E E Cummings (a k a, “e e cummings”) was an American poet, and some of his phrasing has stuck with me from the time I first encountered it in high school and will probably last until the day I die. One of the truths I’ve always noticed about my life as an educator comes from him, and I first remember reading it in a high school poetry class so many decades ago. As my experiences have become more numerous, it seems these words are a common thread running through them all:
I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance
We are now embroiled in a great debate over teaching 10,000 stars how not to dance, and I find myself weeping because I miss many of those birds. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve had quite a few birds in my day. Most I met in a classroom, but occasionally I met them in a tutoring room or in a lecture hall—not that I knew them as birds in the lecture hall, but that’s where I first met some of the birds that have graced my life.
For the last 11 years, I’ve been involved with standardized tests, and even now, I can’t see how my work has taught one single child anything. I have analyzed data and grasped and trained people in the use of good rubrics—some of the best in the industry, in fact. But my birds have all been part of my relatively distant past.
Any given teacher today, in any given classroom, working with any given student, has done so much more for education than I have. Sure, I would have had a rather different career path if it weren’t for No Child Left Behind and the standardized tests it brought to our schools. But whereas the Common Core and the tests from PARCC will mark the all but certain end of NCLB’s accountability rules, where each state decides on its own what proficiency criteria and standards it will use, I have reached the ultimate conclusion that it has all been a waste of time.
We have taught 10,000 stars how not to dance—value-added teacher evaluation models funded by non-educator billionaires, for-profit charter schools, diversion of my tax dollars to pay for some parent who wants to send her child to a religious school, and the exchange of learning and discovery of our wondrous world by young people who can appreciate it for technology and a brief list of standards—and in so doing, have missed the opportunity to learn from even a single bird.
Valentine’s Day is among my most favorite holidays, since it allows expressions of ideas and feelings that don’t really need reasons or accountability standards. To my friends, I say that e e cummings also wrote, “Unless you love someone, nothing else makes sense.” Happy Valentine’s Day!
