There is an amazing modern poet named Belle Waring
who has written a poem entitled “From the Diary of a Clinic Nurse, Poland, 1945” in her book Dark Blonde: Poems. In it, the clinic nurse tells us of her encounters with a feral Jewish child who was left in the woods in an attempt to save her from the concentration camps. She, the lowly nurse, tries to do what it takes to connect with this child – to help her become human again – but the doctors and specialists scoff at her efforts even when they seem to work. But Waring writes it better than I could ever retell it, so here’s a short excerpt from the poem:I lay on the floor like a pup at play. I lay there and begged for the Blessed Virgin for Her help and was seized quite suddenly with weeping. The child fixed me with a concentrated stare, then crawled over and sniffed my hand: carbolic soap and tears, if indeed these have a scent. // More doctors came and she fled then to her corner as they shouted at my lack of dignity. // I need the work. I did not shout back.
I have not been teaching long (in the grand scheme of things), but this is how I often feel as I reach out and try to engage my students. (Please don’t get me wrong. I am, in no way, saying my students are feral animals; however, the sentiment still seems to apply.) I make myself vulnerable, put myself out there, try to gain the trust of some who have never trusted a teacher, and, if I’m lucky, they try to meet me halfway. But I think that is the goal of most teachers. Why else would we teach? What has recently begun to weigh on my mind is how we are able to do this. I’m sure anyone who has ever taught part-time anywhere can identify with the last stanza of the poem. We may do things differently. We may feel that our ways are the right ways to do them – the more “progressive” way – but we can’t shout back because we are lowly part-timers.
So how do we fix this? What should we do when our passion and our abilities contradict the procedures in our academic institutions? This is a question I am currently trying to answer. This has been my “you’re-not-quite-doing-that-according-to-standards” semester and, even though what I do gets my students to think, write, and to think about what they’re writing, I have to change it. And I do understand that without standards some people will take advantage or go in without a sense of accountability. But what do we do when what we are told to do contradicts something that is good and working? The only answer I’ve been able to create is that we compromise. Change what is working so that it doesn’t quite fit your plan, per se, but it does fit the procedures. But how far will compromise take us? I’m not proposing a revolutionary overhaul of the system. (I like my job, thank you very much!) But what would it look like to start petitioning for changes on a statewide level? Not random changes, but thoughtful researched-backed changes that would better the standard of education for our students? I think that it could be monumental. Right now, it seems that the truly progressive changes in education are popping up in state colleges and universities, which makes complete sense – publish or perish would cause these faculty members to be “in the know” about current shifts in pedagogy. But then people like me – recent grad students – are filtering into the community college system and seeing a discrepancy. This is frustrating. And even those of you who teach at the K-12 level probably left your credential program feeling passionate and excited, only to dive into an untenured position wrought with test-based materials and thought to yourself, “Where did all the teaching go?”
Here is my question to you. What would it look like for a group of progressive-minded individuals to strategically and tactfully address the issues that we see at the state level so that teachers would have a little more freedom to teach in the best way possible for their particular set of students, without endangering the careers of our hard-working supervisors? I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on this matter so that perhaps, with your help, we can make a difference.
