The usual daily flow of ideas here is now almost eight years old. Each year we go through the cycle of returning to our classrooms and supporting each other by sharing ideas about our teaching and our emotional relationship to what is really a very difficult profession.
After not hearing from Chris Roberts for some time and missing his voice here, I got an email from him last night – I see that Sabrina mentioned it too – and I was happy to get what I thought was an update on what he has been doing lately. Instead, the email provided a link to a recently published article in Plunderbund about Chris.
What Chris wrote made me very emotional. I actually had to stop reading after the first paragraph to get a hold of myself. You see, in this article Chris rejects a very dark force in education that, had it been allowed to run free during my own career, would very likely have broken me.
Instead, I am right now in the middle of very much enjoying the first official week of my retired life. I just worked for 37 years to get to this week. To put that into perspective, I have just taught (not counting the summer months and vacations) for 1,332 (36 x 37) weeks to be able to arrive at this one.
Yes, I have been able to retire now and live in dignity because the same forces that Chris addresses in his article have been kept at bay in Colorado.
For the first 24 years of my career I was simply crushed under the wheels of the grammar translation model that was all around me. I didn’t think I would survive it. I ran the Bring Out Your Dead cart. Yet I knew no better, and since I had small children and needed to work, and I had a stubborn streak in me that wanted to be a teacher, I didn’t leave.
I stayed in teaching in spite of six (yes I counted them) serious burnouts. Any teacher who has burned out knows what that means. I don’t use the term burnout lightly – it is a charged term and I use it here in every sense of the depth and power and fear of not being able to go on that the word conveys.
I kept searching until the best day of all when I met Susan Gross in 2001 and my career became a thrilling divine search into storytelling that has resulted in my being able to rock my professional life over the past 13 years and talk to people like you here every day, which is a happiness beyond anything I thought would ever be possible, because we say true things here.
Back to Chris. Why did I cry when reading what Chris wrote? I couldn’t help it. Can we ever help it when we cry? Chris stood up to bullshit on my behalf. He rejected a $5000 cash prize on my behalf, and on behalf of all teachers. I’m not sure that in my fourth year of teaching 33 years ago I would have done that. Like him, at that time I had small children.
Honestly, I haven’t finished the article. I am tasting it like I would a fifteen course meal. I’ll go back and finish it after I write this. I am just at the end of the paragraph in which he compares teaching to the medical model. Have you ever cried good tears, not sad tears? That is the kind of tears I cried in reading that first paragraph.
I have always respected Chris, but I can’t express what his words have done for me. They have validated all that I have suffered over 33,000 classes and some 5,000 students. They have validated Carol Hill’s career and that of Le Chevalier de l’Ouest, Robert Harrell and countless others both in and out of this community. Chris has delivered a punch in the mouth to the same forces acting in Western Canada now, those forces that Michelle Metcalf mentioned in a comment here just last night and that Chris Stoltz often refers to.
I’ll stop now, and go back and read the article. More tears will flow. Thank you, Chris, for validating my career like you did here. The words you wrote here resonate in my heart. I think of what Daniel Auteuil’s character Ugolin says in Jean de Florette, “Ce n’est pas moi qui pleure, c’est mes yeux/It’s not me who is crying, it’s my eyes.” But for me, it is my heart that is crying, and not just my eyes. Why?
Because I think of all the younger teachers who, if not supported by courageous acts like the one described here, may not be able, like me this week, to retire in dignity. And I think not just of them, and of the clear and present professional danger that they run right now, but also of how lucky I am to have even reached this first official week of retirement, because the forces that Chris rebukes have been around for a long, long time.
Thank you as well to all the fighters for my rights here in Colorado over the years who have kept the retirement system strong here on my behalf. And thanks to those guys in Canada who are on strike and fighting as we speak and and the fine people everywhere else right now who are opposing what I see as something really evil.
Here is the link to the article:
http://www.plunderbund.com/2014/08/19/ohio-teacher-turns-down-studentsfirst-in-spectacular-fashion/