“There is, thank God, no teacher meter, and there never is going to be one. A teacher’s major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student’s grandchild.”---Wendell Berry.
There is simply no teacher meter that would have told anyone at the time that the teachers at Erik Loomis’ struggling high school in a dying mill town were in the process of producing Erik Loomis---Sorry. That’s Professor Loomis:
So how did I become an academic? I guess I’m not sure. My parents of course, who were not going to let my brother or I go into the mills. But a lot of it had to do with the awesome teachers I had. Sure we had some terrible teachers. My AP Lit course was a freaking joke. We had spelling tests in it. To my knowledge, no one actually took the AP Lit test. The building itself was more of a prison than a school. There were like 4 tiny windows in the entire school.
On the other hand, I am amazed at the commitment the majority of my teachers had. Think of what they had to deal with every day. I knew girls who got pregnant at 14. Who knows what happened to them. I knew people who had done every drug known to humankind by 15. God knows if they are still alive. There were stabbings outside my school. 2 or 3 years after I left they finally put in metal detectors and upped the police presence. There were growing racial tensions too as a burgeoning immigrant population from Mexico began attending the school.
How did anyone get a good education?
Because for at least part of our day, we had great teachers.
Read all of Erik’s post, Why I Support Public School Teachers at Lawyers, Guns & Money.
Erik, thank you for your post. Teachers have become the scapegoats for all that is wrong in the world. We are not perfect and not all of us are great but we are willing and able to be part of education reform. Poverty cannot be overcome by the public school alone. Let us help!
Posted by: Spectro55 | Thursday, September 13, 2012 at 02:33 PM