The letter of the law...and the spirit of the law...
I have a teacher I'm working with, right now, who, more clearly than anyone I've ever met, reflects the important distinction between someone who lives by the spirit of the law...and someone who -- tediously -- lives by the letter of the law...
The teacher I'm referring to is the special education teacher who is mentoring me, currently, around matters of paperwork and school bureaucracy...
She's getting better...a lot better, some days, when I think about it...
But the major difference between our outlooks...on life, nevertheless on teaching...
Is that this teacher lives her life, often, by the letter of the law...no matter how ridiculous and horribly out of touch with the lives of the kids she teaches...
And I live my life...and I do serve my kids...by the spirit of the law...knowing that the law is far too crude an instrument to understand or serve the interests of anyone, nevertheless of a learning, growing, and developing child...
This teacher is convinced that if she just has the right IEP/legal leverage...if she just gives the right command...if she just finds the right punishment...if she just asserts control in the just the right way...that she will, somehow, shape up kids that have never been shaped up by this approach, even though it is, by far, the dominant approach to dealing with kids, their educations, and in their interactions with adults in a school building...
The irony is that she is kind of a push-over, really...and she has had some of the lowest expectations for kids in the building...she's gotten better...but, for a while...the entire time while I was first teaching at Eisenhower...there was no worry...no fear...no insecurity...no boogey man lurking around the corner...that she did not warn everyone was following her and her efforts every day I worked with her...
This teacher operates the way she does (and she's recently changed from a policy of wimpy low expectations to a policy of tough low expectations:):):)...out of fear, primarily, I think...
And...other than my advisor...who I swear is this teacher's mentor-in-waiting...so alike are these two...
Her whole orientation is survival in the educational bureaucracy...with fear and insecurity driving much of that survival...very much, in fact, like her university counterpart in my graduate advisor...
This teacher is getting better...and I feel much better, today, than I did in grad school, leading people with more age and experience than me...who just have all the wrong priorities operating in their lives and in the lives of the students they serve...
But she has been the best evidence, for me, of why I am not someone who lives my life by the letter of the law...afraid of some ax swinging my way...rather than with purpose...and by the letter of the law...caring more about kids than about laws...
Every chance that she gets to use an IEP (which is a legal document) as a billy club, she uses it...and I think it's been a long time before Linda has really thought about whether it really serves the kids or not...
She's getting better...I think we've persuaded her, for instance, to just ignore an IEP requirement of "negotiation" with one kid we have who manipulates kids and adults as a regular course of life...with whom negotiation would not only not serve him, but would feed every impulse that brings him our direction in the first place...
It took some doing...but she is developing a sense of humor about the whole thing...
Which is good...because the last thing I wanted to do as a teacher...was relive my experiences as a student with my graduate advisor...
Seeing this teacher...what I can now see...is that my advisor was, really, for all his huff and puff...kind of spineless, much of the time...he was kind of a weasel, often...just trying to keep his tenured full professorship at a prestigious university and graduate program...
So incredibly sad, I think...not just what a distortion that kind of thing is of everything that universities should stand for...
But so incredibly sad for the people who live that life...
For my graduate advisor...and for this teacher...
My Ph.D. advisor, especially...who worked 7 days a week at that job...
All just to keep a shitty and not-terribly well-paying job...
So sad, to me...
Anyway...
When I meet people like this...no matter how much I want to help someone like my graduate advisor and this teacher to learn to have some backbone...and have some sense of self-respect...
I realize just how much I appreciate being me...no matter happens in my life...
And the more I encounter people...who I don't always understand...nor need or want to earn respect from, necessarily...
The more I'm proud to live a life that I'm proud of...regardless of what others think...
Though...if my academic peers don't take up my scholarly ideas (my teaching colleagues are taking up many of my ideas...but they aren't terribly intellectually astute or honest about the whole thing...which is kind of tedious, sometimes...though, at least it serves the kids better, I think)...I think I'll just give them up...give up the jig...and do something else...
A life lived by the letter of the law...rather than the spirit of the law...
Is a life of cowardice...and fear...and a loss of a sense of purpose, I think...
It's been a long time since this teacher did this job for the kids, first and foremost, I'm afraid...which is sad...for this teacher, most of all (though, as I said, she's getting better)...
I'm proud not to live a life by the letter of the law...which seems like a pretty bleak and purposeless life, really...
I'll be and am inspired if and when either I:
1) discover or come across ideas that persuade me or inspire me as much as the ones I work on, including least possible neccessary aggression, or...
2) my ideas are thought useful by practioners and/or scholars in the fields that they touch...
If not...I'll wait for someone else to develop ideas or otherwise inspire me in a direction that either persuades me that I'm wrong...or builds on my ideas...or others' ideas in ways that are as compelling to me as these are ideas are to me, right now...
Sometimes I wonder if I would have become a teacher... or even a policy thinker...if I had known just how little people really care about the work...how little teachers care about their work and kids, sometimes, as surprising at it sounds...at least by my standards...and how little policy and political folks care about taking responsibility for good policy, rather than getting access to power, exercising it, and deflecting responsibility for anything that goes wrong...and that goes for politicians, journalists, activists, and even too many policy thinkers, unfortunately...
But I also don't know what I would do where people would care more about doing a good job...
All I know...is that if this job is all that this particular teacher and too many teachers in this building have been acting like it means...and too many teachers and folks that I've encountered in the last 3 years or so...
It wouldn't mean much, at all, frankly...
In fact, it would mean so little...that I can hardly imagine staying in the job...unless I was just too afraid to go get new one that might be something to take seriously...
I've got an IEP to finish before I make it home, tonight:):)...
I hope everyone's having a great Friday night:):)...
Love,
Ben
