Tag: hierarchy

Things I Know 145 of 365: I don’t yell in anger

In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.

– Cynthia Ozick

I’ve yelled at students before. I’ve yelled, but never in anger. In anger, I’ve left the room. In anger, I’ve asked another teacher to watch my room while I walk to the water fountain to cool down and rehydrate to avoid yelling.

I’ve been angry at my students, but I’ve not acted in anger.

It’s been close a few times.

A few days ago, Debbie Schinker sent me a link to this open letter from a community college professor Jaime O’Neill, to his students of the past semester.

They, the students, didn’t measure up to expectations, and their professor, after completing his final semester, let them know – publicly.

I’ve read the piece a few times now, and I can’t tell whether or not O’Neill was yelling.

I never find it pleasant or productive to guilt-trip students. But if just one of you reads these words and decides to take your education a bit more seriously, it was worth writing them.

I don’t doubt the experience was difficult and frustrating. Students now and students 40 years ago, likely register as different. Then again, I’d imagine O’Neill now and O’Neill 40 years ago are fairly different.

I want to criticize O’Neill, to write sentence after sentence taking him to task for publicly and unabashedly taking his students to task.

The thing that keeps me from doing that, though, is the same thing I wish had key O’Neill from writing.

I don’t know him.

I know only what he chose to reveal in his writing. The rest I would be inferring.

The same is true of O’Neill’s final class of students. He knew only what they shared with him, and most of that was in their writing.

I cannot make a full-throated critique of O’Neill because I haven’t taken the time to question him, to engage him, to draw out his interests and let the conversation build in the way I hope he did with his students.

I won’t be criticizing O’Neill because to do so would be to use a public forum to assert some sort of power in the communication dynamic. Anything I’d hope to accomplish would be undermined by the fact that a message I meant for an individual was posted for anyone to see. That would be unfair, it wouldn’t put us on equal footing. The medium would be impersonal, while I’d be sending a message meant to have personal meaning.

An open letter would be a passive aggressive thing to do. If my goal was trying to educate someone like O’Neill or push his thinking, an open letter or public posting of my thinking would probably be something I’d be doing out of anger.

And I know acting out of anger when trying to create change can feel cathartic in the moment, but often be damaging to the change I’m trying to create.

As a teacher, I wouldn’t want to do that to my students.

I’m sure O’Neill agrees.

Things I Know 139 of 365: We don’t work in the mailroom

There is absolutely no indication this is a problem beyond the mailroom.

– Phil Budahn

I don’t see myself as working at the bottom of the education hierarchy.

In his weekly media address, President Obama said, “We need to encourage this kind of change all across America. We need to reward the reforms that are driven not by Washington, but by principals and teachers and parents. That’s how we’ll make progress in education – not from the top down, but from the bottom up.”

See what happened there?

In attempting to build up the teaching profession, the President admitted teachers work in the equivalent of the mailroom of the educational industrial complex.

We don’t, but it’s subtle turns of phrase like that which continue to make it acceptable for politicians, commentators and anyone in general to talk about teachers as if they were the least important pieces of a student’s life. Often, this is a breath or two after they’ve admitted teachers are the most influential factors in teaching and learning.

“From the bottom up,” is one of those frequent idiomatic turns of phrase thrown in as filler or a linguistic bridge to get from one point to the next.

It draws much less attention than “Teachers are facilitators of learning,” or “We must focus on 21st-century skills.” Those rhetorical lightening rods draw the attention of anyone with an opinion on education while “From the bottom up,” or “From those on the front lines of education,” merit little notice in the educational thunderstorm.

This is how we keep teachers in their place. This is how we continue to scratch away the polish of the profession.

“From the bottom up,” implies the President wants to put a suggestion box in the break room and give a coffee mug to any teacher whose suggestion makes it to implementation.

At this point in a conversation, my students would claim I’m reading too much into President Obama’s remarks. Perhaps I am.

Consider, though, the effects if he reversed his language to paint a different mental picture – one that sat educators as the experts at the top of the system and recognized the role of government to provide a foundation of support.

“We need to support expertise of educators all across America. Washington needs to support reforms driven by principals and teachers and parents. That’s how we’ll make progress in education – from the top down.”

It would shift the paradigm. It would acknowledge that educators serve the needs of our students and that Washington serves at the pleasure of its electorate.

The first step toward the adoption of this language will begin with parents, principals and teachers and their rejection of the notion that they operate at diminished capacity simply because that is what they have been told.

We must engage in self-advocacy as we would want our students to do.

If we continue to agree with the linguistically constructed hierarchy, we will never be models of change to our students.