Confessions of an American Teacher

Written October 14, 2006
Slightly revised June 6, 2014
Minor revision January 19, 2018

A bit more revision October 8, 2021


I’m tired of saying the right thing. I've taken too many bullets for the team. I've been a Pollyanna with my head stuck up my ass… and a visionary that changed lives for the better. 

I walked picket lines, exposed evil, compromised my integrity, and given with all my soul. I've ranted across the desks of more than one superintendent and rolled over for others. 

I charmed, trashed, ignored, sympathized with, and bullshitted hundreds of parents. I faced surly classes and then flipped them into open-minded learners. I missed as many teachable moments as I caught. I helped some kids gain 4 years on the reading test and ignored others because they were hopeless punks who pissed me off. 

I hung around in the computer labs and classrooms weeping with inspiration and happiness for simply being part of the learning environment I dreamed of building, 

I hated the deep rut of driving back to school every morning to participate in the systematic destruction of joy and trust that small-minded inane administrators and school board members call education.

I was an American Teacher for 45 years and I’m sick at heart about public education. I want to tear the system down and let the ferrets run free. I want to teach skepticism and critical thinking and create a generation that will fight for their minds and fight for freedom. 

But I’m tired of tilting at windmills. I’ve learned to choose my battles. I’m not sure how much fight is left in me.

Sometimes I just want to scream and tell it all. All the good, all the bad, the lunacy and the laughs and everything in between. Instead, I’ll just blog.

I got my credential in 1974 despite a system that kept trying to talk me out of wasting my life in the classroom. All my neurotic friends in the graduate English Department at Berkeley thought I was nuts.

“You’re too good for teaching. Why waste your talent in a classroom?”

The application committee at the CSUN asked me the same thing (after beating me up for misspelling the word professional in my writing sample). 

“You don’t want to teach. There’s no money in it. You won't’ be able to get a job, there are too many teachers already.”

But I was stubborn and burned out by the life I’d been leading and looking for direction. Up in Canada, I made a deep woods camp. I spent time on mountain tops and in the wild thinking about it all. It gets old talking to fish and sitting on the high ground with a rifle. Ultimately, you are left with the questions only you can answer…

My career choices came down to law or education. I could be a lawyer or a teacher. I could make a living working with people at their worst or helping kids learn. I chose to teach and despite 45 years of classroom joy and pain, I don’t regret the choice.

Growing up in the cold war meant institutionalized drop drills and living with the gut-grinding anxiety of being nuked out of existence. Junior high conditioned me like a rat in a skinner box to jump, duck and cringe under my desk.

I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis and the afternoon when everyone thought the button would be pushed.  The adults building bomb shelters. That feeling is always there. I saw fighting in the supermarket, the shelves empty.

"Drop" the teacher shouted in a voice that said it was all real. 

I curled up under that pitiful flimsy wooden desk. I imagined the flash and blast of a hydrogen bomb taking out downtown LA. The pressure wave rolling over the hills to the valley where I’d be toasted alive.

I remember the horror of thinking the screaming air raid sirens were for real. I remember just wanting to ride my bike home so I could die with my family. Instead, I cowered on the floor, weeping, huddled on the dirty linoleum of the overheated classroom, back to the wall under the windows so the flying glass wouldn't shred me.

The teacher was crying, she couldn't answer as we begged, 

“Is it real? Is it the bomb?” 

The teacher was sobbing, kids were running through the halls screaming…it had to be real.  I was going to die, away from my mom and dad and brother. I just wanted to ride my bike home and die with my family. But I was too scared to move. 

After fifteen minutes the moron who was principal got on the P.A to announce it was all just a drill.

I learned a lot that day. I learned that faced with certain death I was too afraid to get up off the floor. Nice lesson.

That’s the lesson of mainstream American education: just curl up in a ball and wait for it… lay on the floor and pray… let’s spend lots of money to train kids this way… "...children, when it comes to a fiery death, STOP! DROP! and wait for it like sheep."

In my day it was the Russians and ICBMs, overkill and nothing left but the cockroaches. Now it’s a Stalinist dictator with a nuke or a Jihadi hoping to pack a bomb in a suitcase…or an FBI agent breaking down a door and dragging out an 8th grader for threatening the president on Facebook… and let’s not forget the twisted 15-year-old in a trenchcoat shooting kids in the head while they lay on the floor praying.

It was Mr. Pinto, my 8th-grade social studies teacher,  who saved my mind from the terror. After the phony air raid, Mr. Pinto gave me a way to deal with my fear. 

We were debating nuclear war in his Social Studies class and someone asked him what he’d do if the air raid sirens went off for real. Just thinking about this 60 years later makes my stomach knot… but it makes me smile too.

I can still hear Mr. Pinto's voice, 

“Kids, if the bomb gets dropped we’re all finished. We’re so close to prime targets there’s nothing we can do. I’m not hiding under my desk. I’m getting a six pack of beer, and a folding chair and climbing up on the roof where I can see it all. It will be one hell of a light show."

We all started to laugh. “The teacher said hell!” Nuclear annihilation suddenly seemed funny. 

Mr. Pinto with a little smidgen of honesty, helped me vent the paranoid steam of the arms race. He gave me a way to confront my fear and begin to stand. His fatalistic and funny advice gave me a game plan.

I was 13 years old. That’s when I started thinking seriously about being a teacher. I could say things that might help people… and get summers off!

After decades as a teacher, it seems right that my career choice was founded on visions of Armageddon laced with fatalistic humor. 

My years in the public school classroom were both sublime and mediocre. I love it and I hate it. I went farther and did more than I ever dreamed possible and I’m still dissatisfied with what I’ve accomplished. 

I’ve met some of the finest people on the planet and I’ve uncovered power-corrupted evil-doers. I’ve fought the good fight, won some, and lost more.

I stood up for my principles and was cut off at the knees.

I’m not done. I still want to break on through to the other side. If that means taking another beating, I will punch back.

I’m still standing… maybe I’m standing on stumps, but I’m still upright.

...
Post Script

I came across this piece and was reminded of the passion I felt at the time. This was one last vent written as I transitioned from teaching school into online teaching in college. 

The venting worked. The anger is gone. The memories are mostly good. More sweet than bitter.  The few decades of teaching online to help American Teachers yoked to the nonsense of NCLB have sharpened my empathy and reinforced the wisdom of my decision to leave public school behind.

For many years now I've been a teacher of teachers.  Working online allowed me to look through the windows of so many brave and dedicated teachers. It's good for my soul.

I still like being an agent of disruption. I'm glad the silos of education are cracking.  

Cracking lets some light in.