The Convenient Truth About My Road Trip to SUNY Cortland, Part 2

11/11/11 -11:11 PM - Don't you love it?

In Part 1 I laid out the background of my road trip to SUNY Cortland – which was really an air trip – to the Syracuse neck of the woods. I forgot to describe the tiny plane which seated 2 across on one side and had only one seat on the other side. One of the smallest planes I've been on. I prayed the rubber band wouldn't break.

Before getting to the panel itself, I want to give you some of my impressions of a day spent in the bowels of academia.

Cortland is the 8th largest teacher training school in the nation. So I spent the day interfacing with two groups of people: higher education professors who train teachers and college and grad students who are becoming teachers, pretty much all of them in their early twenties and under.

Though I got to hang with the loveliest people all day, I have to say that that my comfort level with education academics has never been great since I started teaching. You see as a history major in college I was one of those who looked down on people becoming teachers, on ed courses and on the people who teach them. I certainly changed my mind about those (mostly) women teaching elementary school after my first week when many of them saved my ass.

Even in my brief 6 week summer of '67 TFA-like training program for men looking to get out of the draft by teaching elementary school in hard to staff areas the best instructors I had were NYCDOE supervisors. OK, I never liked them much either but in those years you didn't become a supervisor unless you spent a number of years teaching in the trenches.

Now meeting all the academics on Wednesday, I felt they knew what they were doing and some of them even did teach for a while before moving up to higher ed. But my contact the future teacher students  made me feel I connected with some of them - at least from the ones who came up to touch base after the panel. The same thing happened at the Oct. 27 panel at NYU where the experience as a teacher who didn't leave the classroom for 30 years seemed to resonate with some future educators while sometimes I feel higher ed people are thinking - dumb, dumb, dumb.

Let me get to the panel. 

The hall was not fully occupied but I'm guessing 100+ people, mostly students.

Sandra Vergari who has done extensive research on charter schools was the first speaker. While putting on a face of neutrality on charters and pointing to the positive and negatives of both WFS and TITBWFS, I felt the way she presented the material was somewhat simplistic: that there were 2 opposing sides - one led by reformers and the other by the old stakeholders (teacher unions, school boards, supervisors - the old guard defending the status quo - though she didn't actually use that poisoned term - which I would have countered with " the ed deformers are the new status quo after 16 years in Chicago and a decade in NYC and charters all over the nation screwing up as bad or worse than public school in greater numbers. She also presented school choice as a positive factor. In her critique of the films she declared them both one-sided propaganda pieces, not addressing the fact that our film was a response to WFS that focused on the deficiencies of that truly propaganda piece. We did not make our film to show both sides of the charter or union debate. I do not consider our film propaganda but the truth.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz went next and started out taking a middle position between where Sandra and I were coming from. But she clearly was lining up against the ed deformers (as was most of the audience it seemed, especially the instructors. But is was her climax where the read a letter from a teacher at a well-known charter school who resigned in frustration that blew everyone away.

My presentation, after showing a short clip of our movie, was a hybrid between my personal experience as a teacher and activist (I connected the two, pointing out fighting for better conditions for students and teachers outside the classroom was a major component of my satisfaction as a teacher) and an assault on ed deform. I was working from some notes but ended up digressing, yet felt much more confident than I did at Hofstra and felt I got a better response - I could tell by the expressions on people's faces.

The question and answer period was dynamic though it seemed few questions were coming from the students. But a number of them came up at the end to say hello and thank me. I invited them all to join us one Sunday at 12 noon at 60 Wall St. at Occupy the DOE.