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Thank you to the Brookline Education Foundation, the tremendously generous parents who do so much to support the schools and their children, Dr. Lupini, my library colleagues, Dr. Parziale, Dr. Schraft, and the wonderful Driscoll School Staff. Thank you also to my friends at Devotion School. Thank you to the staff, students and parents who nominated me for this award. I want to especially thank my family – my husband Tim, who installs shelves, moves furniture, and lets me treat every vacation as a field trip for my teaching, and my children, Maggie and Max, who act as my pipeline to the world of my students and who don’t often complain when I spend too long in bookstores. I love you. Thank you all so much.
I am stunned to be in this position. Every August I am certain I have forgotten how to teach. Many afternoons I drive home beating myself up for blowing a teachable moment or frustrated by my inability to reach a particular child. I am always convinced I could do more, do things differently and do things better. But sometimes I drive home thrilled, singing to myself about something a student did or said. Maybe you feel the same way.
I couldn’t imagine what I could say today that would be important enough to reward your willingness to come here on a May afternoon after a long day of work. So, as a desperate library teacher, I turned to a book. I take as a model today a book by the aptly named Margaret Wise Brown – The Important Book. What is important about what we do?
The important thing about children is that you just never know. Every student is a surprise. We are only reading the first chapters in the story of their lives. It can be a messy start. I have had many students who struggled their way through school and gone on and done wonderfully in the world. Sometimes I hear news about my students. A boy who couldn’t stay organized in school becomes a top-notch EMT in Colorado. The girl who couldn’t stand algebra, but drew beautiful dragons on her jeans, turns out to love design school. One thoughtful and courageous girl who chose to repeat fourth grade so she could become a better reader today teaches nearby. One of my students who struggled learning to read and write, checked back in with me when he was working in business. He told me the one thing he learned as a student with learning disabilities was how to work hard, a lesson that has served him well. Our job is to give our students the skills they will need some day, not knowing exactly where they will travel. We hope we prepare them to travel well into their futures lives – with confidence and curiosity, with strength and good humor, with hope and expectations - because the important thing about children is that you just never know.
You never know which child has a problem at home – whose family is struggling with issues of substance abuse, mental health, divorce, bankruptcy or prison. I know this is true because all of these things touched my life. I am one of seven children, two with significant learning differences. We were a stressed-out family unit. I moved many times when I was young, my father chasing jobs or dodging bills. We bounced around like pinballs, moving back and forth across the country. Partly because of this, and partly just because, school was a place I loved to go. I was a nerd from the start. I had the essential cluelessness of a nerd. Who wouldn’t like learning about geometry proofs, the Brontes or Mohenjo Daro? It was all interesting to me. As a girl I had a crush on Thor Heyerdahl and kept his clippings as he tried to cross the Atlantic on a papyrus raft. Everyone else was tracking Herman and the Hermits. I wasn’t sure whether I was more interested in cultural anthropology or archaeology, so I read lots of books on both to help me decide.
But to my teachers, my many very excellent teachers, I’m afraid I was a disappointment. Looking back, I realize I was intense, impatient, messy and challenging. I actually failed handwriting in second grade. I was banned from religion class in high school for arguing the finer points of religion’s views on women. The principal told me I would rob the other students of their faith. I was assigned to do an independent study on world religions in the library instead, which probably explains my love for libraries. I refused to take the typing class because I thought they were tracking girls to be secretaries, so they put me in a Speed Reading Course. I couldn’t afford to go to college after high school. One of my high school teachers told me she was disappointed in me because I chose to take a year off from college, not realizing how much I wanted to go. “You will never go back,” she said.
But here’s the thing – you just never know. It was an interesting turn in the road. I worked many different jobs. I was a house cleaner, an elf at a Christmas village, a dishwasher, and a cook and excavator on an archaeological dig outside London. I was a short order cook when I discovered the newly-hired fry cook made more than me because he was a man. I was a fire truck inspector on the Tonka toys fire engine line. While I was working there they had the annual lunch when they gave out longevity pins honoring those who had served Tonka toys the longest. One woman on my line came back from lunch wearing her 30th anniversary pin, and I was humbled by her pride I worked nights on the line at Continental Baking, bagging hot dog rolls and Twinkies. I was an administrative assistant at an ad agency, and sorted through cornflakes boxes looking for the largest flakes. I was the assistant manager at a convenience store called Munchies at U. Mass/ Amherst, and spent my nights confronting students who were trying to liberate snacks from the shelves.
I lived in boarding houses, shared homes, a tent and one frat house. It was cultural anthropology on the cheap. All of these jobs taught me how to live in the world, and taught me about all the different ways other people live.
When Munchies laid me off for the summer, I was bored and volunteered at the Campus School summer program. I was assigned to work with an autistic student who loved light switches and splashing in water. The question of how to use those two loves to get her to interact with others was such a challenge, and the challenge just pulled me in. She pulled me in. That was it for me. I had been studying archaeology on and off, but teaching had two things going for it. It was much more fun because the people were alive, and the pay was better. So, I became a teacher. You see, you just never know.
The important thing about me as a teacher is that I ended up in Brookline. I had finally landed in the right spot. Brookline helped me become the teacher I wanted to be. I was encouraged to learn, to grow, to develop curriculum and to work with some of the best teachers on the planet. The Brookline Schools value intelligence and hard work. They trust that teachers know their jobs. There are so many opportunities to learn here in Brookline - the wonderful Brookline Education Foundation, Primary Source, and Teachers as Scholars to name a few. I have always been in teaching positions that involved collaboration with other teachers. In Brookline, when you work with colleagues, you better come prepared and ready to learn. Planning a unit with my Driscoll colleagues is like a graduate level course in teaching. The important thing about me as a teacher is that I ended up here.
The important thing about administrators is that they open doors. It is a job that has become increasingly challenging. I could make a graph that shows the relationship in school positions between pure fun and proximity to students. Teachers get the best of this deal. But I’ve been blessed. The principals I’ve worked for believed in their staff, were smart, took risks and saw the possibilities. Irwin Blumer was my first principal. He hired me, and immediately sent me, a first year teacher, off to a system-wide committee on computers in the schools. In my first meeting, I sat next to Superintendent Bob Sperber and was dazzled by his vision of computers integrated throughout the school. This was 1979. There were no computers at Driscoll School. We began a program with special needs students and Seymour Papert from the Logo Lab at MIT, and I ended up with the first computer used for teaching at Driscoll School – a huge machine on a cart that was locked up at the end of every class.
When Carol Schraft came to Driscoll School, she brought her own remarkable vision and organizational energy to the school. But more than that, when you went to Carol with an idea, as Marianne Taylor, Francesca Stark and I did when we were interested in starting a course on Media Literacy, she listened and said, “How can we make this happen?” – so it did. Good administrators care for and know their students. Today, when I see a student feeling a bit lost knocking on Jim Parziale’s door just to talk, I know he is someone who will open the door. And that is the important thing about administrators – administrators open the door for students and teachers, and then lead them through. An administrator must look with just one pair of eyes and still have a vision for all of the students in the building. They have to see the present, and into the future, at the same time they remember who takes which bus and why this student is here in the office again. We need the best administrators – because the important thing about administrators is that they open doors.
The important thing about teachers is that good teachers are magic. They are more than magic. In magic there is a trick – something that can be recreated step-by-step by someone else. But in teaching there is a moment of alchemy when one thing is transformed into another. The teachers in Brookline do that every day. I see uncertain and sad students transformed into confident learners, struggling students proud to master new skills, unsettled students becoming leaders, and a unrelated collection of individuals become a class. In my role as special educator, a classroom teacher or a library teacher, I have seen the transformations you do daily. I see how very difficult this job has become, and I know that you have never worked harder. I stand in awe of the teachers I work with, from the seasoned veterans to the new staff. The important thing about you is that you can change a moment with a child into pure gold.
The important thing about education today is that it is like a turtle bowl. When I was a child a common present was a small turtle you could buy at the five and ten cent store. If you went in to look at the turtles, you could see them in a blue and green tank, constantly crawling one on top of the other, making big turtle piles and little turtle hills. Today many interests and trends and pieces of legislation and test results and reports – a whole alphabet soup of SLPs, AYPs, SIPs, and CSTs - climb up and over each other, jockeying to be on top. The curriculum standards wax and wane, and the schedule constrains us. The field is an undulating and uncertain collection of ideas about the one right way to teach.
Yet the one thing we all know is that there isn’t just one right way to teach. We have to hold out space in our days to be thoughtful and reflective. We have to hold moments of learning in the hollow of our hands, these small sparks, and gently feed the flames. We have to keep our eyes on our students – look at student work, do student interviews, keep benchmarks, take time to look, look closely, look again and listen, listen, listen. Because despite that bowl full of educated turtles, it is our students that tell us best the way they learn.
The important thing about patience is that it is overrated. Be patient in the moment, but impatient for our students’ futures. We can’t hear any more about the achievement gap and not take it on as a mission. We can’t read the statistics in the papers about students who drop out of school, and not think of that one first grader we couldn’t reach. We can’t see the connection between income and education, and not wonder about ways we can help students who don’t have access to the support available to another.
Many years ago I was driving a second grade student home after school. The student, who lived beneath the old elevated orange line in Boston, asked me if I knew why some kids got to live in Brookline under trees and he had to live in Boston under a train. It was all I could do not to pull the car over to weep. He was still so young, but I wondered, will he get his chance? It’s easy to get bogged down in schools over who owns what part of a student’s education, to get mired in our schedules. It’s easy for our vision to narrow. The budget news is bad. Positions are lost, valuable people gone, while expectations rise. We can’t do it all. It’s hard to hold on to the things we value. But, we are the experts. We know what works. That’s why now is the time for teachers to look for solutions, large and small, student by student. Now is the time for us to remember what is the most important thing.
The important thing about schools is the possibilities. I once read that public school is the only dinner party where everyone is invited. Students who come to our schools come from every sort of family, every sort of background and are every sort of possible person. We need to prepare all of our students for the possibilities they will face in their lives, not knowing where they come from and not knowing where they will go, not knowing the hardships they will face or the triumphs they will celebrate. We are preparing our students for a future that is unknown to us. We are here for the opening chapters, but we don’t know how the story will end. All we have is this bag of magic – our belief in our students, our knowledge, our skill, our efforts to watch, to listen, and to care, our desire to make a difference and our willingness to work hard.
But that is enough. I have seen you work. I am so proud to be one of you. You are each marvels, each alchemists in your own way. You see the possibilities in every child, and that is why the important thing about the Brookline Schools is you. It is the teachers who make all the difference. As a teacher, collaborator and colleague, I am humbled and grateful to be here.
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