This I Believe

As we near the end of the 2010 Summer Institute for Teachers, I have been in a "beloved community" frame of mind. Four weeks of shared inquiry, reflective writing, and transformative teacher demonstrations -- we have enacted a vision of education I have sought - no, desired - for 36 years, since my first days in kindergarten to my current position at the University of Pittsburgh. Several years back, I tried to capture this vision in a short "This I Believe" piece submitted to NPR...

Last September, my wife Marisa wished me well on my 32nd first day of school. A few days earlier, we had celebrated our five-year old son’s first day of kindergarten, an occasion that included a family walk to the bus stop across the street and then a family car ride behind the bus. We shuffled into my son’s classroom, stepping inelegantly over knee-high chairs, all the while smiling and commenting on the color-coded seating charts and the freshly painted cubicles awaiting backpacks, lunch bags, and future artifacts produced by our bright and eager boy.

There was no such fanfare for me as I headed off to teach the first day of school, again. The college classroom is less rooted, the experiences of teachers and students more itinerant. Adorned with personal electronics, inviting us to hibernate in a cave of text messaging and music, we come and go discreetly, and the only traces of our having been together are smudges left on the white board. But the feelings of excitement and charged possibility still exist on Day 1, despite the lack of classroom displays and smiling parents. At first tentative with their statements and inclined to prologue remarks with phrases like “this may be wrong, but …”, students awaken over the hour to one another, responding to head-nodding encouragement. On Day 1, our receptive energy pollinates a room we will buzz around for the next few months.

Every first day of school, I’m anxious for these preliminary exchanges and polite interactions with a class. Like my son last year, wearing new clothes, standing ram-rod straight, and fixing a brave smile for the camera, I perform a confidence in the classroom that belies the fears I have that my students will remain strangers to one another without having much to say. It is my son’s nervousness, ritualized over thirty years. And it is this recurring nervousness that shapes what I believe.

I believe the first day of school is a renewable and sustainable experience because the annual gathering of students and teacher into a new classroom bears the seeds of an ideal community, one where ideas will fly back and forth like a shuttlecock, where there will be the interplay of agreement and disagreement without feelings of abasement, and where the sharing of stories and the responses to those stories will come closest to fulfilling the vision of an open society.

This I believe: with or without cubicles or beautifully coordinated bulletin boards, the first day of school is a promise to a shared future. At first, it is an explicit display and later a tacit acknowledgment that we learn in communities, within which any given person’s enthusiasm about diesel trains, dinosaurs, entropy, or epic poetry can spread over that community like frosting on a cupcake, like song at a party.