Teachers and Autoworkers -- Connecting the Dots

I was heartened to read Bob Herbert's column ( link included below) in today's New York Times in which he compares the plight of American teachers and the public perception of the American Federation of Teachers to the plight of the auto workers and the perception of the UAW. I have often thought about these two groups of working Americans who have been vilified by the so called liberal press and demonized by the American public. By juxtaposing the situations of American public school teachers and American autoworkers, Herbert exposes the dangers of blaming these workers for the economic downturn and the consequences for all of us if we insist that they alone bear all of the weight through unreasonable concessions.

American teachers have been called lazy, unqualified and caring only about our bottom lines ( as if that's a crime!!!) by the likes of Michelle Rhee and corporate cronies who want to take over public schools and run them like businesses ( another great idea -- see Wall Street -- Why is it okay for then to think about their bottom lines?)

I have been trying to express my consternation at the ways in which the auto workers are being hauled over the coals for being greedy enough to demand job security and health care when executives and investors in the industry expect and and take ridiculously high dividends, salaries, bonuses?

Herbert compares the plight of the workers themselves -- teachers who spend their own money on materials the system doesn't supply, who take students on field trips on the week-ends, who stay up past mid-night every night preparing lessons for and grading papers of over 165 students ( 5 classes of 33 students each) -- and auto workers who labor in factories their entire adult lives only to be told to get off their "high horses" when they demand health care and job security. Why, Herbert asks, are ordinary working Americans like teachers and auto workers expected to make the largest sacrifices during an economic downturn which is hurting them more directly than it's hurting the executives and investment bankers in their respective abilities to take care of their families and secure their futures.

In the column Herbert goes on to discuss the concessions that unions must make, particularly in these difficult times and I find myself agreeing with this also.
Years ago, my colleagues and I were stymied in our efforts to institute real school reform in Philadelphia because the union leadership refused to budge on seniority rights in staffing. The union has since moved away from this pig-headed position of the mid-nineties to one of supporting site selection of staff -- but not until many of the successful small schools within a school that were established in the 1990's collapsed because they were forced to accept the appointment of teachers who did not wish to work as part of a team. Through it all, I never lost faith in the union - just its antiquated and short sighted leadership.

In the piece Herbert focuses on AFT's president Randi Weingarten's defense of teachers as hard working, dedicated people who make personal sacrifices for their students. But he also notes her willingness to make concessions about tenure, teacher assignment and merit pay. He goes on to make the comparison to AUW's president Ron Gettelfinger and the concessions that his union has already made and the ones that still need to happen. But, and this is the point of his column as I see it -- those concessions should only happen within a context in which all parties -- executives, investors, suppliers, dealers etc --- adjust their expectations for compensation and profit as well.

Do we really want to blast American workers out of the middle class?


Why is it for instance that the media finds it untenable that people who labored on assembly lines for 35 years of their lives have health care when they retire? Would it be more American if as Herbert writes, "after 30 or 35 years on the assembly line, those retirees had been considerate enough to die prematurely in poverty, unable to pay for the medical services that could have saved them?" While I applaud Herbert's shining a light on this incongruity, I don't think he goes far enough in pointing out the hypocrisy --- no -- the absurdity of expecting the auto workers to pay the greatest price for the failure of the auto industry, while the executives have earned obscenely high pay and bonuses.

There will be no fair concessions in any union contract without a public appreciation not only for the work that teachers and auto workers do, but the contributions we make to the stability of our communities.

Thank you Bob Herbert for connecting the dots in this increasingly complex picture.





A Race to the Bottom by Bob Herbert
New York Times Op-Ed Page
December 23, 2008

Listen to Maxine Greene

Before I leave for my two week vacation in Italy, I wanted to post this lecture by Maxine Greene. I had the privilege of meeting Maxine in the early 1990's. I presented with my students at two of her conferences and she spoke in Philadelphia at an event sponsored by the Bartol Foundation the year that the documentary about my work at Gratz was premiered. It was one of the proudest moments of my life. Maxine Greene is the person in this world whose work I admire the most. Every time I have felt lost or hopeless, I have turned to her books, talks, and projects and I have been re-inspired. In this talk, Maxine makes clear the power of the human imagination and she links the act of imagining to the creation of new and more ethical social and political realities. She talks about all of these things in the context of teaching-- teachers as human beings teaching other human beings... all of us unfinished, still becoming... human.

Listen:

Watch 'Towards Pedagogy of Thought & Imagination' from The Cowin Center on 3/5/2008

Teaching with Integrity

After meeting with Deidre Farmbry and David Green and learning about their work with the Center for Evidenced Based Education (CEBE) , where I first heard about the work of Roger Martin and the Center for Integrative Thinking, I have been trying to make connections between those ideas which were developed for business management to education. It is somewhat easy to see the connections to school management on the district and school levels. It is a little trickier to see the connections at a classroom level as it relates to teaching and learning itself.

I do think that the processes and skills described as integrative thinking are very similar to those involved in reflective practice and teacher research. Ideas relating to formative assessment, being able to collect data about what is happening in the classroom at any given time and to then analyze and make sense of that data to inform the choices the teacher makes next seems to be connected to this as well.

Here are a couple of initial thoughts. First of all, these skills and practices of integrative thinking will be necessary for students who will coming out of our schools in the coming years and entering the increasingly complex public sphere. They will need to learn how to take an integrative stance as well as develop the skills and practice to enable them to do so effectively.
However, they will not be able to learn in this manner if they are taught by teachers still expected to teach in a skills-based, atomized way. This is why it is incredibly important to reach the teachers at every level -- from pre-service programs to on-going, substantive in-service professional development.

While searching the Internet, trying both to understand the concepts of Integrative Thinking and find connections to education, I came across this short video tape of Lee Shulman speaking about integrity.

ilp_lsclips.mov (video/quicktime Object)

In it, he talks about the relationship between the words integrated and integrity. He suggests that the words are more related than we might initially think. He says that thinking across disciplines is more that just making connections; it's about aligning one's knowledge, purpose, design and action.

I have always thought that it is impossible for a teacher to separate her true self, her values, her beliefs, her background, her experiences and her questions from her work as a teacher. I have said that that is teaching with integrity. There have been times in my past where I have been forced to "teach against myself" -- that is to present to young people ideas, texts, positions that I did not believe in. I've been forced to present material to them in ways that I know do not connect nor engage them. I have been forced to give them assessments that measures skills that are not relevant nor necessary for real learning. When I have done these things, I have not been teaching with integrity. My actions were not aligned with my beliefs.

I have struggled over the years to bring the two more in line. Of course, there has been no easy resolution -- only the tension that comes from trying to reconcile disparate ideas, perspectives, approaches. The exploration of these tensions and the attempt at integration fuel the inquiry. The constant investigation into one's own teaching is the thread that can hold the teacher together - to allow her to teach with integrity.

All That Energy; All That Knowledge

When I was teaching, I was known as someone with an incredible amount of energy. I would carry a 24 oz. cup of coffee and actually drink most of it throughout the day. I don't know if I was really caffeinated or if I was just energized from being around all of those people every day. Nevertheless, my students were often surprised by my energy level and most of them found it amusing, if not inspiring. I was very active in the classroom -- especially in the Drama classroom where it was more acceptable to be jumping around the room, bouncing off the walls, speaking quickly and being totally animated. In English class, I toned it down a bit, but the one thing I vowed at the beginning of every year and every day and every single class is that my class would not be boring. Over the 34 years I had been teaching, I had developed quite a repertoire for ways of presenting, sharing and developing ideas with groups of people and I could "read the room" and "shift gears" when something was falling flat.

I also know a lot about teaching English and Drama. There are publications of my work on the internet like this chapter I wrote about teaching The Laramie Project to a high school drama class in 2003. http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/download/nwp_file/10540/mpincus_laramieproject.pdf?x-r=pcfile_d

My teacher research and practice has been the subject of two major web-site projects developed by the Carnegie Foundation - one about the teaching of Shakespeare -


http://gallery.carnegiefoundation.org/collections/quest/collections/sites/pincus_marsha1/

and another documenting my Drama and Inquiry class along with the role inquiry has played in my teaching career over its lifespan --

http://gallery.carnegiefoundation.org/collections/castl_k12/mpincus/index.htm


Besides the content knowledge that I developed from reading and taking courses throughout my adult life, I also have pedagogical content knowledge -- that is I know how to organize material and present it to young people in ways that will not only teach them information and skills but I know how to arouse their curiosity so as to engage them in authentic inquiry about whatever it is we're studying.
I can read a book and immediately know its potential for a text that can be read in a particular grade or context. I can connect that text to other texts and lift authentic and essential questions from it that will enable to students to read it in a deeper and more complex way than they might have read it on their own. I can see the possibilities for writing assignments in all different genres and from all different points of view. I can see what they do with the text in groups, in class, at home, independently. I write inquiry units in my head. I dream curricula.

What does a retired teacher do with all of that energy and knowledge? I have been exercising to address the energy issue -- swimming laps every single day this summer until the pool was closed on Labor Day. Now I will be walking a couple of miles a day and lifting free weights in front o the TV. Maybe find a yoga class. Maybe take ballroom dance lessons with my husband.
Maybe join a gym with an indoor pool and swim the winter away. I am actually in better physical shape now than when I was teaching. Because that's the other side of teaching -- the way it drains you physically -- the buildings in which I taught were unairconditioned and unmaintained. The last school in which I taught was so overcrowded that many teachers had to float ( what an Orwellain term! teaching in multiple rooms on multiple floors, schlepping carts with books and folders and crates --- only Big Brother could be devious enough to call that "floating!") Crazy schedules with lunch at 10:15 and being in filthy classrooms with the germs of hundreds of adolescents left on unwashed desktops -- the result of "money saving" privatization of janitorial services. Did anyone ever compute the financial losses due to substitute services for teachers who were sickened when their anti-bacterial wipes were not enough to stave off infection? I always spent a good part of the fall and winter with laryngitis and a sore throat that would last so long I thought I had cancer.

It is the intellectual energy that I wonder and worry about. What does a retired teacher do with all of that? When I was teaching high school, if i read something interesting, if something compelling was happening in the news, if I saw a new movie that made me think or heard a new song that blew me away, I could always bring it to my students --- Over 100 of them each year -- I especially enjoyed being a homeroom teacher -- a position that many of my colleagues managed to get out of... I enjoyed being together with a group of young people starting our days together every morning.. I enjoyed the informality of it and the familiarity that developed. In homeroom, I could talk with my students and relate to them as one person to another --- hear what's on their minds, learn their opinions about what's happening in the world. Like a family at breakfast ( and yes, I would let them eat in homeroom -- for some of them it would be the only way they could have breakfast).

And how will I know what young people are thinking? How will I have access to what's important to them? How will I be able to see the world through their eyes and not like so many older people do get tunnel vision-- seeing the world so narrowly?

For the past few weeks leading up to the start of school, I have been receiving email from teachers that I know asking me for advice on how to teach this, or how to approach that. I have met with young teachers at coffee shops and in my backyard and shared with them much of what I know about teaching Drama, making English more engaging for their students. This has offered me some satisfaction, but I know that it will not be enough. I will need to find a way to use what I know about teaching in a more productive and generative way. I will need to build on it to reshape my life after teaching.

Any ideas? What have you or others you know done after teaching for a lifetime? How have you remained connected ( or not) to young people? What do you do with all of that energy and knowledge?