Speaking to Me.

These words are speaking to my soul tonight.  I’m planning to use them in a workshop I’m leading tomorrow.

Students such as these walk into your classrooms in every size, shape, and color.  You can’t know their histories because their only control is control of their secrets.  You are asked to create a safe enough place for them to learn, and for you to teach, and then are provided with ill-thought-out standards, drawn up by men and women so distant from your theatre of engagement as to be functionally illiterate in its regard.  These people demand that you test memory-level learning and abandon the staples of real education — response, expression, relationship — to chance.

But many of you will refuse to do that, because you didn’t invest years of your life getting an education and gathering the tools to follow your passion . . . to be disallowed the right to make the connection with your students that could change their lives.  No child left behind?  Only policy makers and politicians need a bill named that to remind them that leaving kids behind isn’t a good idea.

There simply is no tougher job than that of Teacher . . .

From Adolescent Literacy edited by Kylene Beers, Robert Probst, and Linda Rief; “Flying Blind” by Chris Crutcher