Bryan Ripley Crandall, director of the Connecticut Writing Project at Fairfield University, has high praise for teachers.
He says they are the artists of our age. They deserve our praise, our gratitude, our admiration.
He writes:
“Teaching is a unique profession that requires an expertise in history, research, lived experiences, language, culture, sociology, psychology, mathematics and the humanities.
“Those who spend time in the classroom quickly learn to be the greatest proponents of American democracy. Every classroom, even the homogenous one, is a heterogeneous pastiche of individuality and personalities. Teachers are listeners, mentors, experts, coaches, entertainers, wizards and scientists. As John Mastroianni, Connecticut’s 2014 Teacher of the Year, recently stated, “Teaching is an art.” So, teachers are artists, too.”
Dr. Crandall writes, in honor of Teacher Appreciation Week:
“Our nation’s recent test-crazed anarchy provides better data for political avarice and shortsighted hubris than it does for what educators accomplish in their classrooms when they are given time to actually teach. We know that the best work occurs when teachers are provided resources, when they are treated as professionals, and when they are trusted to do what they’ve been hired to do.
“So this is a “shout out” for the teaching-artists of Connecticut: you sculpt, you shape, you design, you envision, you imagine and you provide hope for a better tomorrow. Happy Teacher Appreciation Week! You deserve better than what’s been given you these last few years. You deserve to be admired.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“On Teaching”
by John Steinbeck
” I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist … Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
They (teachers) … loved what they were doing. They did not tell – they catalyzed a burning desire to know. Under their influence, the horizons sprung wide and fear went away and the unknown became knowable. But most important of all, the truth, that dangerous stuff, became beautiful and precious.”
Tracy Kidder wrote in his book, Among Schoolchildren, “Teachers usually have no way of knowing that they have made a difference in a child’s life, even when they have made a dramatic one. But for children who are used to thinking of themselves as stupid or not worth talking to…, a good teacher can provide an astonishing revelation. A good teacher can give a child at least a chance to feel, ‘She thinks I’m worth something. Maybe I am.’ Good teachers put snags in the river of children passing by, and over the years, they redirect hundreds of lives. Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made of people who can never fully know the good that they have done.”
“She (the teacher) thinks I’m worth something.”
A pivotal moment in a student’s life.
There’s no metric that can measure the value of this revelation.
I agree, and I bet David Paketer does too. Both of us were honored for outstanding service, David by NYC and myself by NYSEC (NY State English Council).
It did nothing to change the way we were treated, and both of us were subjected to the utter lawlessness –th e corruption of the due process laws in the educational workplace, because the arm for the law is the union, and they let the principals do their thing with impunity… across the nation… while everyone argues about testing and evaluation… when the first order of business should be ensuring that THE LAW OF THE LAND OPERATES IN THE WORKPLACE because it is impossible for a teacher to fight in the courts:
http://blog.ebosswatch.com/2013/05/one-womans-legal-fight-against-workplace-bullying/
No matter how much we teachers who were victimized describe there real issue that ended our profession and silenced our voices, one reads about it NO WHERE… including here… unless teachers like me say, “Hey! Look what is still happening to us. It’s the law that needs to be enforced, not the rules for TESTING! That is their game and it is working.
Amen. It’s art and science. Plus a little social studies, math, medicine, environmental engineering and most everything else. Who but a teacher would know that if you paint your classroom walls in soft colors and replace the flourescent lights with lamps, that it will calm your students with ADHD and Aspergers so they can do their school work and focus. There was a well respected teacher in a Louisiana school who got permission to do this and one in a Georgia school who added carpet and draperies as well as indirect lighting. One regular ed. and one special ed. The regular was a math teacher. My room was next to his and I learned some math through the wall. They were both that good.
Diane –
Glad you are feeling better! Stay on the road to recovery! (Is there any way you can block this Darlene Wilson “troll”?)
Take yourself off of the list Darlene. Are you really so stupid that you can’t figure out how to do that?
I recently received an email purportedly from the Harris Interactive polling organization, inviting me to join “one of the most popular and influential online research panels.” By joining, I could “identify the problems and evaluate proposed solutions that meet the needs of America’s schools and districts.” Not only would I benefit from free membership and the chance to contribute my views. I would earn “great direct benefits:” a promised entry in a $10,000 sweepstakes and redeemable “HI points” for every completed survey.
Smelling a rat, I replied with the following letter:
Greetings,
I am a veteran classroom teacher and researcher, curriculum developer, author, and presenter, and care a great deal about the state of education in this country. While I have no reason not to respect your organization or the value of polling, I do not choose to join this project. Let me explain.
First, I believe public education in America is a core unrecognized cause of what some call American exceptionalism. It’s no accident that the majority of our great political and business leaders, artists, scholars, inventors, literary and military geniuses and more have been products of American public education. Our K-12 public commitment to provide every child the best education we can offer, however imperfectly we have as yet achieved this goal, has provided an educational opportunity that continues to draw immigrants from around the world. Our public institutions of higher learning, such as the three-tiered system in California, are without equal in the world.
Public education in America is facing its most serious threat in our history: the highly orchestrated plans to siphon public education funds into private for-profit hands. The charter school movement, especially virtual charters, is one highly effective weapon of the forces who seek to plunder public education. Vouchers is another. So is the obsession, not supported by solid research, of evaluating teachers by student test scores, a practice designed to further enrich the testing industry, another flank in the attack on public education. Respectable research on these methods do not suggest either that they have achieved their touted rise in student achievement or that they will anytime soon. Indeed, quite the opposite is widely apparent, for example, in the widely-recognized failure of many charter schools to uphold the American commitment to educate every child.
If we are serious about achieving our goal of giving each child an education to help him or her become an independent, contributing American citizen, we need to abandon these failed and failing moves, funded by foundations committed to enriching private companies.
One of the first orders of business is to begin treating educators as professionals. We must require greater professional preparation, such as the Master’s degree requirement in Finland, and we must begin to regard classroom teachers as the guides most of us dedicate our careers to become. We must accord educators devoted to serving as guardians of the future the same dignity teachers are given in Afghanistan, where they are regarded as fathers and mothers and respected as such. Our culture can learn the true value of education from cultures where many pay a fatal price for efforts to educate girls. When those who have taken such risks finally seek refuge in American public education, what must they think when they see schools penalized and closed as if they were intended to turn a profit easily assessed by test scores? We must find effective ways to support classroom teachers, not demean them for failing to meet unsupported corporate targets.
What then is my point? If you would like me to offer my input, my years of commitment and expertise, study and thought, please don’t offer to reward me with trinkets. Aren’t you concerned that such rewards will skew your results and compromise the validity of your data?
I also would need to know if organizations like Bill Gates, the Broad foundation, the Walton family and others support your efforts. I believe you owe it to educators to be transparent about this. We have seen quite enough recently of efforts to buy off whole states, to say nothing of individual teachers, with proffered funding attached to “corporate reforms.”
Please forgive my suspicions, but they are entirely justified in today’s climate. I am hardly a conspiracy theorist, and have come only recently to see the extent of the piracy now underway of an institution Americans should proudly support.
I would be happy to correspond further if you can answer my concerns honestly and truthfully.
Sincerely,
John Creger, M.A.
Teacher of English / Author
American High School
Fremont CA
“Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
~ J. F. Kennedy
Many are also Mothers so happy Mother’s Day to those with children at home & to those who are mothers to the young minds they educate & love in their classrooms.
Here’s a tribute to grandmothers everywhere. My friend Rayna’s mom was honored in this NYTimes article as a grandmother-bridesmaid. It is wonderful to see older adults honored instead of pushed aside. Let us do likewise for teachers everywhere. Let’s honor them & not blame them for all of society’s faults.
http://p.nytimes.com/email/re?location=InCMR7g4BCKC2wiZPkcVUo0rvBTdqgE7&user_id=bf2b037123e6939f8b4fbf72d5ea1eb2&email_type=eta&task_id=139980568117878®i_id=0
Creativity spans all areas of learning and endeavors. Great teachers are flexible and creative but this does not mean they are artists. The author is mistakenly making creativity all about art. Art helps one enhance or exercise his/her creative capacity.
Agree that the art s do not have a corner on creativity.
Indeed teaching is an art. Gilbert Highet wrote a book with that title back in the dark ages when I began teaching. Also, when dealing with people, person to person interplay is an art. yes, there is some science involved but I prefer seeing people as humans, not “its”, objects, a view which science employs. For me, that is what is killing education now, our children, people, are just another kind of widget on an assembly line. “humanitarian” idealism is destroyed in the process. That is my view. The love of children, and people in general is what makes civilization possible. Education should be a process to engender that, not just to view people as cogs in a machine, to “prepare our children to be cogs in the industrial machine”. I was in education for over half a century. NEVER was there a time when job preparation was not on the agenda BUT children were perceived as human beings, not just cogs in the top 1% of our country’s industrial machine. The “arts” engender our humanity, essential for a “purpose of life”. Always have, always will. Teaching is an art when raised to its highest potential. There is of course MUCH more to say on the subject than can be said in a short blog.