Adventures in Learning

Yesterday I posted a paragraph from Grace Lee Boggs book The Next American Revolution, it caused a lot of anger from some classroom teachers and I moved by the passion expressed. I don’t think students are alone in being failed by the way schools are organized, I think teachers are also failed. They are overworked, underpaid and worse most of them do not get to express their true abilities because they are stuck being micromanaged by top down rules, standards and narrow curricula. I am a teacher, and I understand that many teachers work to make it work every day for every student. The deck is stacked against them, they are demonized and made to shoulder the blame for many problems they have no impact in.

I do think there is much power in the voices of teachers and I think it is up to teacher to lead the transformation of the system. I have been lucky to organize with a lot of teachers recently and the energy is powerful, and I hope that teachers feel empowered to stand up to practices that don’t help students learn. I hope teachers feel like they can seek out allies in their schools even if it is uncomfortable. I hope teachers continue to seek to evolve their roles as teachers and a profession I believe is one of the most important in society….

I apologize if my post seem like attack on teachers, it was not. It was a post that spoke to me and I felt the tumblr community would find it interesting. I do recommend reading Grace Lee Boggs, the whole book is a beautiful call to transform many of our institutions. 

Below I have adapted the quote to express some of my own feelings about how NCLB and other similar policies and reforms have impacted teachers.

I am always opened to be challenge, feel free to Direct Message me, and lets grow together, I don’t have all the answers and don’t want to. Active inquiry is my hope with this blog!

Instead of trying to bully teachers into turning their classrooms into test prep factories isolated from the community and structured to prepare their students to become cogs in the existing economic system, we need to recognize that the reason why so many teachers drop out of teaching is because they are voting with their feet against an educational system that sorts, tracks, tests, and rejects or certifies them and their students like products of a factory because it was created for the age of industrialization. They are crying out for another kind of education that gives them opportunities to exercise their creative energies as teachers because it values them as whole human beings.

-Adventure in Learning