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Carolina Shout Program 2006 |
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Bill Ayers on the importance of teacher celebrations |
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Visit Carolina Shout 2001 Visit Carolina Shout 2004 Visit Carolina Shout 2006 Reflections on Carolina Shout by Bill Ayers |
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William C. Ayers is Professor of Education at University of Illinois-Chicago |
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| Jocelyn Sanders: Bill Ayers is one of our most devoted participants and, after attending the first event in 2001, he has become our official Shout historian and archivist. Also, Dr. Ayers is a internationally-renowned education author who has delighted USC audiences with his lectures and numerous publications. His career has taken many paths: as longshoreman, co-director of a day care center, community activist, preschool teacher, deputy commissioner of education for the city of Chicago, baker, founder of three magnet schools, and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois- Chicago where he is director of the Center for Youth and Society . . . . Bill Ayers. |
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| Bill Ayers [text taken from an audio transcript]: Thank you, Jocelyn, and welcome again. I’m glad to see so many people here to think about teaching, celebrate teaching, and wonder about what are the dimensions that make teaching worth celebrating. My youngest son, Chesa, is a student at Oxford University in England. And he was visiting his older brother Malik in California recently and he spent the day with Malik—Malik teaches sixth-grade science in a bilingual school in Oakland, California. Chesa called me that night and he said, “Pops, I don’t know how Malik does it. We got up at six thirty, he was in front of kids from eight o’clock till three, then he coached an athletic event, then an after-school thing, and we got home at eight. And I didn’t do anything and I’m exhausted. And Malik gets up tomorrow and he’s going to do it all again.” I said exactly: Teaching is hard work. And those who do it, know it, and those who practice it, understand it—but very few others do. Teaching is hard work, and so we’re here partly to celebrate that. | ||||||||||||||||||
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Teaching is also ethical work. I was talking to my neighbor and friend Vivian Paley. Some of you know her writing about the morality of life in the classroom, in the kindergarten. She’s the only kindergarten teacher to ever win a MacArthur Genius Grant. And she has written a number of books including White Teacher, You Can’t Say You Can’t Play, The Kindness of Children—she's a marvelous ethnographer and educator. Vivian told me she was asked by National Public Radio to write a short essay in their series “This I Believe,” and so she wrote a short three-minute essay, sent it off to them, and it came back all covered with red marks and basically with a failing grade. They said she had taken the position in her essay that she’s discovered that kindness, niceness, and fairness are all equivalent to young children, and they learn kindness and niceness and fairness in the preschool and in the kindergarten. The red-penned version of her essay included a great big block-letter statement, “KINDNESS DOESN’T EQUAL FAIRNESS,” and then, “DON’T TELL TEACHER STORIES. FIND ANOTHER WAY TO GET AT WHAT YOU BELIEVE.” Vivian gave up the project, of course, because, because teaching is ethical work, and Vivian had it exactly right. |
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We teachers are under constant scrutiny in our classrooms. Our students are watching us to see how we behave—whether we are kind or not, whether we are fair. They are eager moralists, these three years olds, these eighteen year olds, and we are models and guides for them—the coming generation, who, watching us, begin to establish their own belifts of what it is to have a moral code. The ethics of the classroom are worked out on the ground—face to face and minute to minute. So many issues, so much to wonder about, so much to weigh; the teacher keeps the dialogue going often with questions like, “Who are we and what do we owe one another?”
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| Marge Piercy, the feminist poet, has some words that I think capture this sense of the important ethical dimension of this very ordinary, very common, but very extraordinary work. In a poem called “To be of Use,” Piercy writes, The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They become natives of that element the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls. I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and muck to push things forward, Who move in common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out. The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. Greek amphoras for wine or oil, are put in museums now, but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries out for water to carry and the person for work that is real. |
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This gathering tonight, this Shout, the breathtaking efforts of Craig Kridel and the other teachers assembled here, is a dazzling monument to our work. Common as mud, and, at the same time, elegant in its aspirations and profound in its impact, teaching is work that is real. Thank you. |
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Museum of Education - Wardlaw Hall - University of South Carolina - Columbia, SC 29208 - 803.777.5741
museumofeducation@sc.edu