The Human Race

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

H.G. Wells

Power Failure

Not living on a teacher’s salary…

I’m not even in the profession yet, or even taking classes, but already I find myself defending the proud vocation of teaching. In a May 27, 2009 piece in Teacher Magazine titled “Do Teachers Lack Power and Self-Worth?”, Anthony Cody takes TV financial guru Suze Orman to task for comments about teachers’ lack of empowerment based on lack of pay in a New York Times Magazine feature titled “Suze Orman Is Having a Moment”. “[Orman] has been reluctant to work on school curricula on personal finance,” the New York Times feature read, “because she says students can’t learn empowerment from people who aren’t empowered, and teachers, she says, are too underpaid ever to have any real self-worth. She told me: ‘When you are somebody scared to death of your own life, how can you teach kids to be powerful? It’s not something in a book — it ain’t going to happen that way.’” Cody begins attacking Orman only to back off and give her a pass. I’m not that generous.

Cody’s sensible enough to see the flaw in Orman’s reasoning that empowerment is equated with monetary compensation. Unfortunately, that false equivalence pervades our “$20 million per year athlete” society. In the paragraph immediately after Orman’s comments above, the author quotes a story from one of Orman’s books in which she recalls her father running back into his burning store to retrieve the money in the register. Unable to open the register, Orman’s father picked up the searing hot metal and carried it outside, badly burning himself. “The money was that important,” Orman concluded. “That was when I learned that money is obviously more important than life itself.” The wrongness of that statement stands for itself. If her father had never come back out of that burning building, I doubt she would have written those words.

Cody tries to draw something positive from Orman’s words in finding truth in the idea that teachers need to embody what they teach. Only someone who teaches from a confident, caring place can instill confidence and caring in students. Any parent knows that most of what their children learn is by modeling. You smoke, it’s most likely that they’ll smoke, for example. Do as I say and not as I do doesn’t work. But I still can’t get over the idea that teachers are “scared to death” of their own lives, as Orman puts it. Orman paints teaching as an escape from the “real world.” Personally, I want to leave that “real world” of corporate soullessness behind. For me, the classroom represents possibility and potential for changing that “real world” for the better, one mind at a time. It begins with tapping into my own potential for growth and, yes, empowerment, which I’ll do my best to model to my students.

If I’m generous at all towards Orman it will be in acknowledging that celebrity financial gurus are often asked questions out of their comfort zone. Orman knows IRAs, not NCLB. Just because someone puts a microphone in front of you, doesn’t mean that you have anything of value to say. Orman should have resisted commenting, but the temptation to be a know-it-all can be irresistible sometimes. If anything, her comments should inspire teachers to prove her wrong. Ironically, Suze Orman’s wrong-headed thoughts on empowerment might end up being empowering themselves.

Second Life

It’s a cliché, but today is truly the first day of the rest of my life. Today is the day that I gave my two weeks’ notice at my job and leave behind twenty years in publishing to pursue a new life in teaching. I’m going to be a teacher of English Literature on the high school level. Just typing that sentence gives me a chill, not of fear but of excitement. First, I’m taking a year to get an MA in Education and my teacher certification first. If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it right. I owe it to myself and, more importantly, to the students that will one day be in my classroom.

I’ve already gone into all the sordid details of the corporate life I’m leaving behind on my “other” blog, Art Blog By Bob, so you can go there to hear the backstory. (A special welcome to any Art Blog By Bob readers who followed me over here.) I want to keep this blog a negativity-free zone, so I’ll turn away from the past and face the future head on. In many ways, Art Blog By Bob was the beginning of my catching the teaching bug. I’ve always felt I had more to offer to the world than being a paper pusher behind a desk. Writing about art allowed me to spread out into writing about history, literature, music, politics, and pretty much everything else kicking around my cranium. Judging from the response to my ramblings there, I think I’ve already become something of a teacher. Now, I just need to translate that talent from the virtual to the real world.

Like myself, this blog will be a work in progress. I won’t be publishing on any schedule, but rather when I feel like I have something to say about my personal development in the world of education. On one level, it will be a personal teacher’s journal of sorts. On another, it will be my way of working out the ideas that I learn in graduate school, as a graduate assistant, and, eventually, as a student teacher. If I can convince publishers to take a chance on me and provide review copies, I may publish the occasional book review in the education field. I’m certainly a novice and my reviews will reflect that, but I think that a fresh approach might bring something different to the discussion than what a veteran educator might. I use the word “different” intentionally over loaded words such as “better,” because this whole experience is about openness and positivity and a sense of purpose. My goal is to be a sponge sopping up all the opinions and ideas possible. This blog is where I’ll periodically wring that sponge out.

For anyone who’s accidentally stumbled across this blog looking for an in-depth discussion of the merits of Gloria Gaynor versus those of Donna Summer, sorry, this blog has nothing to do with the John Travolta-dancin’, KC and the Sunshine Band-booty shakin’ music and dance phenomenon known as Disco. I can’t dance. Eight years of playing a musical instrument and yet I still have no sense of rhythm from the neck down. However, I found it was kismet that “disco” is also Latin for “to learn.” “Doceo” is Latin for “to teach,” thus Disco Doceo, “To Learn to Teach.” The title was playful enough to represent the relaxed style of my writing and, thanks to the Latin connection, wonky enough to maintain my academic street “cred.” The dance theme also fits in nicely with the idea of teaching as a partnership—first with my educational mentors, later with my peers, and, finally, with my students. Through books, I’ve already intellectually sambaed with Paolo Freire, waltzed with John Dewey, two-stepped with William Ayers, and hustled with Jonathan Kozol, among many other partners.

Please feel free to watch and comment as I learn the steps to the grand pedagogical dance and, I hope, step on as few toes (including my own) as possible in the process.