Wednesday was the culminating event of my summer teaching
program. It was an outdoor performance by various classes of ours from around
the country, MC’ed by Tal Museri, and ending with a show by Eliad Nachum.
That morning, the newspapers and our group Whatsapp group
were both screaming about the heat. It was set to go above 100 degrees
Fahrenheit, with fires and closed roads, and we were planning to trundle
hundreds of kids across the country in buses to an outdoor venue.
As we sat in our classrooms, locked indoors by principals
who warned us not to let the kids spend even a minute outside of the A/C, we
waited for the message that the event would be cancelled. The situation room
was talking… the CEO was in discussion… the news was overblown… the parents
withdrawing their kids from the event didn’t know what they were doing… and
voila, we received confirmation that the event would happen.
I’ll describe it, but first I’ll cut through the suspense
and say that as far as I know, it went well. The ambulance standing by didn’t
seem to have any customers, and the medics came to listen to Eliad Nachum. So I
think all of the instructions about forcing water on kids and teachers worked.
But that said, I was amazed at the hubris that it takes to
shove hundreds of people outside into the heat on the hottest day of the year.
Nothing happened, but we were all ready for the worst-case scenario. In some
ways, this makes sense. The amount of arrogance it takes to start any initiative
is such that anyone who has that much self-confidence is likely to ignore heat
warnings. Without that hubris, nobody would think themselves capable of
groundbreaking educational initiatives. But that arrogance can also be
dangerous.
A question that always pops up for me when I’m engaging in
reflection about my teaching is a side effect of my days in Teach for America. I start with—“am I
helping the children?” and inevitably also ask myself, “wait. Let’s start with,
how might I be hurting the children?” Does being in my class waste their time? Drain
their motivation? Make them angrier, harder, less kind than they would
otherwise be? Or give them anxiety (yes, I know for a fact it does for some,
and I’m working on this)? I work through my regrets with a focus on the future,
but I know that sometimes I fail, not just as a teacher, but as a person.
The point is, in this program, I ask myself whether we are
helping the children more than we are hurting them, and in general, I think we
are helping. Kids who were terrified to speak English at the start now ask to
go to the bathroom, or for supplies, in English. But the program in general follows much of
the same model as TFA—let’s drop people without expertise into a classroom on
the assumption that students will learn from motivated people regardless of
their training.
So teachers who normally teach 1st grade are
working with 3rd, 3rd with 6th, high school
teachers are in 6th grade classrooms, and my co, who is a nurse in
the US, taught for the first time this summer (she’s beyond awesome and the
kids love her, but it did devalue the training and experience that teachers
amass. Nobody would ever drop me in a hospital and assume I could do a nurse’s
job). This echoes the TFA model—if you’re a tip top person, you’ll be a tip top
teacher.
But that’s not always true. If you’re an incredible human
being, you can learn to be an incredible teacher—but why should the kids have
to receive less than the best education while you learn on them? The teachers
in this program are generally wonderful human beings, but the swapping of
grades means that they’re like Olympic basketball players, put into the
gymnastics arena and asked to perform. They’re fit, and talented, but they
really have no idea what they’re doing in this particular sport.
On that Wednesday, one of the American teachers came running
into my classroom.
“There’s a fight in my classroom!” she told me.
I sprinted next door and pulled a kid off another. He backed
away and out of the classroom as he looked down at his opponent: bloody mouth,
bruised throat, crying fetal position. I cradled the hurt kid’s head off the
ground and asked him if he could talk.
“He choked me!”
Okay, you’re able to talk, you’re able to breath—phew. Let’s
go wash your face.
The drama made me grateful for the calm of my own classroom,
where the kids were peacefully running their own Kahoot game. Later that evening,
shepherding two of my sweetest kids and 20 of other teachers’ most rambunctious
from bouncy castles to performance, buying them each ice cream to make up for
the fact that the promised food was not available for dinner, and reassuring a
crying, nauseous child on the bus back that she was going to be okay, I thought
that we were prepared for much worse to happen.
One more day of teaching. Here’s hoping it helps.
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