Way To Go, Zack Morris!

By the time they fill our classrooms, students have endured more than a decade in an educational system where learning has been reduced by testing advocates, eloquently labeled “Standardistas” by writer Susan Ohanian, to the mastery of purportedly essential skills. They have, for the most part, successfully muddled through an experience injected with intensity practically from the second they entered kindergarten. Ohanian suggests the media are a key purveyor of this intensity. Coverage of education, she argues, comprises “mostly refried press releases from the Fordham Foundation, the Heartland Institute, the Education Trust, and other public-school-bashing enterprises.” Reading or viewing a news story in which a reporter has gone “beyond the corporate chants and charts” about our crumbling public schools and the need for more stringent measures of teacher accountability is a rare occurrence.

Reporters are always on the lookout for “a pro national-testing piece” usually built on a comparison of how students in the U.S. perform compared to students in other countries, or a “feel good” story about a diligent, caring teacher who urges and cajoles students – who often come from poor neighborhoods – into generating improved test scores. But by and large, journalists are content to give voice in their coverage to members of what the late educational activist Gerald Bracey called the “schools are awful bloc,” made up of like-minded business leaders, think tanks, and educational reformers. These twin tendencies, contends Beatrice Motamedi, a former reporter who now teaches high school in San Francisco, stem from an editor's desire to attract readers: "finding one heroic, inspiring teacher who is beating the odds...makes for much better copy than the long, slow slog of teaching, grading, reteaching, coaching, and assessment that is the real work of teaching."
 

Rarely do we read about the success achieved by children with different learning styles, or those who embrace and espouse unconventional ideas. Mastering content and spitting out answers on demand receives coverage; asking thoughtful questions that might, in the bargain, challenge authority and/or conventional wisdom, does not. Paying children for doing their homework and professors prattling on about how Twitter can be used to teach more effectively are lauded as innovative. Encouraging kids to learn how to learn – for the sake of learning, for the joy of learning – is rarely discussed, or is dismissed as an antiquated notion that might weaken a child’s resolve to compete. We don’t see or read much about the stimulation of wonder in kids. Motamedi certainly isn’t alone among teachers in grading solely on “mastery of the content.” Teachers who “look for effort, for distance (how far have you traveled from what you knew when you began this class, and authentic learning” – knowledge that “changes you in some fundamental and lasting way” – are not the subject of much media interest. 

A journalist today would likely have a hard time pitching to an editor a story about my sixth-grade teacher, Tom Troyano, a kind, gentle bear of a man. With Tom’s compassionate guidance, we had a hell of a school year in 1972-73, with much of our fun taking place outside curricular boundaries. Our itinerary included: a) inviting parents to class to instruct us how to prepare foods from different parts of the world; b) conducting a year-long reading contest where we read books we wanted to read; c) constructing a two-story reading tower – called “The Tower” – out of lumber scavenged by Tom from his on the side construction jobs to serve as a haven in which the reading could occur; d) learning haiku; e) mastering the non-dirty limerick (and soon, on our own, the dirty ones); and f) learning the vagaries of the Rotary engine which had been introduced that year by the fine folks at Mazda to waves of national skepticism.

I have no recollection about how I performed on the tests, standardized or otherwise, that I completed that year, but I can still (after a beer or two) recite the limerick I wrote about my best friend and picture The Tower’s Partridge Family-like paint job. I occasionally write haiku and have a residual attraction to old Mazdas. The incredulous looks I get from my students when I relive the sixth grade chapter of what they sometimes treat as my hippie past are fresher in my mind.  Most important, though, Tom respected us and valued the experiences we brought to his class. He and my parents were, and still are, friends; to augment his salary, Tom painted several rooms in our house – including mine – one summer. He sent a lot of encouragement my way as I began to think about a career as a sportswriter. When I ask a friend or colleague to share their most compelling memories of school, these are the experiences that usually come up.

As revered teacher and activist Paulo Freire asserted, a teacher “who truncates the curiosity of the student in the name of the efficiency of mechanical memorization hampers both the freedom and the capacity for adventure of the student.” Yet these are the only teachers we read about, the only kind of instruction we see in television news reports. “There is no education here,” Freire concluded. “Only domestication.” 

Tom Troyano certainly did not domesticate us. He seemed to know what he taught might not resonate in us for a while, if ever. He was the perfect teacher for a late bloomer like me. Ah, but late bloomers don’t make many media appearances, especially now, when so many students are stuck from kindergarten through college at the Urgency Festival. Boomers are left with memories of Zack Morris (played by actor Mark-Paul Gosselaar) from the original Saved by the Bell, even though the NBC television series was created for our kids. Zack lied, goofed, and schemed his way through Bayside High School, had to take a one-credit ballet class just to graduate, and still got into a good fictional college. “There’s something special inside you, son,” Mr. Belding says as he hands Zack his diploma. “I just hope I’m around to see it come out."