This week's Pieces of You topic is teachers. I'm guessing that this isn't what they had in mind.
Teachers ... I've always been around teachers, always. My aunt was a teacher for 43 years; once I got into the fourth grade, she would let me grade her third graders' spelling tests. My sister and I are both teachers, and I married into a family of more teachers. I've written before about one who helped shape me in many ways, from introducing me to my husband (well, he's always claimed to; we met in his class when we were in tenth grade) to inspiring me to become the teacher I am now.
Sometimes -- okay, yesterday -- I complain about the paper-pushers who think they know what teaching is and how to correct us all and make us all do it "right", whatever that is; no one really knows except those teachers and students and parents who know when it all comes out the way it's supposed to. I mean, why train teachers at all, or bother making them go to college to learn how to do their jobs when someone who isn't a teacher at all, or maybe who went to the college but never the classroom, claims to have the answer today, and who, with bountiful heart and a fat paycheck is going to revolutionize education by sharing this new method. Maybe it's whole language or new math. Yesterday it was differentiated instruction. Well, okay.
So, Mary. I was never a student in one of Mary's classes; I only know her as a colleague. She joined the high school staff during the years between my own graduation in 1971 and my return as a member of the faculty in 1977. So she's older than I am, but probably not by much. Why have I been thinking about Mary all day today?
Simple. Her new department supervisor has decreed that all members of the English department will now receive memos, notices, bulletins, and the rest of the effluvia that passes as communication via email. Oh, crap. Now they want Mary to use email.
Let me tell you about Mary. When she started teaching, maybe almost 30 years ago now, she was a rail-thin, energetic, young married English teacher who just seemed to reach kids real well. When I met her, she was newly single, having thrown a blow-out surprise 30th birthday party for her hotshot lawyer husband who thanked her at the end of the evening by telling her he wanted a divorce. She stopped being rail-thin. She filled out. And I mean that in the most wonderful way possible.
There was no husband, there were no children. There was a niece, a nephew, lots of cats and dogs, and sure, all those kids at school. She was never the intellectual of the English department, at least not in the eyes of any supervisor she ever had. She's never taught an advanced or honors class. She's had class after class, year after year, of unmotivated, uninterested-in-school-at-all students, and I don't think a one of them has ever been rude or disrespectful to her. Maybe they don't hand in their homework. They know it won't change how she feels about them.
Mary is somewhat heavier now, actually quite a bit, and the overall physical effect is that she changed from that long-haired skinny 1970s chick into a really beautiful woman. The energy and the perkiness is still there, in spades. She wears funky clothes: pink sneakers, leggings, long sweatshirs, and pulls it all off like a dream. She's not a joke. She's good, dammit. She reaches kids that no one else can reach, and she's been doing it consistenly for a long, long time. No, she's not teaching them to dissect and explicate The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. She's teaching them that she's an adult human being who cares about them and wants them to do well in life, and that's what people remember about the teachers they remember.
So, email. Mary is not moving so quickly into the age of technology. She doesn't want to, and as far as I can see, she doesn't have to. What's the big deal? She doesn't even have a microwave at home, and she's perfectly happy.
Her supervisor -- the one who still doesn't know the names of the students in the one class she teaches, and it's October now -- told Mary today that she's got to start checking her email. She's got to log on to the school network, log on to the Internet, log on to the mail server and read her damn email. Mary was so panicked that she couldn't even come and ask me to help her. She was embarrassed, even though I've told her before that I don't see why anyone should make her do this, either. She sent someone else to ask me, someone she team-teaches with a couple of periods a day.
I logged her in, changed all her passwords, printed out all the nonsense that was in her inbox. I told her buddy that I'll happily check her email for her once a week or so, if she wants me to, or whatever. I'd rather not see Mary ever check her email unless for some reason she decides she wants to. I'd rather see her devote all that incredible energy to what counts: niece, nephew, dogs, cats. Kids.
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I'm watching listening to Clay Aiken's new CD
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So ... - 12.19.2006
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Fifteen Years - 12.17.2006
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