I have been teaching for nearly 35 years now. I always like to consider that I might be wrong about things. But as I consider whether I might be wrong about teaching and literacy and education, here is what occurs to me:
If I am wrong, then treating students like data points is more important treating them like real, living, breathing, mysterious, complex, multifaceted human beings. If I am wrong, we must reduce them to a numbers can be ignored if they don’t show signs of gains.
If I am wrong, then reading is a performance for the system, a series of hoops students jump through so that the system can measure their ability to jump through hoops so that we can have data about hoop-jumping, both the students’ and the teachers’. Because, of course, teachers have to jump through their own hoops in order to effectively get students to jump through theirs. Reading is, of course, something students do in order to keep the testing industry thriving. If I am wrong, reading is not a connection between a reading mind, a reading soul, and the mind and soul of a writer, a connection forged across miles, months, or centuries.
If I am wrong, reading is not an act of meaning-making, and act of creativity and imagination, an act of sheer fun, an act of depth and of weaving webs of connection, but merely an act of dissection, of extracting the correct answers to someone else’s questions rather than asking questions of your own. If I am wrong, reading is best reduced from a vast act of knowing down to a simple tautology: the only reason to read is to prove you can read.
If I am wrong, writing no longer matters. We don’t need their beautiful words. All of literature, all of writing to this point, has been only prologue and prelude, raw data to be fed to the algorithms that string packets of words together so we don’t have to.
If I am wrong, writing is not expressing the iceberg depths of what’s inside us. It is not the exploration of vast inner landscapes or expression of love or rage or worry or wonder. It is merely a measurable output of words in a predetermined format to comply to the demands of a rubric in order to get a score.
If I am wrong reading is no longer inhaling and writing is no longer exhaling. Reading and writing are no longer inextricably entwined. They are isolated in separate compartments, sterile cells where they can wither. If I am wrong, love of reading no longer matters. Just phonics. Reading freely and with enthusiasm no longer matters. If I am wrong writing is a chore to be avoided. If I am wrong, writing must be standardized and tamped down and tamed because we certainly don’t want the young people getting any ideas, or, God forbid, expressing them.
If I am wrong, education is a grim business of data-tracking and measuring, devoid of joy or fun or autonomy or play.
If I am wrong, students are not in school to learn how to function as free people in a free society, with all the thinking, ambiguity, rough-and-tumble struggle that comes with freedom. If I am wrong, students are here to learn to obey, to comply, to follow rules, free from ever having to deal with freedom.
If I am wrong education exists, not to create thinking, questioning, skeptical citizens, people of depth, capable of nuance, resistant to propaganda, but to create credulous, easily manipulated and polarized members of a populace that can answer multiple choice question but can’t a approach a text to read it and think their own thoughts about it, but only the thoughts that have be prepared for them to think: the one correct answer of four. A. B. C. D.
If I am wrong, then teaching is not an act of modeling intellectual character or a life of the mind, not an act of creativity and artistry and insight, of thinking and feeling on multiple levels, of always thinking Where are students now? and How can I take them where they could be? No, if I am wrong, teaching, too, is obeying, complying, following; having fidelity to the textbook, the map, the pacing guide. Of making sure they can answer the benchmark aligned questions on the next state test but also the mid-quarter assessment and the district assessment.
If I am wrong, we are all meant to do as we’re told. That’s the job. And no one, student or teacher, has anything unique to bring to the table. If I am wrong, we are here to have difference squeezed out of us by the machinery of measurement.
If I am wrong, we are not here to explore, to flourish expansively, to gain capabilities, to expand our perspectives, to awaken wonder, to flex our minds, to become fully human, to imagine different futures and explore possibilities.
But I don’t think that I am wrong.