Borderland

Before blogging was ever a concept for me, Gatto’s book crossed my radar, but I had no background knowledge about him. As I recall, I hadn’t developed a sufficiently critical view of education at the time, and whatever he had to say to me then was very little. I didn’t make the connection to what I do so I wrote him off as a crank. That was a mistake.

My next encounter with Gatto was from Marco Polo, through comments left on Borderland. Marco Polo’s persistence with this book recommendation didn’t escape my notice. Busy with work, I haven’t read Gatto carefully. Yet. Summer leave is about to begin and Gatto is on my reading list.

Several weeks ago I followed a link to Robin Good’s site, called Experiential Learning Vs.Traditional Schooling: John Taylor Gatto’s Educational Ideas Still Worth A Good Look? When I got to the end of the article, and saw this, I got it.

I accept this award on behalf of all the fine teachers I’ve known over the years who’ve struggled to make their transactions with children honorable ones, men and women who are never complacent, always questioning, always wrestling to define and redefine endlessly what the word “education” should mean.

A Teacher of the Year is not the best teacher around, those people are too quiet to be easily uncovered, but he is a standard-bearer, symbolic of these private people who spend their lives gladly in the service of children. This is their award as well as mine.

This article is the text of a speech by John Taylor Gatto accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990.

He was talking to me. If you read through his speech, he touched on so many of my concerns, and offered more than a few suggestions that I don’t wonder Marco Polo has been pointing me to him. This post is a response to a comment Marco Polo left this morning.

Inevitably, the end of the year leaves me in a reflective space. I think about my expectations for the year, the limitations that I encountered, the innumerable wrong turns, the plans that worked out, the surprises that I capitalized on, the many things I did simply because I had to and which included some valuable lessons for me. I’m looking forward to summer. Teaching is an excellent career for a person who needs to die and be reborn on a regular basis. Deliverance is near, and I have other work to do.