Letters to a new teacher

Jonathon Kozol has a new book out, Letters to a Young Teacher. Kozol is widely regarded as America's conscience as it relates to educating the least affluent among us. His work includes Savage Inequalities and Shame of the Nation, along with nine other books, and really, by working hands-on in inner-city Boston and New York for more than three decades, Kozol has become a national treasure of truth about the teaching life. At least as it relates to those urban environments.

So, I'm going to quote some of Kozol's thoughts in an article published recently in Education Week. It's more about teachers than his other work, which tends to focus on kids and the system. That makes this highly relevant to our mission at NTN.

And in general, I thought, what a wonderful concept for a group here at NTN.

Veteran teachers racing through, here is my question: What would you write to a young teacher if you had the chance? (And by the way, you do now have your chance!)

Jonathon Kozol:

"The loss of first-year teachers from suburban schools is not particularly high. In inner-city neighborhoods, by contrast, on the basis of my conversations with at least 200 of these young recruits, I would estimate that upwards of one-half decide to leave the school in which they’re placed by the end of their third year....

 

"The most frequently reiterated reason for discouragement that they express has nothing to do with “relating to their students,” with whom they tend to strike an almost instantaneous rapport. Instead, it has to do with the systematic crushing of their creativity and intellect, the threatened desiccation of their personalities, and the degradation of their sense of self-respect under the weight of heavy-handed, business-modeled systems of Skinnerian instruction, the cultural denuding of curriculum required by the test-prep mania they face, and the sense of being trapped within “a state of siege,” as one teacher puts it, all of which is now exacerbated by that mighty angst machine known as No Child Left Behind.

"The challenge for such teachers, as they convey it to me in our conversations, is: (1) to hold fast to the pedagogic principles they value and the tenderness of their attachment to young people that has brought them to the classroom in the first place, (2) to do so in a way that will not isolate them in their schools and leave them feeling all the more discouraged as a consequence....

 

"Most of all, I encourage in these teachers a sense of what I like to call “enjoyable and mischievous irreverence” in the course of navigating those mandated miseries introduced by federal pressure into many inner-city schools but, at the same time, a mature sophistication and respectfulness in dealing with their principals, who often view the policies they must enforce with the very same distaste their younger teachers do.

 

"Inspired teachers of young children, like Francesca, ardently refuse to see themselves as servants of the global corporations or drill sergeants for the state. They disdain to be regarded chiefly as technicians of utilitarian proficiency. And they stalwartly refuse to see their pupils as so many future economic units for a corporate society, into whom they are expected to pump “added value,” as the number-crunchers who determine much of education policy demand.

Few of these technocrats appear to recognize much pre-existing value in the young mentalities of children or, indeed, to be acquainted closely with the personalities and character of children. Rarely, if ever, do they ask if children ought to have some opportunity for happiness during the hours that they spend with us in school. (I cannot find that word in any sentence of the No Child Left Behind Act.)

Faced with these pathogenic pressures, teachers of young children in particular need to learn not only to prevail in the quite literal respect of keeping their jobs and staying in their schools, but also to retain their sense of playful energy and fascination in the unexpected offerings of all those pint-sized packages of whim and curiosity who are entrusted to their care. This is why I fervently encourage them, even in the most decrepit and depressive-looking of our urban schools, to fight with every bit of courage they command to defend the right to celebrate each perishable day and hour in a child’s life, which, in the current climate of opinion, may be one of the greatest challenges they have.

Schools can probably survive quite well without their rubrics charts, their AYPs, and their obsessive lists of numbered categories and containers, reminiscent of the lists severe psychotics make in efforts to control the uncontainable and, for healthy people, wonderful disorder of reality. They can’t survive without excited teachers who take satisfaction in the beautiful vocation they have chosen. Keeping young teachers in our schools is of immense importance, but keeping them there with spirits strong and souls intact is more important still. If we lose this, we lose everything."