD. Many of you know that my daughter also has a CHD. And although hers is not as complicated or severe as Patrick’s, it is still considered “complex” and will always put her life at additional risk.

Photo Credit: Jon Tyson (@jontyson)

As COVID began to make it’s way into our national consciousness, there were people who called it a hoax. Few took it seriously. However, many of us with CHD kids had to start taking action long before any governmental officials did. Being hyper-aware of the health hazards our kids face, we generally prefer to err on the side of safety. CHD parents were pulling their children from school a week or more before schools were actually closed. We were one of those families.

Because of COVID, for more than 3 1/2 months, I have lived in fear that someone will unknowingly bring this invisible killer near enough to my daughter to kill her, and leave me grieving a second time. Pair this with the recent anniversary of My son’s second open-heart surgery and the hospitalization that ended with him coming home in palliative care, and I am having serious physical and emotional trouble just trying to function.

Now I want you to go back to the news. I want you to imagine that every night—for years—day in, and day out, you see a person that could be your son, daughter, sister, brother, cousin, best friend, father, mother, aunt, uncle, or other loved one being brutalized or murdered. Every. Day. Some of them are even murdered live, on video. And worse, the people killing them are never held accountable, often remaining in positions of power and free to do it again.

In my world, this looks like white people running around town without masks, not washing hands, crowding together on playgrounds or at the beach like it’s any other day. It looks like white politicians telling me that making money is more important than my child’s life. It looks like people telling me to “lighten up.” Or that it’s “just the flu.” News flash! The regular flu can kill my child. In fact, it can kill perfectly healthy one’s, too! But for me, I have to live with the knowledge that general everyday growing up has the potential to kill my child. So, some days, I have such debilitating panic that getting out of bed, taking a shower, and eating are too much for me. Politicians are supposed to care about all of their constituents. They are supposed to make sure we are all taken care of. But the policies they are putting forth are putting myself and my family directly at risk. And I am angry as hell and scared as shit about it.

And in this moment, I got a small taste of American life for African Americans, Latin Americans, and other minorities. And I began to wonder, how do they even function in our world? How are they not completely overcome with grief and anger, every day? Because every day they live in fear that someone is going to bring an invisible virus into their lives and kill them or someone they love. Just looking at us, they can’t tell if we have the virus. Our words cannot reassure them. No test will give them the answer. And even if we don’t show symptoms, they know that we can shed the virus. Thus, they must be hyper-vigilant. And man, that shit is exhausting! Knowing how little I’ve achieved in the last 6 years except figuring out how to start to function again, I am only now comprehending how strong and amazing these people and their communities are that they manage to get up every day and keep going.

And even now that I have finally had a tiny opportunity to experience and understand just a small piece of what they have experienced practically since birth, I am overwhelmed with anger and sadness. Because as much as it has helped me understand, there are still depths to their pain and experiences that I will never know and never feel. Realizing just how many people are living in a world that is actively trying to kill them, it’s no wonder they are tired and angry. Quite honestly, I’m surprised they aren’t more angry. They have waited a long time. Sometimes patiently, sometimes not. They have tried talking to us nicely. They have tried showing us facts and figures. They have used research. They have used story and film. We have video that shows they get killed for no reason and the perpetrators lie about what happened.

Photo credit: frankie cordoba (@byfoul)

We owe them more than lip service. Our country and our successes have been built on their backs and the backs of their ancestors. Our country’s governing documents promise them equal treatment under the law. They don’t have to earn it. They are entitled to it just by living here. It is long past time for us to do something about this. And if begin to feel guilty as you realize just how much they have continued to suffer at our hands even in the last 40 years? Good! Sit in it. Make yourself uncomfortable. Don’t assuage your feelings with a token gesture, either. It’s high time we stand in the trenches with our black and brown brothers and sisters. Our whiteness is a shield, and I expect to see us using it to shield our fellow citizens from continued harm until we make significant and substantial changes to the racist institutions that run this country.

Here’s another exercise for you. If you think our systems are fair and that we live in a post-racial society, I want you to volunteer to trade places with a black person. No? How come? Because regardless of whether our conscious mind will admit it, deep down we know they don’t get what we do. And here’s another news flash: when you have been privileged all your life, equality looks like discrimination. We will have to work harder for some things. But not because others are getting preferential treatment. No. It’s because we won’t be receiving preferential treatment anymore. So save your boohoo stories of blacks “taking your place” at a job or a school. How entitled do you have to be to assume that it was your spot to begin with? You want true equality? Get rid of legacies. If all those spots were opened up and everyone had to compete for them, I can guarantee you there are a lot of schools that would have very different compositions. White women and all minorities have seen white men with money and connections but no brains and no real interest in learning get admitted to highly distinguished institutes of learning that we *all* know would not get admitted if they were actually considered on the basis of their grades. So yeah. It’s gonna suck. But not because we’re being discriminated against; because we no longer get to automatically move to (or at least closer to) the front of the line. We just have to accept that the loss of our privilege is a mandatory requirement for our continued living here and receiving the freedoms this country has to offer.

And if you feel compelled to tell me about your close black friend(s), or you want to explain to me how you’re not racist, don’t bother. I am telling you, here and now: Yes, all whites! We have all perpetuated racism, whether we did so blatantly, passive-aggressively, quietly, or unknowingly. Treating others kindly, following the golden rule, doesn’t earn us a cookie or a gold star. Treating other people as humans, as equals, is required, not extra credit. That is the bare minimum. It is long past time to provide black and brown bodies of all types the things our guarantees: not just a claim to equality, but actually equal opportunity, access, and treatment. And stop looking at it like a gift we are bestowing on them. This is their due. Their right as citizens. We owe it to them. They have been entitled to, but denied, that which the laws have promised them. We are indebted to them!

This ends now. It is way past time. My eyes, my mind, and my heart have all been broken open, and I will no longer allow my country to pretend that this isn’t happening. Stand up and help us move forward, or get out of the way and left behind.

Life Is Precious

Dear friends,

Six years ago, I took Patrick to the ER where he was then transferred by ambulance to Detroit because his oxygen was in the 50s. This was the beginning of his longest and final hospitalization, which ended with us bringing him home on palliative care. Although I have done so much better this year since doing my 31 Days of Patrick, all of the big anniversaries are now on my internal countdown as we head toward September.

As we struggle as a nation with COVID-19 and the over 100,000 lives lost, the loss of socialization and touch, the continued mistreatment and murder of black and brown bodies at the hands of police and the border patrol, the militarization of the police, the gassing and injuring of peaceful protesters to make a point or take a photo op, I want to remind you that life is precious. No one deserves to die. And no one—official or citizen—has the right to endanger the lives of others, whether by misusing force, ignoring science and social distancing measures, or making unreasonable or unlawful orders and demands.

None of us is promised tomorrow. And life feels so precarious to all of us for any number of reasons right now. So please—tell all your friends and family that you love them. Right now. And then, before doing anything else—speaking, acting, typing—take a deep breath. And when you next interact with someone, take no action until you can see the humanity in that person. You don’t have to like them. You don’t have to agree with them. But you can make your point without yelling, spitting, embarrassing, humiliating, threatening, or otherwise dehumanizing the other person. We are all in this together, and we can lift each other up, or suffocate as we all fight each other to be the one on top.

Society only works when we work together. Many of us have lost our jobs—me included. Many of you are risking your lives, whether by taking care of others, making yourselves heard, or demanding justice. Almost every one of us in the US is being asked to make a sacrifice right now. How well we survive—both literally as bodies and figuratively as a country—will be determined by our willingness to give up looking out for #1 in the name of looking out for the least of us. The most important thing we can do right now is see—truly SEE—every single person as someone deserving of life, love, care, and compassion. Don’t talk about “them” or “they.” Don’t demonize with generalizations. Be precise with your words. Discuss. Debate. Protest. Be angry. But stop threatening each other. Stop using violence against unarmed citizens. Remember that every single person is loved by someone else. Every single person has someone who will grieve their loss. No life is unimportant. The old and sick are not disposable in the name of commerce. The young and healthy won’t remain that way forever. Give your workers the benefits you want to receive from your job. Be compassionate. Be caring. Be understanding. Help your neighbors. We can all survive this—all of this—if we work together for change. Change is never easy, but it’s absolutely necessary to our long- and short-term survival.

Educational Series, Pt. I - Why Teachers Matter

I have had a few different thoughts recently about why having good teachers matters. Today's blog is going to cover engagement, interest, and careers.

I have always been good at math and science. Loved chemistry and physics! In high school, I knew I was going to be an engineer. I applied to two colleges--MIT and Purdue. My SATs weren't quite enough for MIT, but I was accepted to Purdue either right before or a few days into my senior year. My physics teacher my junior year was amazing. We made holograms! He was funny, and he made the material interesting. I became his student helper my last year in school.

Photo Credit:

When I arrived at Purdue, the freshman engineering classes were huge. We had chemistry in the auditorium where concerts were held so there was room for all 300+ of us. I was a number and excelling was all on me. I had always been self-motivated, but there was no way to get to know most of my professors. My math professor spoke English as a second language. He was probably brilliant, but I had difficulty understanding him, let alone the math concepts he was trying to impart.

And my physics professor was boring and generally the caricature of a socially inept scientist. He did the experiment where you sit in a chair and hold a spinning bicycle wheel and move the wheel to spin in a different direction. He hit himself in the head with the wheel, which caused him combover to flop over and not get fixed the entire lecture. But he was the better physics professor. The other one only taught in the spring semester, always failed most of his class, and was put on teaching probation each fall because of it.

Photo Credit: Hal Gatewood (@halgatewood)

I get that freshman engineering is something of a weed-out program. But making us hate math and science seems to be the wrong way to go about it. Since I'm not an engineer, it should come as no surprise that I quit the engineering program after the first year. I switched my major to psychology. I can't tell you how many people told me (and my parents) what a mistake I was making because I was now getting "a chick degree" and there was more money to be made in engineering. But it was too late. I had lost the fire for physics and calculus and moved on to statistics and psychological experimentation.

But I'm not a psychologist either. As much as I enjoyed the material, I am an empath, and counseling people would have crushed me. I would have taken things on and taken things home, and it would have been a disaster waiting to happen. After I changed to a liberal arts school, which had more options for my degree, I added a minor in criminal justice. I took amazing classes in the history and sociology departments. I had at least three history classes that were taught as law classes, where we had to memorize cases and explain their application to hypothetical situations on exams. I LOVED those.

Color me surprised that there were any history classes I liked. See, with the exception of my World History and US History classes in high school, I abhorred history. Avoided it like the plague. Every World History class started with the Fertile Crescent and made it to Rome by the year's end. Every US History class started with the Revolutionary War and ended around the Civil War. In High School, we managed to avoid this pattern and learn more modern history. I found the depression and Watergate fascinating. I was intrigued by how much religion played a part in World History. But it had never been taught in a way that was engaging or interesting.

I will now share some embarrassing information with you. In my 20s and 30s, my husband and I would play "I or II." He would name a leader or important figure or country and I had to say if it was WWI or WWII. I knew Hitler and Churchill and Japan and the big ones, but otherwise, I was wrong. A lot. The information *never* stayed. I could memorize facts and figures and keep them for a school year, but they inevitably fell out because there was nothing to hang them on in my brain.

But stories? Stories stay with me. That's why I was great at law school and am successful at my paying job. Cases are simply stories. Facts that make skeletons to hang cases on. Turns out, historical fiction is the same. Even biographies work depending on how they are written. I can do research after and find out what pieces of the story were true and now have a way to hang onto the facts because of how they impacted the characters' lives.

Maybe I was always going to end up a lawyer. Maybe I would have left engineering at some point even if I had good professors. I'll never know. What I do know, is that teachers and professors who engaged me are the ones I learned the most from. When learning was fun, interesting, and practical, I soaked it in like a sponge. But all of my elementary and middle school history teachers were coaches who had been hired for sports; not people who had studied history or had any idea how to make it interesting. So I missed out. I am learning a lot as an adult, which pleases me. But I wish I had learned a lot of this back then so I would have an even broader, richer knowledge now on which to build.

My brother and my brother-in-law both teach in high schools. Physics and history, respectively. When I hear what and how they teach their classes, I wish I had more teachers like them. I have a lot more to say about them in Part 2. But for now, I want to focus on the fact that they have found ways to engage their students, keep them interested, show their students that physics and history are relevant in everyday life, and make learning fun.

To me, these are the marks of a good teacher. And I was blessed to have many. But it makes the others stand out even more by comparison. I want my kid--and all kids--to love school. To be excited about learning. To have teachers who show them the world in new ways and teach them how to learn and think critically, so when they find the thing that sparks joy inside them that they want to do to earn a living, they have the tools to do just that.

So, no more hiring teachers just because they can coach. Hire them because they can teach! (Or even so both! My HS physics teacher was also a basketball coach! It's possible to do both well.) Students deserve teachers who want to be there and want them to learn. Let's make sure we give them that gift. It will make a huge difference in a short time.