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The life I’ve really loved living began after high school, after I left suburban New Jersey, Villager outfits and Bass Weejuns behind. I had narrowed my college choices to two Big Ten schools: one sent me a list of cocktail dresses I would need in my wardrobe to pledge a sorority; at the other, I saw picketing against Dow Chemical, producers of napalm. The decision was easy: I entered the latter, the University of Wisconsin, in the fall of 1967.
The war in Viet Nam was escalating and the anti-war movement was the only game in town. In October, the next protest against Dow was huge and violent: a sign of more to come. Radicalized almost overnight, I moved from being an onlooker to an activist, spending much of my time in Madison attending SDS meetings, demonstrating against the war and for black students’ and women’s rights. I met, in secret, with the central committee of the Mother Jones Revolutionary League. I sold the Black Panther Party newspaper on street corners and sat in at the state capitol with Father Groppi in support of welfare mothers. Somehow, through all of this, I managed to avoid getting arrested, probably because I could run fast and didn’t do anything truly foolish, a good thing since my father vowed he would never bail me out of jail.
I did, additionally, attend classes, classes taught by campus legends, teachers who could hold an audience of 500 students spellbound as they lectured about revolutionary movements that brought change. We listened with rapt attention, (we had to, this was in the days before Power Point presentations); we took copious notes, read lots of books, and wrote serious papers. In four years, however, I am quite certain I spoke to only one professor face to face.
The one small class I took probably had the most influence on the kind of teacher I became. Twelve of us met with an American history professor to dissect primary sources. We marked up text and talked about word choice and sentence structure. Much like the Socratic seminars we hold in our classes now, EVERYONE’s ideas were valued. TOGETHER we constructed meaning. Quite an empowering experience.
Just as the first protest I witnessed as a freshman propelled me into the anti-war movement and left-wing politics, the bombing of a campus building in August 1970, helped push me out. A physics graduate student, working in his lab at 3:42 a.m., was killed; the FBI descended on Madison; and the student movement ground almost to a halt.
After college some of my friends planned to redirect their political energy to organizing the working class, taking jobs in factories and hospitals. Trying that route, I worked the graveyard shift at a cannery in Oconomowoc. I stood on the assembly line for eight hour stretches, feeding ears of corn into a machine that cut the kernels off the cob. At 4 a.m., I tootled off to lunch and read quotations from Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book to myself. So much for organizing the working class; I was too tired to talk to anyone. Thankfully, this was seasonal work, but a long enough stint to convince me I needed to find a more meaningful way to “serve the people.”
In my first real job, I worked with court adjudicated youth in Milwaukee. These kids, barely fifteen years old, had much in common; they were poor, non-white, and virtually illiterate. To stay out of the residential corrections system, they spent three hours a day doing mindless “vocational” work, like gluing tiny magnets into plastic letters that other people put on their refrigerators to teach their children the alphabet. The other three hours, these kids spent in a schoolroom run by another untrained teacher and me. It was baptism by fire, my chance to put what I’d read in Pedagogy of the Oppressed into practice. If I could teach these kids to read, I reasoned, maybe they could seize more control over their lives and stay out of trouble. A pretty tall order. I lasted for three years.
Graduate school at BU gave me an understanding of psycholinguistics, the tools to diagnose and remediate reading problems and the certification I needed to work in a public school. Boston, wrapped up in a patronage system, wasn’t interested in hiring meas a reading specialist; fortunately, Brookline was.
If I had continued doing what I was originally hired for, I doubt I would be standing here today, receiving recognition as a Caverly winner. For the first third of my career at BHS, I was holed up in the outer reaches of the A-Wing, teaching elective courses with nifty titles like Reading Workshop, Speed Reading, Vocabulary Development, and SAT Prep. Some of the students were tremendously at risk, years below grade level; many were just learning English, and others were saving the money parents are now shelling out to the Princeton Review.
A small piece of my job description was to work as a literacy coach to spread the virtues of teaching study skills across the curriculum. Little happened on that front. Who had time, or the inclination, to listen to me? Teachers had so much of their own content to cover. Where and when would they fit in what I could add? I let most of that role go.
My daily work was rewarding enough. It is incredibly powerful to work one-on-one with kids, to know the depths of their insecurity about what they struggle with and to help them improve. Years of working in the athletics program with motivated athletes and winning teams convinced me that no degree of success outside the classroom can compete with the feelings of self-esteem that come from being a confident reader, a successful student in charge of your own ability to learn.
Budgetary woes thrust me into a new role: English teacher. In truth, I welcomed the challenge. I had new content and classroom management skills to master and gained a much greater appreciation of what regular classroom teachers have to do. It’s quite different addressing the individual needs of ten students at a time to meeting the needs and controlling the energy of 25. Downright daunting.
Being an English teacher helped me understand why years earlier I hadn’t been an effective literacy coach. That was a model that neither I nor the school was ready for. But to borrow from Bob’s nautical metaphor collection: there’s been a sea change in secondary education: More and more teachers understand that our job is not just to fill empty vessels with information, but to give kids high school literacy skills so THEY can grapple with the content.
Suddenly, reading is the buzz! Teachers across the curriculum want to teach their students how to be active readers, to make meaning themselves. We have a Reading Toolkit in the English department now; the social studies department, thanks to a grant from the Brookline Education Foundation, is moving to create their own; tutorial teachers have requested and received training for teaching reading strategies. All good stuff for the H.M.S. Brookline.
Teaching in Brookline has given me the opportunity to put my personal beliefs in a just and literate society into daily practice. Waking up each morning knowing I’m about to face the youthful exuberance of bright fifteen year olds still excites and delights me. Their sheer optimism is astounding. Where else can you meet people who read a Faulkner story and believe that Abner Snopes MUST have let the animals out of the barn before he burned it down? Equally rewarding, at the end of a day, is knowing I may have led a struggling senior to explore some life changing books. This year, one girl, with whom I occasionally went nose to nose about her negative attitude, finished the year writing proudly about what it means to be biracial. Another boy openly acknowledged having epilepsy after reading about others coping with challenging disabilities. My biggest coup, however, may have come by handing the right books about the wrongness of the war in Iraq to one boy, enchanted with all things military. He has since decided that “war is hell” and enlisting in the Marines is not his best option.
And, teaching in Brookline, I am not alone; I am in a community with a clear mission and shared goals about fairness. Colleagues and students work on behalf of the kinds of causes I once thought I’d be devoting my life to: they hold assemblies about genocide in Darfur and human rights violations in China; they give up school vacations to help build houses for Katrina victims; they speak out and make us hear the silence that some people still suffer for being different. In Brookline our motto rings true: “We serve youth that youth may learn to serve.” I humbly accept this year’s Caverly award, thank my colleagues for nominating me and the Brookline Education Foundation for honoring me.
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