Confessions of a “Failing” Teacher

Like most teachers I’ve gotten some praise from my high school students over my 26 years of teaching—a lesson “wasn’t bad,” or a particular class was “sorta interesting.” I’ve even been told that I was a “pretty good teacher.” High praise coming from teenagers.

But the truth is I wasn’t a “good teacher.” I was a “failure,” at least according to America’s “education reformers”—that “odd coalition of corporate-friendly Democrats, right-wing Republicans, Tea Party governors, Wall Street executives, and major foundations” as Diane Ravitch aptly defines them—because the kids I taught consistently lagged behind their peers in every measure, performing well below grade level, failing state standardized tests.

Given the present state of teacher evaluations, with a significant portion allotted to student performance on mandated tests, I’d be in big trouble if I hadn’t left teaching recently. I certainly wouldn’t get any bonus pay. If it were up to the Obama Administration I might not even have a job since I would be one of those teachers who, as the President noted in his 2012 State of the Union address, “just aren’t helping kids.” And if I still taught in New York I’d be facing the prospect of having my name and ratings published in newspapers and on the internet if the Legislature gets its way in what the New York State Union of Teachers called the “name/shame/blame game.”

But I know that I wasn’t a “failure,” and more importantly, that the hundreds of kids I’ve taught weren’t either. My students were mostly young people of color, living in neighborhoods and families destroyed by poverty and substance abuse, racism and violence, physical and sexual abuse. Overall, life—shaped by their mistakes and by conditions they couldn’t control—left them little time for, or interest in education. Frequently that lack of time and interest led to trouble which led to repeated suspensions, expulsions and in some cases, incarceration.  But sometimes trouble translated into being placed in a small community alternative high school or the jailhouse classroom in the county penitentiary, both places I taught in.

By the time they made it to me, my students were pretty damaged. They hated school. They could barely read or do basic math. And forget about writing. “You expect me to write?” more than one teen squawked in horror at me. But eventually they did. They read, piling up grade levels like some Americans pile up debt. They calculated. They even learned the magic of connecting sentences that made sense.

But by the state’s educational rubric, they didn’t cut it. As noteworthy as their successes were—both academically and behaviorally—they were still “failures” and I along with them: success was only validated by passing the standardized tests.

One of the hardest things I had to do was send kids into those tests who weren’t ready. I tried hard beforehand to get them out of it. I’d explain, downright argue at times, with the school administration that although my students had made solid progress it wasn’t enough to tackle the exam and so they should wait and take it next time. It never worked. “It’s the law,” I was told.

Every time I think about Tyler my palms sweat. Tyler was a jailhouse student, lanky, 16, with an Afro picked out to an angel’s halo. But he was no angel, and he had the missing front teeth and two years at the county pen to prove it. When he first came to class he was reading on a second grade level. For some reason he was determined to improve this time round in school. He came every day, took work to his cell every night and returned it completed every morning. Slowly his reading level increased. He was pleased with himself. You could see it in the almost toothless smile he didn’t bother to hide anymore.

But he wasn’t close to test-ready. When I petitioned to delay Tyler’s exam the administrator refused but offered me her idea of comfort, “Look, it’s okay if he fails. Then he’ll be eligible for remediation.” I couldn’t help shooting back, “Sure, send the kid in so he can get shot down one more time.” I prepared Tyler for that test as best as I could. He worked harder than ever. He was psyched. “I’m gonna ace it, Mr. C.”

You know the end of the story. It’s the same for many damaged kids living in poverty and neglect, factors that the pundits say can be overcome by good, dedicated teachers. Once again Tyler “failed.” He never came back to class for remediation.

If Tyler and kids like him are “failures” then I—and all the other teachers who teach in tough places—are too. But I don’t think we should take the rap alone. As long as our educational policies let students like Tyler down in the name of “reform” and “the law,” continuing the “name/shame/blame game” instead of addressing the social conditions that cripple these kids’ lives and learning, then we as a country are failures as well, in need of some serious remediation.

Originally posted on Beacon Broadside

Global Lesson in Hope: Worldwide Concern for Juvenile Justice

In a six by eight foot jail cell there’s barely room for a bunk, a seatless toilet, and a postage-sized sink. The only other space you have in jail is in your head, and even that gets crowded with all the people you carry around in there who you resent for the things they did to you.

The world is pretty small when you’re locked up, especially if you’re a kid doing time with a healthy body that needs to move, energy sizzling through you like high tension wires, your emotions threatening to blow the power grid any second as you struggle with those nagging teenage questions, “Who am I?” “Why me?” It doesn’t help that the only answers you get come from walls and bars, gates and guards, and maybe that crowd of unreliable experts in your head.

Many of my jailhouse students lived that loneliness and isolation hour after hour, day after day, and for some, year after year until it was hard for them not to see the world as anything but confining, and brutally uncaring. It’s a vision that, as hard as they might work against it, too many of them carry throughout life.

Even though I taught high school in a county penitentiary for over 10 years and experienced in a minor way some of that same isolation and indifference I still know otherwise about the world: That there are people—teachers, social workers, clergy, parents, judges and lawyers—out there who care about real justice, not just for the “done to” but for the “doer” as well; who worry not only about “the system”—education, child welfare, juvenile and criminal justice—but about the kids, each individual kid, consigned to those systems.

But it’s hard a sell to young people whose world has taught them the opposite. Sometimes, listening to them talk about their lives, I feel as though they are living an alternative reality. Then again, maybe that is the reality of today’s America.

This summer I got to talk with various groups about these issues and met some people who could back me up on my view of the world. I just wish my students could’ve met them as well.

I’d like them to meet the 15 or so law students whom I met who were interning at the New York Center for Juvenile Justice (NYCJJ) in New York City, an organization working to ensure that kids in trouble are treated compassionately and fairly in the justice system. Even the toughest guys that I taught, and I’ve taught quite a few “thugs”—scarred, tattooed, hearts tough as stone (or so they’d like you to think)—would’ve had a hard time not being affected by the interns’ sensitivity to, genuine concern for, and insights into their lives and “the system” that had them (in so ways.) But my students were used to words—judge words, cop words, social worker words, even teacher words, so they would have been impressed by the students plans to establish juvenile justice chapters in their law schools and gotten a kick out of the fast-cut videos they made about laws that treat kids as adults when it comes to crime but not when it comes to voting or drinking or going to the movies.

And I wonder what they would’ve thought of the group of German juvenile justice professionals visiting the center. In halting English or through the slow process of translation, these professionals shared the same concerns about their criminal justice system that people in this country have about ours: a system that refuses to treat children as children; that refuses to look at the real reasons—poverty, discrimination, failing families, lack of money and resources for youth programs—that young people get drawn into crime.

At times the conversation in two languages was stumbling and drawn out. However, what translated fluently was the universality of the concern and compassion that is out there for the world’s young throwaways. It was moving to realize that there is a worldwide network of people just like me, just like the student interns and the staff at NYCJJ, just like the many other folks I know involved in this work. We may not be many but we’re out there, and, if you’re like me, it helps just knowing that.

Because the work never stops. As concerned as many of us from various nations are about the already bleak treatment young offenders—our students—receive, there are in some countries loud demands to make that treatment even harsher and more punishing. Canada for example “is planning to shift toward a jail-intensive approach” when dealing with its juveniles according to Toronto’s The Globe and Mail. And in the wake of Britain’s recent riots there are renewed calls for a retaliatory approach to young offenders rather than a rehabilitative one.

The global picture can be bleak. Nevertheless, that network of concerned and committed people is still out there. Despite everything, they keep doing what they can for the world’s locked up kids because no matter how much those kids might bad mouth their country, society, “The Man,” their own lives, they don’t give up hope. So, I ask you, how could any of us do otherwise?

Originally posted on Beacon Broadside

 

Kids in Adult Jails: A Different Kind of Commencement

Now that all the high school graduations are over and the backyard barbeques celebrated, I’m finally coming down from the contact high of all that youthful exuberance and optimism.

It’s easy to get swept up into those good feelings. But now as I move into summer’s quieter months, I can’t help thinking about the high school students I taught in a county penitentiary and what “commencement” meant for them.

Success never came easily to my students. Why should it? They came from lives wrecked by poverty and discrimination. It tried to wreck their spirit, but it never could, not completely. In that way my students weren’t any different from the kids at our local high schools—like their peers, they believed that life was there for the shaping.  That faith in success, though, didn’t always translate onto the streets. So they got caught up in crime, got arrested, did their time.

When that time was served, their “commencement” was being released from jail. The “graduation ceremony” wasn’t much: Down to booking to sign papers, their clothes stuffed into black garbage bags. Then the booking officer handed the “graduate” bus money and delivered the keynote address, “Stay out of jail.”

And that’s exactly what they intended to do. My jailhouse students talked a lot about “starting over again,” and I believed each of them. Because while they were locked up, most worked to change things for the better. They studied for their diploma or GED. They worked at staying clean and sober. They grappled with the rage of disappointment that tore at their guts through anger management programs. If there was a thread of family life left, they reconnected with it.

When they hit the streets, they were determined to shake the dust—and smell—of prison off them forever. But the only thing that had changed while they were locked up was them, not the streets. There was nothing out there for them, no services, no resources, no one. The only things waiting were the same predator-prey food chain, the same joblessness, and the same lure of the streets with easy money.

I knew the litany these young people heard from corrections and probation officers: Get a job. Go to school. Stay away from your buddies (the only people who even remembered your name.) Stay away from your girlfriend (the only one glad to see you.) Stay in the house. Start over. Stay out of trouble. And I’ve watched more than one kid’s face fall when he was told that he had to find someplace else to live. He couldn’t live with his mother because his probation didn’t allow him to associate with anyone with a record, and since his brother, or uncle, or cousin was already there he needed to find another home.

It’s not hard to guess what all those demands sound like to a 16 year old fresh out of prison: Stop being the only person you recognize. Stop living your life.

I often tell people that the changes we demand of young ex-offenders are things most of us, even with all our assets, would find daunting. The isolation. The loneliness. The helpless rage of unreasonable expectations. Yet these kids are told to make those changes with no one to help or guide them.

It happens, though, if rarely—some kid takes the plunge into all that fear and dynamites his life apart.

Alex was one of those kids. The judge made it clear. This time no probation. Instead a full county bid. Next arrest, a long stretch in state prison. Even at 17 Alex knew that going back to the same neighborhood, the same friends and enemies would seal his fate. “I might as well stay here and wait for the next bus to state prison,” he tried to laugh it off but couldn’t.

I can’t tell you what happened, but something did. Everybody had given up on him, with good reason or not, but somehow he hadn’t. Alex had a cousin in California that he never met but who said he could come live with him. So at his “graduation” he hopped a cross country bus. However, there was nothing quixotic about his move. Alex had never been out of his own town except to go to various jails and detention centers. He knew he had to do it. It was a terrible struggle at first. The dirt jobs. The loneliness. The disorientation. The fears of failure. Eventually, though, the jobs got better and he signed up for college. Last I heard Alex was close to a real commencement.

Watching that final moment of triumph when our local high school graduates flung their caps into the air I imagined all the hands—of family, teachers, coaches, clergy, counselors—that over the years had made that moment possible.  Young ex-offenders at their “commencement” haven’t had, and don’t have that same net of hands. And yet, there are plenty of hands in each of their communities to help, if they only would. That way kids like Alex wouldn’t have to go 3,000 miles for a chance at a new beginning.

Originally posted on Beacon Broadside

Teachers in Tough Places: Another View of Juvenile Justice

It was a busman’s holiday. 30 people in a room, all teachers in high school and GED programs in various prisons from across New York State, listening to me talk about teaching locked up kids. The conference was in Saratoga Springs with lots of other things to do. Yet there they were, nodding their heads in recognition of the stories I told, laughing in all the right places with that dark sense of humor we jailhouse teachers develop from years of working with society’s throwaways in some of the toughest schools going.

In interviews or talks I’m frequently asked why I wrote I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup. I often explain that I want people to see the kind of living conditions to which young offenders are consigned in adult facilities and to show that each incarcerated kid is a real person, one who most likely grew up in a home crippled by poverty, by poor health, by addiction as well as physical and sexual abuse. It’s a picture not conveyed by the crime numbers we read in the newspapers.

But looking out over that audience of incarcerated education teachers, I knew there was another reason why I wrote these stories: to describe what it’s like to be a teacher working under some of the harshest conditions going. In this time of “education reform” and its concomitant teacher bashing, I wanted to praise the people who are committed to teaching every day, no matter what’s going on around them, around their classroom and their students.

And in jail a lot goes around. Most classrooms are right in the correctional facility, and so the closed, foul smells of overcrowded and under-washed bodies, the ubiquitous roaches, the dirt and grime of poorly ventilated buildings and the chaotic noises of slamming gates and shouting voices easily seep under a classroom door.

One of the rooms in which I taught at a county lockup was a cramped, dark space right off a major hallway going to the blocks. Students sat elbow to elbow at a long table. Getting up for a book or some paper was tricky business. Personal space in jail is as valuable a commodity as a dealer’s street corner. I never knew when a fight, or at least a face-off, might erupt. Likewise, it didn’t make it any easier for my students or me to settle down knowing that any minute one of the kids might be pulled out of class for a random search, a lawyer’s visit, or taken down to booking in handcuffs. And nobody could tell when a fight might break out and a code called with the emergency response team in full riot gear running down the hallway screaming threats and commands.

Try teaching the difference between a simple and a complex sentence, or the definition of irony, with that kind of disruption. Sometimes I felt downright silly going on about adjectives in the face of such chaos. Sometimes I’d think, “Why bother?” Nevertheless, I kept at it. I taught every day and my students learned. I want to repeat that, because so many people don’t believe it’s possible: every day I taught and my students learned.  I had high standards and expectations. We had skills to acquire and to hone. We had tests to prepare for. We had tools to fashion so that when they left jail they could repair and change their lives and, I hoped, not come back to prison.

Looking out at that conference room full of intent faces, I could see that every teacher understood what I was talking about. They knew the damaged lives their students brought into prison and in turn, into their classrooms, and they recognized their own oppressive working conditions.

I realized something else that day in Saratoga. My jailhouse colleagues were not much different from the many other educators in this country who work in similarly harsh environments in the inner city in schools that are underfunded and undersupplied, in unsafe and unhealthy buildings, and in dangerous neighborhoods. The media reports that schools fail because teachers don’t teach. All they want to do is protect their cushy, tenure-assured jobs. Don’t believe it. Teachers—especially those in the toughest places—teach because they believe that every kid can succeed and deserves a chance. If we teachers are greedy, it’s for those small triumphs that every day make a difference in our students’ lives.

Reposted from Beacon Broadside

“Scared Straight” Continues to Get Serious Review by Criminal Justice Experts

It’s good to see that juvenile and family court judges have spoken out about the “Scared Straight” approach to juvenile justice. They raise the same issue that so many of us have expressed: are kids really deterred from crime by the controlled, choreographed exposure to jail culture? Check out the judges’ statement.

Prevention Programs That Work: An Answer to “Scared Straight”

Here are two excellent sites that give concrete rebuttals to the whole “Scared Straight” approach to preventing kids from getting involved in crime. The idea of scaring kids out of trouble has popped up again because of the series on A&E. As I mentioned in a previous post on “Scared Straight,”  instead of teaching young people to stay away from crime it actually may increase they’re attraction to it. The Coalition for Juvenile Justice addresses this issue in a report that shows some of the data that has been collected on the program’s effectiveness. Likewise, the Coalition in an article entitled “Beyond ‘Scared Straight’ “ presents a counter approach to this “cowboy” “rough and tumble” technique of crime prevention .

“Scared Straight” Approach to Prevention Back on the Scene

Despite the fact that all the research about the “Scared Straight” approach to crime prevention has shown it doesn’t work this idea is getting new attention with a film that will be on A&E. The approach which brings young kids into prisons and has them interact with prisoners assumes that this experience will frighten kids into staying out of trouble. The results are dubious if not down right the opposite. I’ve talked to young guys who have gone through the program and there is a disconcerting glee in their wide eyes as they told me about male inmates screaming obscenities at them, telling them that they’d make a nice “girlfriend” for some brutal thug, that they wouldn’t last a day in jail,  “your ass is too pretty to waste.” The kids loved it. I imagine the dynamic is like riding the roller coaster: you think you’re going to die as your stomach chokes your throats but you know the safety bar is tight and you’ll be getting off soon. “Scared Straight” succeeds in romanticizing jail which is all a part of America’s perverse fascination with what happens in “the inside.” Kids think that jail is really “a cool place to be.” Youth Today– an excellent news source for anyone working or concerned about at risk kids– has a good article on this approach and the A&E showing

Zero Tolerance Revisited in Our Kids’ Schools

Young kids in our country are not safe. But the dangers aren’t what you might think. Kids in schools–places where they should feel safe and understood and protected, places that should help when kids need help–continue to be ruled by our nation’s fears. Prison Culture has a video and quotes a Dallas newspaper demonstrating how crazy adults can get when it comes to kids. I’ve written about the absurdity of zero tolerance before in this blog. I write about the criminalization of children in my book I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Kids in Adult Lockup when in the mid 90s social policy makers warned of the “super predators” slowly making their way up through childhood to become dangerous and vicious teenage thugs. As Prison Culture says at the end of this cogent post, we have to stop this madness.

Education Reform and Juvenile Justice: The Children Still Left Behind

Statewide test day and Damian was psyched. He didn’t sleep much the night before from worrying. Still, he was there on time, ready to go. Now he sat hunched over his desk, head down, lips moving as he read, his pen carefully inching across the paper.

He was like any other kid in his grade taking the mandated English exam. The only difference was that he was locked up in an adult county jail in Westchester, NY where I taught high school for ten years, and he was reading—and barely writing—on a 4th grade level, which was up from the 2nd grade level he came in with.

Damian was a tall, thin 17 year old with a bushed-out Afro who had been in and out of juvenile placements since childhood—foster care; group homes; detention centers; jails. As a result, he had as many gaps in his education as he had in his mouth from missing teeth, most prominently his front two. The list of his educational diagnoses was almost as long as his rap sheet. Mentally Retarded. Learning disabled. Behavioral disorder. ADD/HD. Oppositional personality. Yet as badly as he’d done in school, a part of him always valued education.

Over the months I had him in class, something clicked for Damian. He never missed a day. He worked hard, asked for homework—and did it. His progress was daily. Soon, his reading rose from that humiliating 2^nd grade level to 3^rd to 4^th grade. The kid was on the move. But something else was happening. When Damian first came to class, he never looked anyone in the face and hid what he called his “baby work.” Now he was more self-confident. He was proud of his improvement and suddenly saw himself as a learner.

Then the mandated end-of-year state tests came round.

When I was told that Damian had to take the English exam I was as uncomprehending as he must have felt sometimes trying to decipher a page of print.

“It’s got to be a mistake,” I said to our on-site test administrator. “The kid’s reading on a 4^th grade level. Maybe on paper he’s an 11^th grader, but he doesn’t have the credits or the skills for the 11^th grade.”

“It’s not a mistake,” she explained. “He’s enrolled in high school. Technically, he’s 11^th grade; so he has to take the test.”

Then she tried to soften the regulation by explaining the reasoning behind it: a student was required to take the test and fail it in order to be eligible for remediation classes. I didn’t bother to interpret back to her what I heard: Damian had to fail a test we all knew he would fail in order to prove that he would fail it so he could get “remediation.” Kids, especially kids like Damian, don’t think like educational pundits. It was easy to imagine the damage this latest failure would do to his burgeoning self-confidence as a learner.

Unfortunately, he’d already been told that he was scheduled to take the exam before I talked to him. When I suggested that he might not feel ready to take the test, that it was okay if he didn’t show up, he could take it another time, he looked at me as though I was every white teacher he’d ever had who’d told him that he’d never succeed so why bother. After that I knew he’d be there on test day.

The Comprehensive English exam is two days, a total of 6 hours. Damian was there both days, for every minute of those 6 hours, doing the best he could. It was painful to watch.

I wish Damian was the only example of such mandated failure. But there are lots of Damians in classrooms across the country in places as diverse as jails, psych hospitals, rehabs, juvenile detention centers, special ed classes who find themselves in similar situations. Now that Obama’s educational reforms are continuing where Bush’s left off with their reliance on standardized test results as the prime measure of educational success, I’m afraid that there will be many more kids, and teachers, facing similar struggles.

I am not recommending social promotion. Nor am I suggesting “feel good” education. I wouldn’t insult kids like Damian. Students should be held to rigorous academic standards. However, teachers—and there are many of who are fiercely dedicated to this hard-to-reach population—should be allowed some flexibility to evaluate their students’ readiness and plan accordingly. That local flexibility can’t happen under the present reform blueprint. And given all that is at stake—money, autonomy, prestige, reputations—superintendents, principals, and supervisors will adhere, perhaps reluctantly, to these lock-step standards rather than advocate for the needs of these vulnerable kids and their teachers in their districts.

Certainly gains have been made nationwide. But all of us—teachers, parents and school administrators—should share, on a local and national level, the concern many civil rights groups such as the NAACP, the National Urban League, and the Rainbow PUSH Coalition have recently expressed: that the very students these reforms were meant to keep in school—poor, disaffected, disenfranchised, minority kids—will continue to be left out and left behind.

Originally posted on Huffington Post

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Teaching the Hard to Reach: Working with Juvenile Offenders

Over any teacher’s career—in my case, 26 years of teaching high school English to at-risk teenagers, the last 10 of those years in an adult county jail—you get asked lots of questions. Some about the topic you’re teaching; others, well, it’s hard to know where they come from. But there’s one question I heard a lot, most frequently from my jail students, “Why don’t you teach in a real school?”

This usually happened when a lesson went well and a kid really got what we were talking about. “That was a good lesson, Mr. C.  You should teach in a real school instead of here.” That last part was typical of incarcerated kids. Instead of taking credit for understanding some new idea, the student was quick to give it to me.

I knew where the “real school” remark came from. My students were mostly poor youth of color; many bereft of families. The education they received in their home districts was pretty bogus, and they knew it. Minimal supplies. School buildings as dilapidated as the warehouses (called “public housing”) they lived in. The curriculum dummied down because “they can’t handle the real thing.” For these locked up kids a “real school” was one they weren’t in.

They knew my take on the “real school” remark. My classroom was a real school; they were real students doing real learning; and I expected them to act that way. I confess, I wasn’t always polite about it. It made me mad—at them; at the educational system; at society; at myself. And it made me sad because within that comment was their bone-deep belief that they were worthless.

But in their remarks I heard another question. It’s a question every teacher asks with each new school year, “Why do I teach?” For me it was, “Why teach the hard to reach—at-risk kids—in the first place?” It’s a fair question, one that deserves an answer.

Of course there’s the obvious one. Everybody knows that education affects the quality of your life. Jobs. Where you live. Where your children will be able to grow up. Your health. Perhaps even your happiness. So as an English teacher, I knew the incalculable value of being able to read and write.

Yet I wanted my students to learn more than basic survival skills. I’ve always been a passionate believer in literature’s ability to change people’s lives on a deeper level. It was never an easy sell. By the time my students got to me their minds were slammed shut; their worlds, small. Presented with a story or a book to read they’d growl, whine, practically stomp their feet in a tantrum. “Why do we have to read this? It’s stupid…boring…crazy” (you supply the adjective.) Still I insisted we read.

It didn’t always work. Some refused to leave the streets behind, to glimpse a less hopeless life, even just for the duration of a short story. But not always. Warren read way below grade level. I wasn’t sure that could improve since his teenaged mother drank heavily while she was pregnant. But one day he announced that he was 15 and had never read a book. A friend told him about Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, and he wanted to read it. I worried about the reading level, but Warren was captivated from the start by a kid just like him, steeped in the hood and all its troubles, yet with a message of hope that kind of sneaks up on you. It took him months, but Warren painstakingly, proudly read every word.

I’m not saying that reading a book will radically change a kid’s life, but it may come close. It does happen. Wilbert Rideau who served 44 years, many of them in solitary confinement, in Angola, the nation’s largest maximum security prison, is a testament to that power. In his riveting memoir of his incarceration, In the Place of Justice, he writes that the books he read then saved him emotionally,

Reading allowed me to feel empathy, to emerge from my cocoon of self-centeredness and appreciate the humanness of others…It enabled me finally to appreciate what I had done.

Those words should give any Language Arts teacher the courage to continue pushing books on his or her students.

Yet, my jailhouse teaching wasn’t just about hustling books. You need a lot more than that to survive ten years of prison’s daily grind. No. I knew there was more to it than that. Since I always believe in practicing what I preach, I often got solace and inspiration from what I read. On my toughest days a few lines from Galway Kinell’s poem, St. Francis and the Sow, reminded me why I even bothered,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness.

At times, that reteaching loveliness was the hardest lesson I had to teach. But ultimately I knew it was what every day of my teaching was all about.

Repost from Beacon Broadside