1

I Have a Dream, Too The following ideas and anecdotes took shape from my own experiences at two different high schools (inner-city and rural), as well as from informal interviews with many other high school teachers.

Fifteen-year-old Alex, covertly listening to his iPod and drinking what appears to be Coke, saunters down the hallway toward my third period English class. He slides the bottle into his oversized pants pocket and tugs on the earphone wire just as we make eye contact. Im late cuz my last class was all the way across campus, he says. I tell him to go on into the room and get out his folder. I gotta go to the bathroom first, he says. This is our ritual. Ill let you go to the bathroom if youll promise to come after school to get caught up on your work, I say. Everyday for three weeks, I have reminded Alex that he needs to come in after school to get caught up on the work he missed while he was in jail. In the teachers lounge, we wonder if jail is an excused absence. *** We wonder a lot of things in the teachers lounge. We wonder how two students in the shop class could be expelled for only a day and a half for accidentally hitting a teacher with a two-by-four when the teacher was trying to break up their fight.

We wonder why we have to sell candy to make money for our school when students are not allowed to have food in the classrooms. We wonder why gangster boys wear the waists of their pants down below their bottoms when doing so just makes it harder for them to run from the cops. (Ive actually seen them trip on their pants and get caught.) We wonder what were supposed to do if theres ever a catastrophe in our classrooms because we dont all have emergency call buttons. We wonder why we only have 25 desks in our rooms when all of our third period classes have over 30 students. I personally wonder why I couldnt press charges against the student who dislocated my jaw when I was caught in the middle of a fight. (That happened at a school in HISD.) When were especially frustrated and downtrodden, we wonder not only why but how the teacher can be expected to call parents whenever a student misbehaves, get students to come to tutorials and detention, be on duty in the hallway between classes while students are free to steal things in our unattended classrooms, be sensitive to the needs and feelings of all students when few students bother to be sensitive to ours, modify all lessons for at least five different student types in every class, prove that we have covered all the required material, defend ourselves against accusations of prejudice and unfairness, report suspicious activity or possible abuse, break up fights, and grade papers, and make copies, and research ways to improve the classroom experience, and decorate the classroom, and attend departmental and committee meetings, and sponsor student organizations, and support students extracurricular activities, and distribute

important school information, and keep students awake, ohand entertain students so they will enjoy class. *** Its not that we have a problem teaching. Most of us love our jobsfor a variety of unlikely reasons. Just like in any field, though, there are those teachers who should NOT be teachingthe ones who dont really care. However, most teachers not only CARE, but could have been a success at any other profession. We have chosen to be teachers for the intrinsic rewards. One of these rewards is that we believe we are doing more good for the world, and for the United States of America, as teachers than we could do in any other field. To back up this idea, let me provide a little history: Thomas Jefferson said in a letter to James Madison, Above all things, I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good senses we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty. Our form of governmentwhere citizens enjoy the right to votecannot succeed in an uneducated society. Imagine how much better off students would be if teachers could concentrate on the actual teaching, instead of on paperwork, on the hoops looming before them in their efforts to get things done, and on their entertainment quotient. Teachers all over the country know what the problem really is: The students are in control. Thats a bit of an oversimplification, but its still true. We dont mean that every class is out of control, though. Once a teacher establishes a rapport with each student in an individual class, that class will perform for that teacher. However, just beneath the surface, even in the best of classes, is the

prevailing attitude that fairness is not only a right, but is someone elses responsibility. Perhaps the students believe that the world owes them something just because they happen to be alive and, when faced with unfairness, one can simply sue somebody or come out fighting in some other way. In the teenage mind, its fun to fight the enemy, even if that enemy is one they have had to manufacture in the school system. Teachers often wont stand up for themselves because they are afraid. The bureaucracy of administrators seems to rise above them endlessly. At any point along the gossip route from one end of the school to the other, a teacher can be accused of not being a team player. Her requests for materials, faculty development, or choice of classes can be ignored. The squeaky wheel may get addressed faster, but it also develops a reputation for being squeaky. I dont know this for sure, but I think administrators are afraid, too. Theyre afraid of the school board, which has every administrator hanging by a thin thread of job insecurity. Theyre afraid of the students parents, who storm into the administrators offices with threats and accusations and lawsuits. And I know for a fact that many parents are afraid of their kids, who storm around in a fashion very similar to their parents. I believe I am speaking for teachers everywhere (and certainly some parents) when I say, I have a dream today. With the sincerity of Martin Luther King, I say to you today, my friends, that inspite [actual wording] of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in not only my desire to improve the world for my own children and to help offer up a generation capable of making educated decisions, but

also to satisfy my desire to rediscover the joy in teaching and a general feeling of hope for the future. I have a dream that one day even the inner-city schools, often thick jungles of gangster recruiting, will be transformed into oases of passionate learning, thoughtful opinions, and respect for the older generation. I have a dream no student will ever again say, You work for me because my parents pay taxes. I have a dream that we can turn back the clock to reclaim what was right about our past AND leap forward to find new ways to reach the students. In another letter, Jefferson said, I look to the diffusion of light and education as the resource most to be relied on for ameliorating the condition, promoting the virtue, and advancing the happiness of man. And I still think, that week before school starts every year, what a joy it will be to introduce my student Alex to Mr. Jefferson and Mr. King and to all the other great thinkers and writers who walked on this same Earth and breathed this same air before Alex and his buddies ever thought about sauntering down a hallway late to class on a bright September morning.