Frank Thoms, Teacher in the Rye

America’s teachers are in crisis. They are threatened by selfish politicians, angry parents, unruly students, and serious mental health issues. State and federal tests demand time away from their classrooms. Outmoded textbooks deprive opportunities to think and learn. Curriculum directives deplete initiative. They force teachers to become conduits rather than nurture conversations and creativity. Choosing to be a teacher should not mean to become a purveyor of information but to be an educator, not to teach to inevitable outcomes but to seek the unpredictable.

Meera Sharma, a new teacher, sought advice from Mr. Harding a former teacher now retired twenty years. Anticipating a challenging classroom with students coming in with digital-device-based lives, she knows that she needs help. And what better than to speak with someone with a good reputation who was his own person as a teacher. She decided she wanted to be her kind of teacher but knew she would need guidance. She understood the challenges that would face her.

This is an excerpt from the Preface from my fourth published book, Listening is Learning: Conversations Between Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Teachers. The book is written for  teachers but also is directed to the public to come to know and understand teachers.

You can’t do it alone. Yet it’s one of the practices expected of you. School opens. You’re in your classroom. Students pour in. You think you’ll handle it. But you are quaking in your shoes. Today is your wake-up call. You’ve decided to teach. Now you will––or hope you will.

Just what I am afraid of: today’s middle school teenagers disengaging, coasting, not actively learning. No wonder when they are saddled with the presence of their phones. But aside from that, increasingly they are not interested in learning in class and at home, nor do they want to make sense of it. When younger, learning was integral, moment to moment, everyday. Now they are checking out.

Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, in “The Teen-Disengagement Process,” February 26 in the Atlantic, coin the term ‘passenger mode’ to describe these teens.

I left the classroom in May, 1999 and left consulting in 2012. In 2010, I published my first book, Teaching from the Middle of the Room: Inviting Students to Learn (Stetson Press). I discovered that writing was becoming my passion after all my years teaching. Looking back today, I have a library with six published books, one self-published, four with Rowman & Littlefield, and the other with Spark Press. And I have four manuscripts awaiting publication. If and when they are published, I will have ten books in my library!

The writing of each manuscript has been an enterprise in itself…

I discovered these three wondrous questions by Leo Tolstoy from Thich Nhat Hanh in his book The Miracle of  Mindfulness.

What is the best time to do each thing?

Who are the most important people to work with?

What is the most important thing to do at all times?

Hanh recounts Tolstoy’s story of an emperor, who after receiving no satisfying answers to the three questions, sought out a hermit said to be enlightened. Upon arriving and after he asks the three questions, the hermit puts him to work in his garden.

In these turbulent times, spurred by countless executive orders and the Muskovite invasion, We wonder what we can do. It’s happening so fast, a month now, and we can barely keep up let alone comprehend. Perhaps we are tempted to think “It’s over, we are done, what could I possibly do now? Too much happening, too fast, so many firings, deportations, agencies cancelled.”

But they, the oligarchs, are few. We are the majority. They can act fast, we gather our responses slowly. So, what can we do, readers of this Substack, for teachers and public schools?

I don’t think I need to convince my readers that reading is an integral part of our lives. We read books, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays, newspapers, magazines, because we want to. Many read to stay in touch with what’s happening. Reading gives us a framework to understand our world.

Having information, truthful information, has been a foundation of humanity. Early hunter gatherers informed each other about their hunting and gathering skills and sat around campfires sharing knowledge, feelings, and understandings. The ancient Greeks memorized wisdom, e.g., the Iliad and the Odyssey; Socrates was miffed when he learned of writing…

Many of us thought the coming of television in the mid-20th century would spark armchair entertainment for hours on end. Children would succumb to its charms. But we seemed to have gotten through that times somewhat unscathed, well not unscathed but still a people who talk to each other.

The 21^st century is taking us down a new path, a path of continuous entertainment. We have become a culture that prizes being entertained above all else. Not only in the home but everywhere we are. We have phones and all of its inputs, beeps, blings, alerts. 24/7!
When clicking…

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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!

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.

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…