“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the immensity of the sea.”  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I’ve been revising my first book over the past few days and have been struck by how much I’ve changed as a teacher (and a writer) in just ten years.  Some of the routines I used in my classes seem rather naive, and I’m squirming at how often I describe “heated arguments” with colleagues.  I don’t do that anymore.  I’ve found far smoother ways to work through roadblocks, but in my defense, for many years I taught students who struggled with reading and writing–some with serious behavior problems–and I was overly protective of these souls who made up the bottom rung of the educational system.

I’ve also been working with an inspiring group of teachers who make up the small staff of the charter school in a small public school district nearby.  Some of these teachers have little experience, others have been around for awhile, but what they share is an amazing amount of energy and worthwhile goals.  We will go through the accreditation process this year, so we’ve had to make sure that our courses match the state standards and the UC system rubrics.  I agree that there has to be a bottom line–some kind of system in place to verify that progress is being made by the students as they tackle a wide variety of skills.  However, we can become so focused on the tiny steps that we miss the big leaps forward.

In making up our course descriptions, I encouraged the teachers to keep the big picture in view by identifying the “Big Questions,” many of which cannot be definitively answered, and by pushing the students to grasp how useful the specific skills will be as they tackle the puzzle of their futures.  This year I placed six challenges before my ninth grade students: 

What and why should I read?

How do I make my writing worth reading?

What do I need to memorize?

How do I locate what I need to know?

What are the beliefs on which I base my life?

Why was I put on this Earth and what am I going to do about it?

I should think that will keep us occupied for ten months.  I also ask the teachers to stay focused on what made them fall in love with their subject in the first place so that the students will leave their classes with a clear idea of the passion behind the facts.  Or as T. S. Eliot would say, “We had the experience but missed the meaning.”