I am a teacher

I am a teacher. I work for the future. I teach people values, manners and tolerance. I teach so other people may have a better life. I belong to a union, the Elk Grove Education Association, a local of the California Teachers Association. I have spent my career working to make each student’s education better. I advocate for kids, because they cannot advocate for themselves. I teach parents how to respond to kids, how to discipline with fairness, how to react to success. I teach parents to celebrate their student’s lives. I am a teacher.

Over the 27 years I have been teaching, I have seen communities revile education and celebrate it. In the early '80s, I worked with my local union to support a bond measure to build needed schools in the area. I lived in Maricopa County, Arizona at the time. Our opposition was the community of Sun City, an over-55 community that decried every dime spent on the future.  I went door-to-door in Sun City and talked about education. I lobbied for the future of that county and the measure was passed.

In the late ‘80s, we rode the roller coaster of funding and no funding, looking for respect and pay that matched the increasing responsibilities of being a teacher. Educational research had replaced “gut feelings” in the classroom and I was at the forefront of the revolution led by Madeline Hunter and her theories. We were given curriculum written like a script with the understanding that if we followed the script our students would all learn whatever the script taught.

Then came the ‘90s and standards-based curriculum. We no longer taught what we wanted; we followed a map of standards that wove through the years of a student’s life. The expectation existed that kids would learn on a straight line. Here again, research has shown us time and again the complexities of learning and the value of not thinking in straight lines.

Now we live in the second decade of this millennium, a time when money is tight and every value Americans hold has come into question. The media throws empty statistics at us about education every time we open our phones, our newspapers, our computers, our tablets. Places and people who once voted for education question our motives, wonder what we’re doing.

Yet, I, and so many others like me, still work in the public schools that every kid in America is free to attend. Laws enacted during the Civil Rights movement have mandated a free and appropriate education for all students regardless of disability, ethnicity, economic level or religious affiliation. Everybody comes to school in America! That makes every statistic about public education different from those about private education or education in any other country. We are an inclusive society with an inclusive school system.

I teach the future. I listen to the woes of burgeoning adolescence. I take notes away that were written in passion. I stop students from fighting and teach them how to avoid conflict. I help them with their homework and teach them how to talk to their parents about their dreams. I fight for them, because they cannot vote and I know them better than the voters do. I tell them the world will be better if they make it so, and I hope they believe me; I hope they make it better.