NOTE originally posted on the front page at MyLeftWing on TUESDAY - several people urged me to cross-post here
and this is a MyLeftWing exclusive
I was recruited to be a frontpager specifically (but not exclusively) for education, so this, my second post for the day (which is one reason it clearly cannot be posted at dailykos) will be about education.
And why I am depressed.
And to find out why, you will have to keep reading, below the fold.
Today, at 2:15, my last class for the day ended (I have last period planning, because in the Fall I would miss so many times because of soccer games). I will next have a class at 8:25 on Monday. That is five full days without students.
Jay Mathews of the Washington Post, who wrote a book on Jaime Escalante, once told me that Jaime got depreseed when he was away from his students. Jay offered this remark to me when I was commenting at the start of a school vacation how down it made me feel.
Yes, to be certain, I can use the time to rest, to actually spend time with extended family, to catch up on reading and tasks around the house. All of that is true.
And yet, absent the chance to be with students my life seems to have much less focus.
Tomorrow I will be 59 1/2 -- on May 23 I will turn 60. This is my 11th year of teaching. At times I feel my age. I will come home and grump that I should give up teaching, that I don't feel effective. Then the following morning some student I have not taught for several years will give me a warm greeting in the hallway, or come and ask for a college recommendation. Or I will se a belated spark start behind the eyes of a student who has been struggling, and I will decide to keep at it just a little bit longer.
I have been reading several books on teachers, including one by dkos poster Mi Corazon. Perhaps in the next few days I will offer some organized remarks about what I have absorbed. This is part of the process of reflection, of pondering what I do, and examining how I could do it better, how our schools could better serve our children. I blog about education because I care so deeply.
Blogging has its rewards. Early this morning (around 1 am) I received an offline note complimenting me on my writing, including my post yesterday on the James Carroll op ed, from one of the most prominent and skilled writers in the blogosphere (who for now shall remain nameless, since it was an offline communication). Yesterday I received a phone call from Jay Mathews - principal education writer of the Washington Post - congratulating me on my National Board Certification. I also received an invitation for a private get together with a nationally known politician, an invitation that is a direct outcome of my blogging.
Yet none of this would have happened without my students. I think about education, and read about education, and talk about education, and write about education, because I spend time with students. None of what I offer would have any meaning or any reality were they not willing to trust me with their minds, their lives, their futures. I learn far more from them than they will ever learn from me, for after all, I am but one and right now they are 156 (I got a new one yesterday) when they all show up. That's 156 sets of eyes and ears providing me windows to the world I would otherwise lack. That's a potential 156 points of view I might otherwise neither encounter nor consider. That's 156 opportunities - and all the encounters they have beyond that as leverage - to possibly contribute to making this country and this world a better, more creative, more loving place.
But it is Tuesday night, and I will not again be with my students until Monday.
So I am depressed. Do you understand why?
I will survive this depression, as I survive it each week, each break, even the summer breaks which are the most painful. I have some ongoing contact electronically, but since I live in a different community I lack the chance encounters when school is not in session.
I think I could be offered a position of great influence on educational policy in this nation and I would turn it down, because it would mean I would be leaving the classroom. Whatever insights I may have of value on education come from being in the classroom with students. Without that ongoing relationship my ideas on education would be sterile, they would lack the vitality and energy that comes from living that about which I write.
I am depressed because the students are not here. But I am excited to realize that each minute that passes as I write this diary brings me closer to the next moment I am again with my students.
I hope this posting was not too much of an imposition, either upon the front page, or upon those who took time to read it.