I VISITED THE St. Paul’s site in Oakland on Wednesday, July 6^, 2011

        As always the day starts as one community, gathered in a circle so that every person is visible and present to every other person.  The circle, with 2 staff members in the center facilitating and this day, leading a game – a version of Simon Says that allows grown-ups and children to be silly together – is a language that says much better than words can: we are a community in which each of us is treasured for who we are and a ritual that celebrates that fact.  That the children have caught on to this is obvious on their faces, and in their body language.  They are alert, glad to be where they are, expectant of the good things that will happen this day. The energy is palpable.

 I followed a science class of rising sixth graders and their teacher into the botanical garden across the street. The garden  is in itself a place of intense beauty, a marvelous place just to be on a summer morning,  exotic in the center of a busy city, not one that a sixth grader is likely to enter on his or her own. The assignment: to observe. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you smell? And what questions do have about these?  How many of us ever actually stop, be still and notice? The students are making their own information, not being fed it, and of course are performing the fundamental scientific act of observing phenomena and identifying the relevant questions about it.

                Next I dropped in on humanities class of rising 7^th graders. The subject Pirates, but the deeper subject is the context in which pirates operated- how there wouldn’t have been piracy without the voluminous trade between Europe and the east which forced merchant ships to congregate as prey between Madagascar and the mainland. What were the working conditions and pay for sailors on merchant ships, or in the navies where the captain had absolute control over your life that might have induced you to become a pirate? It is hard to believe that the children didn’t emerge from this lively discussion more aware of context, of systems, connections.

                Then to a math class which the teacher starts by challenging the students to put an array of numbers on the whiteboard at the front of the room on a number line in 4 minutes , “Starting right now!” Immediate intense focus to win the race against time! Some of the numbers are positive, some negative, some whole, some fractional, and one is expressed by an unsolved long division problem.  There are the same number of numbers on the whiteboard as there are children in the class, and at the end of the four-minute race to finish, the teacher holds a stack of cards in her hand, each card with the name of one of the students and asks each child, as she draws from the top of the stack to come forward and place one of the numbers on the line. Thumbs up if you agree, sideways if you are not sure, thumbs down if you disagree, and why. Everyone knows he or she will be called on, so everyone is important, and because no one knows when, everyone’s alert.  Then, after everyone is sworn to absolute silence, each child is given a slip of paper with a number on it, again either negative or positive or expressed in a fraction or decimal. Now the class is challenged: “You have four minutes to get in a line in sequence, the lowest on the left, ascending to the highest on the right with no verbal communication.” Smart kids, they write their numbers on the whiteboard, labeling them with their names and use the resultant info as their guide and beat the deadline. Teamwork and math combined. Everyone intensely engaged, working hard, and having fun.  Next the class is divided in two, one teacher taking some of the children who need more help to a different room. In the room where I stay, the teacher hands out individual whiteboards and calls out numbers to be placed on a number line. As soon each child is finished he or she shows the answer to the teacher for immediate corroboration or correction. The process is efficient, brisk. Superb time management.  How much can you teach in one short class period? At Aim High a whole lot.

                 On the board of an Issues and Choices class for rising 6^th graders;  OBJECTIVE: “I will know how important it is to prioritize and manage my time.” The teachers and students work with a chart that when filled out identifies assignments to be fulfilled, due dates, etc. so as to identify priorities and manage time. Much discussion about this and other methods, specific examples from their current homework assignments, what works for some and doesn’t for others. Near the end of the class a FINAL Word: one of the students summarizes the class, tells what was learned. And to get out the door, each child hands in an idea or plan written on a piece of paper, an EXIT TICKET.  Another highly interactive class in which the skillful guidance of the teachers keeps the students engaged in very relevant material.

Another humanities class: Focus: mythology, this week, western, specifically Atalanta.  Objective: perform the myth as a play with active voices. Agenda/Do Now: identify story parts: characters, plot, setting, resolution. Homework: read the myth, labeling the story parts. The energetic discussion, largely Socratic in nature, during the first half of the period, fused the unlocking of this specific myth with developing the ability to derive meaning from all kinds of narrative.  In the second half the students perform the myth, each taking a part and reading it as in a radio drama. Again, total engagement. No perfunctory reading here! That the students are willing to be so animated, so out there in front of their peers,  is sign of their engagement, their understanding of the myth, and of the comfort they feel in this supportive community.

Summary: I came away inspired. I’d spent a fascinating morning in a very organized, happy, intensely busy community in which the students are fully engaged in highly designed, effective curriculum delivered by teachers who are stars.

To the Editor: (In response to an article about the founder of a charter school paying $125,000 salaries to teachers to assure excelence)  What should really amaze us is not that a school is willing to pay $125,000 salaries for great teachers but that this level of compensation is so unusual as to rate front-page placement in a national newspaper. Isn’t it amazing that a whole range of professional and business people, some in their first year of employment, can earn more than the people who taught them how to read, write, compute and think? Isn’t this the way to build our national house on sand?

This is a sad and instructive story about a colleague who at his peak was perhaps the best teacher I have ever known. It is about the danger we face when we don’t take risks. I will assign my colleague the ficticious  intitials: C.F. to protect his identity. I still revere him for how much I learned from him as one of his coaching assistants.

By gesture and statement, C.F.  made it clear to every player on his football team that he thought the world of him, and he never raised his voice except in praise. The players responded by challenging themselves to prove to themselves and him that he was right in his good opinion of them. I have never known athletes at any level to derive as much joy and satisfaction from a sport as C.F’s players did.

A brilliant aspect of  his teaching was that, unlike many coaches who design their schemes on what they think will be most effective in games, C.F. designed his around what worked best in practice, by dividing his schemes into the number of component parts equal to the number of coaches on the staff. His practices were extraordinarily demanding and superbly organized. He turned over their agenda to the student manager who carried a stopwatch and a whistle to signal the end of one section of practice and the beginning of the next. C.F. never forgot that football, like every sport, is played with the brain as well as the body. His schemes were brilliant deployments, interesting intellectually in their own right. I remember how fascinating my father, who never played football, found them when I explained them to him. C.F. made sure that every player understood the whole scheme, not just his part in it; he invited suggestions for improvement. The result was that coaches could take a player out of the game, ask him to analyze what was happening, and together they would make assignment changes on the spot.

But of all the ways C.F. blessed his players, there are two that stand out most vividly: That he played every player in every game, no matter how close. No exceptions. And he never talked about winning. That was not what the esence of the game was about. That’s not why he taught it. Besides, if we did everything right, as coaches and players, winning would take care of itself.

It did. After a few seasons of C.F.’s coaching, some of the teams we traditionally played dropped us from their schedules because they could no longer compete with us. We had to search out bigger schools than we were. We beat them too.

One day, C.F. came into my classroom to tell me he was a finalist candidate for the head coaching position at a college well-known for high academic standards and winning football. The search committee had hinted to him that he was the favorite.

“Wonderful, C.F.!” I said, jumping up from my desk to shake his hand. It was then I noticed that he was frowning. “It shows how excellent you are that a college would choose from the prep school ranks rather than one of their own,”" I told him.

“I think I’ll withdraw,” he said.

“Withdraw? Why?”

“I love it here.”

“You’ll love it there too. Think of the opportunity.”

“We love our house and this school. Our kids are happy here.”

“Yes, I know,” I said. “But there’s more money there. You can buy even a nicer house.”

“Not if you lose. It’s college. You start losing and they fire you. You have to start all over.”

“C.F.! What would you say to one of your players if he talked like that?”

He flushed and looked away. “Forget that,” he said. “I was just cooking up an excuse. The truth is like I said: I love the kids and the community here and there’s still lots to do.”

“So why did you come in here and tell me?”

He shrugged. “So that maybe you could change my mind.”

“I haven’t, have I?”

“No. I’m going to stay. You and I will still be working together.”

“Not for long,” I said. “I’m already restless.”

Now I wish I’d asked him if he could imagine ten years out. Would he still love it here? Would he still be so excited? I didn’t ask those questions and he turned down the opportunity and the next year I left that school and went on to a new position in a new location. We moved out of the house my wife designed. She stood in the doorway of the empty house when the furniture was loaded in the truck, and said,”This is all I ever wanted.”

Years went by and lo and behold, the kid who had been the student manager came back to the school as a faculty member and worked his way up the chain, changing jobs every several years and was now the athletic director. On a visit I made to the school, he told me  that the school wasn’t winning football games anymore. Kids were going out for soccer instead. There were stories about C.F. yelling at his players. He was using the same schemes he’d employed when I was one of his assistants. “The other teams have caught on and their killing us,” the athletic director said. “He shows every sign of a person who has stayed in the same position too long.”  The next year, this man, not half C.F.’s age, who as a kid had carried his whistle and clipboard with C.F.’s  practice agenda, had the sad task of calling a man he revered into his office and taking away his coaching position. Last I heard, C.F stayed on at the school as a classroom teacher until he retired.

For the last ten years of his time at the school, he never went to a football game.

Everyone knows who Babe Ruth was. Millions watch the Jerry Rices of the world catch footballs and the Lance Armstrongs race through France. But how many people can name the winner of an award won by a teacher in their own community – if there is actually such an award?

As a person who taught and administrated in schools for years and then consulted with teachers, I offer a plan for the reform of American education: celebrate teachers. Put them on a pedestal and acknowledge the act of teaching for what it is: the most fundamental, critical activity in our society.

But that’s obvious, you might say. Everyone knows that you can’t get anywhere these days without a decent education and that the nation’s welfare depends on an educated populace. Well then, where’s the glory around teaching? Why aren’t teachers being interviwed on TV and radio? Why aren’t thousands of young people asking themselves, “Do you think I can get to be a teacher? Do I have what it takes?”

Perhaps the reason our culture doesn’t award hero’s stature to teachers is that most  people assume they could be good teachers. That’s a fantasy. We have never come to grips with how hard it is to excel in teaching, how rare the required native talent, how much there is to learn, how innovative and flexible one must be, and how self-motivated to improve each year and not go stale in a job where there is no external change, no ladder to climb from one position to a new one. When we understand enough to marvel at a well-taught class as we marvel at a successful heart surgery, we will see true reform. The best and the brightest will apply to be teachers. We’ll focus on training and supporting them, not just with good pay, but with respect. They will do the rest. People who see themselves as heroes perform accordingly.

We see ourselves as we are seen. Year after year, in an annual workshop for experienced teachers of merit, my co-facillitator and I heard teachers tell stories of the status they lost when they entered the profession; many confessed that in their own parents’ eyes, “they were only a teacher.” How hurtfull! Surely those parents were reflecting the culture’s opinion. All that parental love and care, all that money set aside for college, had been in service of a different expectation. We began to focus the workshops on celebrating the teaching profession, helping the teachers  to see themselves as highly skilled professionals providing a service without which every other enterprise would collapse. Some of them told us later that the workshop was one of the reasons they stayed in the profession.

We need to do that on a national scale. For every breathless article about some twenty-something’s performance in a game the outcome of which changes the world not one jot, for every platinum recording of a song that will very likely be forgotten in a year or two, we need to feature a teacher. Let’s put TV cameras into classrroms where star teachers work, with an expert commentator, the way we do for sports, and show what happens in a good classroom, the decisions, minute by minute, the teacher makes. Instead of inviting some famous person to speak at the college graduation ceremony, let’s invite a local public school teacher whose work has opened doors for kids that otherwise were closed – some of whom will be in the audience. (Besides, she’ll probably make a better speech; she’s been making herself clear for years.) Prizes for teachers, parades for teachers: whatever shows we know their value.

We’ll have reform when, instead of  athletes and rock stars smiling at us from advertisements, holding up  an underarm deoderant, a pill to make us thin, we see teachers holding books.