A Teaching Life: In the US, England
& Russia
The classroom
The classroom is the backbone of every school and teachers are an integral part of the backbone of the country. Where students can be who they are, discover their gifts, and learn to become agents in society. It offers multiple ways to engage, connect, to be with students. Despite the glitz of social media and its ubiquitous role in our culture, the classroom can be––must be––a safe place without devices where students can be face to face, listen and talk together, trust one another, and understand who they are, and discover their agency to bring into the world.
Teachers as teachers, not conduits
From my study in Mexico, now in my mid-80s, I often think about teachers. From my earliest years in the classroom in the 60s, I saw myself as part of a cadre of liberal arts graduates who were going to reform public education. But as the years past, we blended in with teacher-college graduates. We were teachers, ‘just teachers’ as some would say.
But I never accepted being’ just a teacher.’ I believed––and still do––that teachers are essential to America, part of the backbone of who we are. We take credit and blame for our performance.
Tossing Newspapers onto the porch
I wrote this piece for my Substack, Teacher in the Rye. I am publishing it nearly verbatim.
Some of you may remember when the newspaper boy (it was boys), who either walking or riding his bike, flung his paper onto your porch or stoop. When I was a paperboy for the North Adams Transcript, I placed the paper on the porch or doorstep and sometimes knocked when I wanted to visit and did with my girlfriend halfway through my route. So what does this have to do with the classroom?
Oklahoma classrooms nearly trumped
In a conversation with a handyman in my home in San Miguel de Allende, he told me that he and his wife and family moved here from Oklahoma, because the schools were poorly funded. Enough of a reason until he added that the legislature intends to put Bibles into all 55,000 classrooms––and Trump Bibles were being considered. Schools with few funds, the State spending money at nearly $60 a pop for Bibles! The final decision on placing them in classrooms with the added Pledge of Allegiance, the US Constitution, and other historical documents has not yet been resolved.
Imagining myself as a teacher today
I ask myself, Can I return to a middle school classroom after twenty five years away? I often imagine returning despite what I have learned about the challenges facing today’s teachers from the far right, from coddling and angry parents, unruly students, and restrictions on what to teach. I wonder, for example, how would I handle teaching a topic like slavery and not being allowed to tell the ‘truth’ and being threatened with losing my job if I did. Well, I have a plan for that.
Isolation of today’s children: What to know, what to do
We’re in a new year, a time reflect, see patterns and observe the changes. Step back and look into our childhood and retrace our steps into adolescence, how we were with ourselves, our peers, our parents, teachers, and community.
I remember my childhood, full of play with neighbors and friends. Without parents. We walked to and from school, played games in the neighborhood like Red Rover outside and Monopoly inside. And choosing sides in play, arguing whether one of us was ‘safe’ or ‘out,’ in games or ‘dead’ or ‘alive’ when playing guns. No parents. I see a different childhood today.
Teacher as Algorithm
In Arizona, the Unbound Academy, academic subjects two hours a day taught by AI. No teacher in the room, only a ‘guide.’ No interactions. No responses. No asking questions. No answering them. No creating context. No seeing another’s eyes. No teacher expression. No conversations. No distractions. No noticing squirming classmates. No one complaining.
Teacher as algorithm.
That might be true for all education someday. Who really knows. An unknown future awaits. Who saw the coming of the telephone? The horseless carriage? Email? The Internet? AI? If we project out, can we imagine ‘school’ happening only in the home?
Giving only A's
Teachers and professors give higher grades today well above the average gentleman C’s I experienced. Where not too long ago a 4.0 was the highest average in secondary schools, 4.0+ now appears on some transcripts. This blog is another take on this issue.
I was about new ideas. In my fifty years in the classroom, once freed from textbooks I was able to generate my own approaches. And I was free to invoke methods I believed would stimulate my students to learn and want to learn. I would often offer the unexpected. One such moment happened in September, 1964.
AI is here!
When AI went ‘public’ (but it had been here for a longtime already), a lot of us in education, including me, saw it as a potential threat, a nightmare for teachers. It would insert bias clandestinely, spread numerous inaccuracies, and promote plagiarism. It would write students’ essays! And we would never find out whether the essay was theirs or not! But calmer heads are beginning to prevail.
Here’s a fact: Today’s AI is the worst that students will interact within their lives!
We the people, us, no others
I am distraught about the threats to our democracy. The upcoming regime is focused on ‘the enemy within. We are entering a time when “We the people…” is being relegated, to become an outlier. After more than 200 years of growing our fragile democracy (with many interruptions) another awaits. I, well retired from the classrooms, ask myself, What can I do? My answer is I am on a mission to advocate for teachers to reclaim their classrooms, to resist directives that steer them towards spreading propaganda rather than supporting them to educate.
I'm on a mission
As a consultant, on October 13, 2006, I observed fourteen new teachers with whom I worked before the opening of school. We engaged in a variety of activities designed to stimulate their students. On that day, all of them talked at their students, no questions, just talked. That night, I wrote a six-page letter to encourage them to engage their students, to make their classrooms come alive. The next morning, I began to write.
Four years later, I published my first book, Teaching from the Middle of the Room: Inviting Students to Learn (Stetson Press, 2010). In the next ten years…
I'm now on Substack: Teacher in the Rye
My first Substack entry. I am writing as a 20th century teacher to encourage 21st century teachers to take back their classrooms, to be the teachers they want to be, to resist having to be conduits of others’ biddings, to enable their students to develop agency to resist succumbing to misinformation and disinformation and the deceptions of AI. I recognize the challenge facing teachers in their classrooms, no less challenging than what our country now faces. So, what’s my mission?
The Girl in the Yellow Dress
July 8, 2024, a Saturday in San Miguel de Allende, where I live.
I turn and see her coming, the yellow dress. I am locked in. She immobile, leaned-back immobile, in her yellow dress, her body tilting to the right. Her head immobile, further right. I stand on her left. She, oh so alert. Her smile, her upper teeth gleaming. I’m mesmerized.
Her father, lean, older, guiding her chair now paused. In front of her, her mother, lean, glasses, red lipstick, gentle.
But for a moment it’s me and the girl in the yellow dress in her wheelchair. I’m feeling a deep presence, mesmerized, speechless, she immobile, such presence.…
It's turtles all the way down
I‘ve been engaged writing four manuscripts, which I will share at a later date. In two of them, one directed to teachers, the other to the public, I have 99 entries that are designed to bring solace, calm, reflection and inspiration; you decide if that’s true for you. Here's one, “It’s Turtles All the Way Down,”:
“There’s an old joke about a King who goes to a Wiseperson and asks how is it that the Earth doesn’t fall down. The Wiseperson replies, ‘The Earth is resting on a lion.’ ‘On what then is the lion resting?’ ‘The lion is resting on an elephant.’ ‘On what is the elephant resting?’ ‘The elephant is resting on a turtle.’ ‘On what is the…’ ‘You can stop right there, Your Majesty. It’s turtles all the way down.’”
On the opposite page are commentaries, one in general (we), one for the reader (you). If interested, read on.
I'm back! Again!
My website went down but has returned. When I started my blog in October, 2022, (Wow, that long ago?), I named it “A Teaching Life: In the US, England, & Russia.” It was just after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, hence my first entry “People, Not Putin and Other Thoughts.” Many of the early entries focused on my thoughts about that war, about my understandings coming from my experiences in the former Soviet Union. For a while, Americans appeared eager to support Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people. While I believe the support is still there, even after the Republicans craziness in withholding aid, national politics has come front and center and for obvious reasons.
Meanwhile I continue to write. Having published six books, all but one focusing on teaching, I have now completed a manuscript about my life as a teacher, a memoir of my life in the classroom from my first day at Hanover NH Junior-Senior High School in September 1962 to my last class at Bancroft School in Worcester MA in 1999. I am calling it “Teacher in the Rye: Doing It My Way.” Why that title?
I'm back!
Welcome back to myself. I’ve been away from this site traveling, writing, living. The good news, I have completed two manuscripts for which I will be seeking a publisher or two. The first is Teacher in the Rye: Doing It My Way, a memoir of my life through being in the classroom from 1962 to 1999 in three countries, a late twentieth teacher doing his thing. My hope is for readers to see what’s possible in a classroom and perhaps stimulate memories. The second Wisdom for Troubled Times: Seeking Solace and Inspiration is a compilation of 99 entries accumulated during my teaching years. They come from a variety of sources from Steve Jobs to blueberries. Where can you find inspiration, outside this book?
Olya
We met in Boston’s North End, April 24th. In October 1986, my first day as a US-Soviet exchange teacher in School 185. She was the first student I noticed who recognized me. Later in our beloved teacher Raisa Vladimirovna’s, we met again. As I wrote in my book Behind the Red Veil: An American inside Gorbachev’s Russia, she was the “spindly” one in the class. During the lesson, I challenged her defense of being superstitious:
A spindly, tall, dark straight-hair girl with a prominent Roman nose, Olya who had rubbed her hands together with glee when she saw me in her school for the first time––shouted. “We are not superstitious in the Soviet Union! We do not believe such things!”
“Surely, Olya, you must be superstitious about something.”
“No I am not!” raising her voice. I looked at Raisa sitting in the back, who often chimed in, said nothing. I grabbed a piece of chalk and asked Olya if she had a favorite sport.
Her answer allowed me to pursue our conversation with unexpected results.
The Anxious Generation
Time flees faster than I imagine. I have just finished reading Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.” It should be a seminal read for parents and teachers. It articulates the crisis our children are in from three-years-old through high school. His book centers around four major points: (1) No smartphones before high school; (2) No social media before 16; (3) Phone-free schools; (4) Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.
Beginning in the 80s, Haidt explains, “play-based” childhood slowly became lost. Parental suspicion of possible harm to their children from the outside world lurked. Parents became more protective denying their children opportunities to explore their world through play on their own, as all mammals have throughout time.
At the same time around the early 2010s children were free to explore on their own the “phone-based” world of social media with smartphones in their hands accessing the internet––and with a front-facing camera. And along with Instagram, TikTok, et al. they now have millions of apps to choose from. Children navigate this virtual world as their own. And serious mental health crises have spiked.
So what can we do about this?
My Hope
It’s been way too long to reach out to my readers. I have been writing and traveling. Right now I have four manuscripts (all related) in process. I so want to find a way to penetrate the teacher-reader––and now thinking about writing for the general public. It has been fascinating process becoming a writer since leaving teaching for fifty years. I find the solitude in my study in San Miguel, Mexico, a haven for thinking. While I miss the energy and wisdom of students (mostly eighth graders), I can still see and hear them as I write.
Tunnel
- Welcome to the New Year. It’s been a while since we’ve been together. I entitle this entry “Tunnel,” because we’ve been in one for a long time. A tunnel, as one knows, has two openings, one to get in, the other to come out. I feel we’ve been in a tunnel for a long time. With the arrival of 2024, full of foreboding to be sure, I believe we will find our way out of the tunnel into the light where our best hopes may be realized. Is that really possible?
