From the Front of the Room: Permit me to praise some teachers who deserve it

Yeah, so…

Michigan teachers are battlers. Michigan teachers will not cave in to despair. They will do the best with what they have and they won’t stop there.

They will try to make that best better.

I say this because I just spent three days at the National Council of Teachers of English annual convention in Philadelphia, and I attended about 15 presentations. Most of these were mediocre - teachers rehashing ideas that have already been around for a quarter century, or presenting newish ones in a manner so flat you could balance the 12 cups of coffee on them that you need to drink just to stay awake while you’re listening.

Not so with Michigan teachers.

Every thing I saw a Michigan teacher do, every word I heard a Michigan teacher say, made me proud to teach in this state. It’s no secret Michigan’s struggling right now. The industries that built us are wrestling with how to survive, how to reinvent themselves so they can remain sustainable and relevant. But one thing you can say about Michigan - a thing you always can have said about Michigan - is people here know how to work. An honest day’s labor is our cultural heritage. We wake up and we pull our shifts and we don’t shirk our responsibilities because we understand if we do, our colleagues will suffer. Our communities will suffer.

Michigan teachers are no different. We live by that same code. We come to work to be good at what we do, to be damn good at what we do, regardless whether our working environment feels happy or hopeful. We put our collective shoulder to the wheel and we make that mother roll.

Here are some highlights of what I saw:

Sarah Andrew-Vaughan’s hands. Sarah is a teacher at Huron High School and whether she’s breaking down step-by-step her spectacular unfamiliar genre project, an endeavor which asks students to spelunk through alien literary neighborhoods in order to broaden their understanding of how to read and write; or whether she’s arguing we should have after-school workshops where math teachers demonstrate to their colleagues the best ways to understand calculus - problem-solving across the curriculum is just as important as writing across the curriculum - her dreams are so vital she can barely contain them. They shake her shoulders and elbows and her hands flit like birds, flying into and through the hearts and brains of one imagined future student to another as she envisions her next great idea, her next new way to make her classroom magic.

Cathy Fleischer’s huge wide-open eyes. Cathy’s a professor at Eastern Michigan and a mentor to countless area teachers. When you propose an idea to her, she listens with her whole face, especially those eyes that seem to see and know everything with the kind of expertise one would attribute to a field general surveying a vast plain and conceiving the shape of battles ahead. Whether she’s teaming with Sarah to present the book they co-wrote, or introducing a panel of teachers she demands everybody pay rapt attention to, or standing in the dead middle of the convention center waiting to meet with yet another teacher she’ll offer advice to, her switch is flipped on. She is alert. She’s focused. She’s not about to waste anybody’s time. Not for a minute.

Chuck Hatt’s smile. Chuck’s the coordinator of Social Studies and Literacy Instruction for Ann Arbor Public Schools, and you’ve never seen a face more lit with passion than when he mentions some author or book you’ve never heard of and he tells you, you absolutely need to read this!

The back of Jennifer Walsh’s shoulders. Jennifer is the Language Arts Department Chair at Forsythe Middle School, and I say the back of her shoulders because all you can do is follow her as she zooms through the exhibition hall seeking out as many materials as she can find to purchase (with her own money) to stock her classroom. A discount that allows her to buy an audio-book for $10 (three for $30) is an answered prayer.

Anne Gere’s stately elegance. Anne Gere is the director of the ground-breaking Joint English and Education PhD. Program at the University of Michigan, and if she wanted to be, she could be a Senator. Probably a Majority Leader. When she stands in front of a group of teachers detailing the research she and her colleagues Victoria Haviland and Jennifer Buehler have conducted, and the strategies they’ve uncovered to demonstrate how multi-cultural perspectives can help decrease the achievement gap, she owns the room. She makes the material she’s presenting feel as important as health care reform or climate change legislation. And it is that important. We can’t fully address any of our problems without a dynamically educated populace. Anne Gere insists every teacher understands why this means we can’t allow ourselves to give in to despair, and she’ll keep owning rooms until we all learn how to own them ourselves.

And then there’s the whole package - the hands, the eyes, the smile, the shoulders, the unyielding and dignified determination. That’s what you will find at Pioneer Middle School in Plymouth where educators Carmen Johnson, Jason Kaye, Ben McMurray and Claire Walton-Swisher last year created the Pioneer Peace Project.

Listen, forget about test scores. You don’t know what teachers are capable of until you’ve seen this crew show you what they did when they brought their eighth grade students to New York City along with the children’s author Todd Parr, and, equipped with 500 autographed copies of his book; Peace Bags donated by California Pizza Kitchen; and buttons that say Imagine Peace in different languages donated by Yoko Ono (!!!); they had the kids interview New Yorkers on the streets, read them Parr’s book, give them the Peace Bags and buttons, and then come back to Plymouth and create a spectacular museum-quality display of photographs, poems and essays detailing their experiences in the city and their reflections on the concept of peace.

You don’t know what teaching is until you hear the story about how some of these kids met a solider on the Staten Island Ferry who’d just returned from a tour in Iraq and was preparing for another in Afghanistan. When the students explained their project to him, he asked them where they were headed after they got off the ferry. When they told him Ground Zero, he said he’d been there when the terrorist attacks happened and asked if he could accompany them to the site and show them what he saw. The photograph one of the students took of this soldier standing in the rain, students huddled around him, as he points upward - presumably to where the Twin Towers used to be - his face an archive of emotion, is a picture of the very best teaching there is, the kind of teaching that’s unforgettable.

So props to Michigan teachers. Mad props. Our state’s economy ain’t pretty right now. No doubt. But these teachers, man, they’re miracles. They work hard. There’s hope.

** NOTE ** Speaking of miracles and hope … our biggest Poetry event of the year is coming up - Poetry Night in Ann Arbor - on Friday night, Dec. 11 @ Rackham Auditorium. This year’s show (our 10th annual) will feature the return of some of Ann Arbor’s favorite performance poets: Roger Bonair-Agard from New York, Kevin Coval from Chicago and Lauren Whitehead, a U-M alum currently residing in San Francisco. Joining these mic-rockers on stage will be terrific high school poets from the nationally acclaimed VOLUME Youth Poetry Project and the spectacular collegiate spoken word troupe Ann Arbor Wordworks. The show starts @ 7pm. Doors open @ 6:30. Advance tickets are $5 for students and $10 for general public and $7 and $12 respectively at the door. For more info or to reserve tickets at the advanced price, contact me @ 734-223-7443 or via email @ eyelev21@aol.com.

Jeff Kass teaches Creative Writing at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor and at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, and directs the Literary Arts Programs at the Neutral Zone, including the VOLUME Youth Poetry Project, which meets every Thursday night at 7pm. He will post new blog entries every Tuesday and Thursday morning throughout the school year, but he won’t write one on Thanksgiving. See you next Tuesday. Give thanks.