Tread Softly on their Dreams

     How long have I been a teacher?  As long as I can remember.  You see, I truly believe that I was born to be a teacher.  I have a natural aptitude combined with a passion to offer people the means to achieve their greatest potential.  I started teaching at the age of four, and I am still doing it.  True teachers are not limited by the confines of walls or institutions or oppressive leaders.  Natural-born teachers do it with almost every breath.  If we are fortunate, someone actually pays us to do this and then gives us the freedom to do what comes naturally.  We do it in spite of all hardship or threat of persecution.  All a real teacher needs is a student, even an unwilling one. What a challenge the unmotivated and disinterested students are because they push a true teacher to excel even more.  They are like the unworkable problem for a mathematician or the highest peak for the mountain climber.  We can not rest until we teach them something that will help them find their own ways in the world.

     I am a firm believer in reaching students where they are, that is, through their passions and dreams.  Oh, yes, there is a curriculum to teach, but it runs a far second behind teaching the living, breathing human being who has his own agenda in life.  There are times when the lesson of the day must be set aside to teach that which is necessary at the moment.  I have fashioned entire discussions and writing assignments around a single student in one of my classes, unbeknownst to him.  I have often opened up the final product for discussion, allowing my students to choose a path that best suits their natural-born gifts and talents and passions.  Ah, it is a beautiful thing to watch a child rap the comma rules or paint the setting of a scene in a novel or construct a building in the Gothic style or act out a scene in a short story in order to get him to learn the material that is at hand.  

      When teachers no longer have the autonomy to make these decisions about the individuals they have in their classrooms, then the most important element of education, individualization of material, has been removed.  Without it, we can not customize education for each child; all we can do is produce assembly-line dolls who can take a test.  We make poor use of their talents - and ours - and we turn out people who have been dislocated from their natural resources.  They are like fish out of water.  Yet, we do it rather ruthlessly in the name of a standardized test when we direct all of the curriculum and all of our precious teaching time to this man-made monster that strikes fear in the hearts of administrators everywhere.

       One man called this a "Fast Food Model of Education".  Everything is standardized, choices are extremely limited, and partaking in it will never feed him; in fact, it might even kill him. If a child is a musician or an artist or an actor in his spirit, then his dreams and natural abilities will be pushed to the bottom of the academic heap.  We must be careful not to tread so heavily on another human being's dreams that we kill them.  Real teachers who are being held back by the fears of school boards and administrators, who feel that their ideas are not valued and worthy of use, who feel their dreams are being trampled upon do not desire to do this to children and will buck the system for the sake of their kids.

       Below is a poem by Yeats that might shed some light on the emotional aspect of teaching.  Imagine yourself as a student writing this to his teacher; then imagine a teacher who cries in the night because she knows the gods of education and their cohorts will strike her down if she deviates from the curriculum to do the one thing she knows will save a child from dropping out of school and ultimately out of life.

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. 

                                      ~William Butler Yeats