“Teach Together” (Pass it On)

Teaching isn’t about a competition; it’s about learning and conversation. It’s about resource sharing. It’s about the real work of teaching: asking question after question until you find a method, resource, or approach that works for your context. It isn’t about being the best. It’s about building the reflective capacity to know when you have to seek help and change what you’re doing. (Kevin English, Teacher Consultant, 2013)

The 23rd summer institute of the Eastern Michigan Writing Project soared into the sunset, trailing clouds of witnesses. This could be the smallest teacher’s institute in the annals of the National Writing Project with four new teachers graduating. However, it also brought back two teachers from 2013, two from 2012, and one from 2010 to relive the glory of those previous institutes and make it wonderful for the other four.

It also featured guest speakers from days of yore, on Family Literacy (2013), on classroom research (2011 and 2003), on writing  (2011, 2005 and 2003), on professional development (2004), on school improvement (2009), and on literacy coaching (1998).   And today it featured our published authors of poetry (1998), of professional inquiry (2000) and of children’s fiction (2011).  From this point of view, this was the most widely-attended Institute we have sponsored at Eastern Michigan University.

It illustrates the point made by Kevin English (2013) above that, “It’s about building the reflective capacity to know when you have to seek help and change what you’re doing.” As a network of Writing Project teachers we have built a shared “reflective capacity” that makes us much larger than the four teachers we had this summer or the nine teachers we had last summer or the eleven we had the year before. We are not getting any prizes for head count, but we could really set off tremors with our “reflective capacity” because it is shared, not only this summer, but across the generations.

When we celebrated the authors today, quite a few generations of teacher consultants looked on and cheered for three who made a mark by publishing. The moment gave me that feeling that the early Christian writers had a generation after Jesus had walked the earth: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles and let us run the race with perseverance, the race marked out for us” (Hebrews 12:1).

This is no race to the top, but a race to make schools better and students valued and writing a lynchpin in the curriculum.  The “sin” that entangles us is helplessness, the sense that we don’t matter in this race.  When we stand with the “cloud of witnesses” we are much more than victims, more than the faithful remnant of those who put students first. We are a shared reflective capacity for improvement and making a difference.

If anyone wonders how you hold a “Writing Teacher’s Leadership Institute” with four teachers, here is the answer: teach together. Gather the “cloud” and let teachers collaborate. There was very little design in this, just a faith that teachers are stronger together than apart. The new teachers came together the same way as their predecessors had, because they shared their own “reflective capacity.” They also made their unique contributions to inquiry, to digital stories, to metaphors (“writing is like a hula hoop”), to adopting social media.

So thanks to the clouds of witnesses who joined us today and thanks to the new teachers who joined them enthusiastically.

May the reflective capacity be with you.

Are We Brave Enough to be Free?

Water, Roads and Education are getting play in today’s newspapers. Households in Detroit are getting shut off from water for nonpayment of bills, the federal highway trust fund is bottoming out, and the Flint, MI public schools has fallen $20 million in debt, emblematic of many urban public schools.

Is it possible that Water, Roads and Education are not basic rights in the land of the free and the home of the brave? Is it possible that these emergencies don’t keep the monied interests in this country up at night? That they don’t think,”I have so much and some people in this country can’t afford water.” Is it possible that they only drive on well-paved roads or their shock absorbers are so amazing that the potholes don’t register as they drive over them? That they cannot be moved by the overcrowding of public school classrooms, because their children attend schools where the largest class is fifteen students?

Perhaps the rights of individuals have been obscured by the facade of taxation. We can’t allow taxes to pay for what some lazy manipulators have not earned. We’ll give directly to these causes, so the government can’t squander our taxes.  We are charitable people, just not dupes of the undeserving poor.

How is that working out in the land of the free and the home of the brave? “A 90-year-old woman with bedsores and no water available to clean them.” (“Going Without Water in Detroit” N.Y. Times, July 4, 2014). One of the horror stories reported by the Wayne Metropolitan Community Action Agency, but only one of 904 water customers calling them for assistance in the last year.  Does private charity address the water needs of a thousand people in one city? How can we allow such want in the land of the free and the home of the brave? Or are we just free and not brave enough to support these needs with our taxes?

If we were a brave nation, the Flint Public Schools would not be $20 million in debt and the road I drive to my university position would not be fractured with gullies and potholes for the entire twenty years that I have taught there.  The evidence is under our tires and in the erratic attendance of urban secondary school students. The evidence is a family of five “with no water for two weeks who were embarrassed to ask friends if they could bathe at their house (“Going Without Water”). How do we let this happen in the home of the brave?

To be brave is to risk our resources to help those that need them. You can never guarantee that your charity will have the effects you expect, nor can you guarantee that your taxes will be spent wisely. But you can say, “I have enough. Let others use it for a better life.” We do not see this level of bravery in a free land.

Water, Roads and Education. Are these not inalienable rights in the land of the free and the home of the brave? Or are we only brave enough to provide them for our own kind?