SLATE Update, December 2007

First Person:  My Wishes for 2008
by B. Corwin Davis

Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw
on a bank where they have no account. 
~Oscar Wilde

If a person does what is good, let one do it again.
Let one find joy in it.
Happiness is the result of good conduct.
~Buddha

I am not big on resolutions because life has taught me that I will not keep to what I resolve, however well meaning I feel at the time I make the resolution. But I have been able to keep some of my resolutions -- I brush and floss my teeth every night before bed and I’ve been able to lose (and keep off) a good bit of extraneous weight this past year. Good for me.

For 2008, however, I think that I will make a wish list instead of resolutions. It seems to me that a wish is as likely as a resolution to come to fruition, especially if I am willing to work to make it happen. So here is my wish list for 2008:

Since No Child Left Behind is languishing in committee and seems unlikely to be revised or reauthorized until a new president takes office a year from now, my wish is that the U.S. Department of Education will declare a moratorium on the harsh punishments that are beginning to go into effect for those who haven’t quite hit the mark yet. My own elementary school missed making “Adequate Yearly Progress” by three points last year. That was a substantial increase over the previous two years but since NCLB is an all-or-nothing kind of law, we will be re-structured next year, no matter what we score this year. Three years and you’re out, I guess.  Enough already. The harried teachers, the worried parents, and the frantic kids are not going to change under duress. How about a little of that promised but never delivered extra funding for helping the least among us? That would be a good start in undoing the wrongs created by this hideous law.

My second wish is that the citizens of the United States of America will elect a president and congressional representatives who will actually do something to help the least among us, my own students included, rather than thinking up new ways to harass and vilify them. New regulations have caused me to pay the cafeteria tabs of five of my students this year so that they can continue eating breakfast and lunch at school. If I hadn’t paid the tabs, they would be given a government cheese sandwich on government bread and a half-pint of milk. No extras. How does denying a 1st-grader hot, semi-nutritional meals fit into the grand schemes of the Bush Education Department’s No Child Left Behind philosophy? These children are eligible for, and now receive, free/reduced meals due to familial poverty. Their parents took a little too long to fill out the paperwork proving that eligibility and a tab began running up during the interim period from the beginning of school to official acknowledgment of eligibility. There is no forgiveness of tabs allowed. That’s just cruelty. A six-year old isn’t capable or legally allowed to fill out the needed forms yet they are the ones who are punished. No child can learn to read, write, compute, or theorize if they haven’t eaten all weekend. How about a little traditional American compassion?

My third wish is for the American People, the Congress, and the new President  will come to an agreement that basic, affordable healthcare should not be a luxury allowed only for those who can pay for it but rather an essential building block of a strong and functioning democracy. I have a child in my classroom this year that has been waiting for a new hearing aid for three months now. A younger sibling, curious about that cool-looking new toy in the ear, yanked it out and broke it before it was a week old. The mother must now take a day off from work, without pay, and find the money to buy gas to drive over an hour to get to the nearest clinic that accepts the state’s SCHIP insurance for the hearing aid. The Speech/Language therapist at my school located a closer, more local clinic that is willing to make exceptions and allow the mother to bring the child in for a new examination and application for a replacement hearing aid. They are now on the long waiting list while the child still struggles to hear. Why should this be such a traumatic and inconvenient solution? I could also go into the number of children I teach who have severe dental problems that go untreated because there are no more local dentists who will work with poor children; those who do are booked for months and months in advance. Remember the boy who died from abscessed teeth a few miles from the Capital Building last year? Is this really the America we want to live in? A place where our children die from easily preventable childhood diseases, suffer needless pain and disability, all to prove a political philosophy?  Learning to read is a low priority when a child is frequently hungry, frightened, or in pain.

My final wish is for myself as a teacher. I love my work. My children, though poor and often deeply troubled and challenging to work with at times, are a delightful asset and part of the American fabric. Their eyes widen in wonder at a well-told story, read from a beautiful picture book or told extemporaneously. They draw pictures of happy people laughing surrounded by color and light or of frightening violence surrounded by darkness and sharpness. They write profound, if frequently misspelled, sentences to describe the delightful and sometimes painful moments of their all-too-often troubled lives. They wonder at the patterns revealed by numbers and shapes as if they are the first discoverers and the world is still unknown. I will not trade this creation and discovery for test preparation. My wish for myself is that I remember this every second of every day so that I can find the fortitude to continue teaching in the most unfriendly, hostile, and depressing public school environment this country has known in my lifetime. I hope that I do not reach the point so many of my colleagues have reached, accepting the unpleasant, acquiescing to the unrealistic, and abetting the indefensible when it comes to teaching children. Let us protect the wonder and excitement of learning from the bland dryness of test-driven instruction.

May we all continue in our own good conduct and best practices of sharing the wonder of learning while simultaneously holding back the ever-encroaching dangers of government intrusion into our classroom communities with their harmful reforms and cruel punishments that threaten to rob teaching and learning of all joy and reduce it to a spreadsheet and a percentage. Let us do good again in America.

Let us be like the lotus, at home in muddy waters.
Thus we bow to how life is.
~Zen saying