Borderland

My personal narrative frames the Why that led me to become a teacher. It is linked to my previous post about cultural narratives.

I left the University after my second year there. I quit to work on an oil tanker. I was unfocused, unmotivated, disillusioned, disenchanted, and disengaged. I’d always been a good student, but I wasn’t interested in school in 1973. There was a world to explore and it wasn’t between the pages of any book. After I left the unversity I spent about 6 years doing odd jobs, embracing aimlessness and wandering. I didn’t work at anything longer than a few months. I was homeless part of the time. One of the things I did was work as a field hand in apple orchards in Washington state. I did that, seasonally, for a few years. After making a few bucks I went to Mexico to see how long I could make the money last. I also worked on fishing boats, washed dishes, painted houses, dug holes, and pushed wheelbarrows. I cleaned and moved anything that came along.

I lived on the margin. My vision for the future had about a 3 month horizon. The god that commanded my reverence was the god of Experiments in Rough Living. One of my more ambitious experiments, for example, was to spend a winter in an abandoned mud-floored log barn in the Idaho wilderness. The building was heated by an old oil drum that I made into a stove with a cold chisel, a hand drill, a hammer and a screwdriver. I covered the roof with a roll of felt paper. I cut my wood with a bow saw, and I shared my bed with mice.

The insight that led me to become a teacher presented itself when I was standing at the top of a three-legged ladder with an apple sack on my shoulders, with branches in my face. It was late fall. The weather was cool and grey. Nights were cold, and we didn’t work until the fruit thawed each day. A lot of pickers left that time of year because they couldn’t make money working only half a day. I stayed on because I had a free cabin to live in. A Mexican family drove into the orchard in a yellow Buick. They were assigned the row next to me. There were several people working the row, and they all spoke Spanish. There were kids in the car.

I began thinking about the limited options those people must have had to be all living out of that car and working as fruit pickers. I realized that any day I chose to quit I could return to the university and pick up where I left off. The difference between me and them, I reasoned, is that I had a foundation in the basics of reading, writing, and math-tools that I could use to construct an alternate future.

It might not sound like an earth-shaking revelation now, but at the time, with six years of distance between me and any coursework, and the contemplation of much Mystery, it seemed like a monumental understanding. The very fact that I remember that moment now, 30 years later, says something about its significance. I decided to go back to school and become a teacher so that other people might have the same access to choices in life. The point I failed to consider, though, was that the cultural narrative which served to keep me engaged and motivated to acquire those academic skills in the first place isn’t necessarily shared by everyone who might enter a classroom. I knew nothing about achievement gaps or institutional discrimination because my upbringing had primed me for success, and completely sheltered me from minority points of view.

I see now, after 22 years of trying, that all of the “best practices” and new technologies won’t make a difference for all students until we shape a shared vision for schooling. Some students, of course, will succeed no matter what institutional model we employ because they have a sustaining reason, a compelling Why for schooling that serves them wonderfully. Every student needs that, but they don’t all have one. Those are the people I entered the profession to serve.

The only institutionally viable option I see at the moment is charter schools, an idea that I’ve been entertaining for a few months. Still, the promise of an alternative approach seems but a desperate attempt to patch a shattered vision with just another technology, another How. If disillusionment is a stimulus for growth, I’ve had a dose.