Why Teach?

When I was in the classroom, people would often ask me “why did you become a teacher?”  What an impossible question, like asking someone why did you have children? or why did you fall in love?  The answer had something to do with wanting

     to honor my animal body
     to honor story and stories
     to honor the beauty in others.

I wanted to make something whole.

Hearing the word teacher, my animal body still responds with exultation. A gate swings open inside; answers gather readily like calves with bells around their necks. Yet at my school’s first retreat the summer before I started teaching, I could only answer this question obliquely: I became a teacher “to show kids things.” For a long time I could not articulate what it was I wanted to show my students.

And then, from the poet Rita Dove, my answer:

I would like to remind people that we have an interior life- even if we don’t talk about it because it’s not expedient, because it’s not cool, because it’s potentially embarrassing- and without that interior life, we are shells, we are nothing.

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In this 11-minute video, Dalton Conley interviews Victor Rios about the youth control complex.  He argues the that punishing arm of the state (the prison system) and the nurturing arm of the state (the education system) work together to criminalize, stigmatize, and punish young inner city boys and men.  (Via Sociological Images)

Interesting to think of schools and law enforcement/prisons as the nurturing and punishing arms of the state; the youth control complex as the left and right arms mixed into one another.  Although I never heard of it as a “college kid” (and so could not have had informed discussions as Rios’s mentors did with him), when I was a new teacher an organizer friend taught me the term “school-to-prison-pipeline.”  Thank you to Ari & the NYCLU! You brought necessary info and words to my students in the pipeline.  Now Ari’s in law school, gonna fight the punishing arm/nurturing arm incest (or at least dilute its poison by representing kids in suspension-court).  Who knows what wonderful things he’ll accomplish once he’s a full-grown lawyer.  

Stayers, Leavers, Lovers & Dreamers

What Keeps Teachers Going?

On the train I’ve been reading the lime-green issue (#16) of the Bank Street Occasional Paper Series.  The slim volume contains Marilyn Cochran-Smith’s (2004) Barbara Biber lecture, “Stayers, Leavers, Lovers, and Dreamers: Why people teach and why they stay.”  She talks a lot about the unquantifiable strengths that motivate our best teachers and allow them to persevere.  From Sonia Nieto’s (2003) book What Keeps Teachers Going?, Cochran-Smith finds that teaching requires depth of thought but also strong feeling and character (or, convictions). 


What truly sets the best apart is not their training, curriculum, or strategies; rather it is their expansive definition of the educators’ role in society: “‘teaching as love,’ teaching as hope and possibility,’ ‘teaching as anger and desperation,’ ‘teaching as democratic practice’” (Cochran-Smith 2004, p. 11).  Teaching as anger and desperation!  Now that’s a definition you don’t hear every day, but I do think that good teaching is a way to to express anger about society’s absurdities.  The best teachers I’ve known (both as student and teacher) stared down despair and walked the knife’s edge of anger.  Those who kept teaching until retirement tapped into this boiling rage (we could be so much better than this! we are so close!) as a fuel for humanizing work in the classroom.  Like Cochran-Smith, they saw teaching “as a way to live in the world.”


I love also her common-sense responses to all the fear-mongering about teacher shortages.  The lecture weaves together teacher memoirs with statistical data about changes in the profession, and also goes in depth about some of the relevant longitudinal studies:

Nieto’s analysis suggests that good teachers stay in teaching—even in the most difficult of circumstances and with the most marginalized students—for reasons that have more to do with loving and dreaming—with teaching’s heart—than with either it’s physical conditions or the availability of the latest techniques. (Cochran-Smith 2004, p. 11).