Goodbye to teaching that is smug and self-satisfied, teaching as authoritative and proud, hiding its conflicts and uncertainties behind a lectern, a textbook, or a "social science" conceit. Goodbye to teaching as clerking - something quickly learned, easily assessed, instantly remediated. Goodbye to teaching as a trivial pursuit of the obvious.
Welcome to an approach that is overflowing with life, crackling with the surprising and contradictory harmonies of intimacy and love, stunning in its hope for a better world. Welcome to teaching as value laden, aspirational, and imperfect - a never-ending voyage of discovery and surprise, a continuous work in progress. Welcome to a life of no easy answers.
Goodbye to being in control all the time. Goodbye to overthinking and underexperiencing. Goodbye to deference, didacticism, ego and the need to always be right. Goodbye to prisons and border guards and walls - whether in Palestine or in Texas or inside our own hearts and minds. Goodbye to all that.
Welcome to the unknown, to jumping off the edge, to the new and the now, to endlessly learning how to live again and how to love anew. Welcome to relentless curiosity, simple acts of kindness, the complexity of humanity, the wonder of it all. Embrace teaching with one foot in the here and now, and another striding toward a world that could be but is not yet.
From: "Controversies in the Classroom: A Radical Teacher Reader" Series Foreword
By Joseph Entin, Robert C. Rosen, & Leonard Vogt, Editors
Foreword by Deborah Meier
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You know me, but you had me at smug.
ReplyDeleteCongrats on the position, it feels good to be just where you want to be, no?
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