I’ve written in the past about teachers who had a profound influence on my life, beginning with my father and those other teachers like him whose life lessons such as Mr. Durante’s sharks and Mr. Jameson’s putts extended well beyond the content and the curriculum. I wrote about Miss Brooks and our incredible experiences with her in the fifth and sixth grade. Picture Ms. Frizzle, but without the magic bus. I wrote about John Stecklein, my advisor at the University of Minnesota, who gently and steadily guided me through my doctoral journey.
As teacher appreciation week draws to a close this year, however, I want to offer a hat tip to all of those other teachers who did their best to teach us something, anything.
Teachers like Mr. Salterio, the Latin teacher who shared his passions with us by taking us down the street to visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
And Mr. Russell, who kept us engaged in English class by replacing books in the curriculum with The Godfather and A Clockwork Orange. Not to mention that if you started to doze off, he could hit any desk in the room with a perfectly lobbed eraser. And the day he brought us down a peg by having us write out idioms as he read them aloud: it’s “toe the line” not “tow the line,” but then it’s “one toke over the line.” Sweet Jesus, what a teacher.
For all intents and purposes, Mr. Salterio or Mr. Russell or Ms. Tibbets or Ms. Dowling or Mr. Boisen could have made my pantheon of profound influences (definitely, Mr. Boisen), and I’m sure someone else has written eloquently about each of them.
But today, let’s not forget all of the other teachers. The ones who were there day after day, year after year, hardy ever missing a day beyond their one or two contractually permitted personal days per year. Some were passionate about their subject. Some had committed their lives to helping kids. Some liked a job with summers off. For some, teaching was just a stop on their way to an unexpected, unplanned 30-year career as a state assessment specialist. Whatever their motivation, they did their job, and the vast majority of them did it well.
There were the teachers whom you could easily distract into a digression that lasted the rest of the period. And the ones who let you think that the digression was your idea but knew that the class needed a break.
Or those with whom the class had an unspoken agreement. You don’t push us too hard; we won’t push you too hard. The work will get done, and we’ll all be happy.
The ones who taught classes that you just had to get through.
Let’s not forget the new teachers. Oh, those poor souls tossed into the fire without a net. (Yes, that makes no sense, but that’s how the first year of teaching feels.)
One quick digression about new teachers. My junior year in high school, 1975-1976, feels like a microcosm of the current post-pandemic school experience. The year began with a teachers’ strike and the Red Sox making the World Series. That critical “tone setting” time at the beginning of the school year was lost. AP classes and the like got rolling right away in the first week of November. Other classes were back on track by Christmas break. But those classes with new, inexperienced teachers, they were lost for the rest of the school year. There’s so much second-year physics I’ll never know. So many homework assignments that were never assigned or never completed. The students were the same. The variables were teachers and context.
And when I was the new teacher…
I’ll never forget my first class. A roster with 40 names, 40 kids in the classroom, 20 matched. I thank my colleagues in the mathematics department and select others for guiding me through that first year, showing me the ropes, immersing me in office politics, showing me where the good sub shop was, and providing me with a meter stick to carry while I was teaching. Sure, I wished they smoked a little less in our cramped little math department office (a converted boys’ restroom), but it was the 1980’s and you can’t have everything.
Then there were the teachers we tried to support when implementing innovative instructional technology or an innovative assessment program. I learned a lot from them.
Let’s not forget those teachers I taught in professional development workshops early in my assessment career. The “more experienced” kindergarten and first grade teachers fascinated and truly thrilled to discover that there was mathematics in just about everything – and that they understood it. The teachers who sat in the tables up front and participated throughout the sessions. Those who didn’t quiet down until I began opening my workshops with a recording of The National Anthem. And the ones who made a beeline for the tables in the back of the room, took out their newspapers, sipped their cups of coffee, but still gave me good ratings on the evaluation forms they had to fill out to get their PD credits. Bless their hearts.
Finally, heartfelt appreciation for all of my colleagues in large-scale state assessment who were former teachers, those who were content experts, managers, and policymakers at state departments of education and those with assessment companies as test developers, project managers, etc. I shudder to think what state assessment programs would look like if psychometricians, measurement experts, and assessment specialists were left to their own devices without the input of former (and current) classroom teachers.
It takes a village. It takes all kinds. It takes teachers.
Image by Marc Forman from Pixabay
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