With the slashing of the $25.6 million needed to fund the National Writing Project, my microcosm has finally gone macro, and my writing has abandoned its purpose to address “small things.” Having vented yesterday about how politics corrupts and confounds education, I’ll get back to the microcosm, where I should be living and writing.

I enjoyed the conversation between John Stewart and Diane Ravitch last night, as they reflected on what hard work teaching is.  They took the insider’s view: how much the needs of a community added to the burdens of teaching.  What the outsiders (read “politicians”) seem to ignore is that teaching is responsive to need. Teachers don’t just browbeat their students into learning. They try to engage them.

The military has a different philosophy: take the needy and make them strong. This is a lot easier to do when you feed, lodge and live 24 hours a day with your recruits. It is also easier to do with young people who have attained majority: 18 years on this planet. It is also easier with volunteers.

Retired military officers have been recruited to be teachers, principals, and superintendents in schools. I have never heard one of them say that education was analogous to the military. Inevitably they say it is far more difficult to manage a classroom or a school system than to drill a platoon. When politicians assume that a heavy hand is all that a school needs, they are ignoring the experience of the best and most altruistic officers the military has to offer.

Teachers understand the basic needs of the learning equation. They see the how enervating the lives of their students can be. They differentiate assignments, call caregivers, tutor after school, help absent students catch up during their lunch periods, consult with special education teachers, meet with guidance counselors, visit the nurse’s office, read assignments delivered by home teachers, and so it goes. Do politicians ever imagine that a teacher’s day could be so splintered? Don’t they imagine that the teacher stands in front of a room, gives a test, delivers a lecture, and goes home to forget the trauma of education?

Yeah, maybe at Phillips Exeter Academy. And maybe not.

So I end where I began. How the funding of education reflects an ignorance of what it entails. But today I feel better about what I am writing. Because I am thinking of the small things: the ten-minute intervals that constitute public education and the way teachers face those intervals with resolve. Trying not to ask, Am I getting paid enough to do this?