Opinion
Education Opinion

An Education Problem

By Emmet Rosenfeld — April 02, 2007 2 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

My name is Emmet and I’m an eduholic.

I hit rock bottom last night between the hours of 1:30 and 2:45 am when I found myself sitting up in bed scribbling about education policy in a little black notebook by penlight next to my soundly sleeping son.

I thought that once the portfolio was signed, sealed and delivered that these middle of the night sessions would be over, but I can see now that I was deceiving myself. If it’s not National Board that’s got me spinning, it’s that kid from second period who didn’t submit his research paper, or ideas for an upcoming lesson. Or rehearsing the first few lines of a blog post. Can you hear a cast iron skillet clanging violently on my keyboard? That’s my brain on education.

The particular reason I fell off the wagon last night was a productive midweek meeting with Don Gallehr, the director of the Northern Virginia Writing Project and a GMU professor, and Gail Ritchie, an FCPS guru on teacher development. We were brainstorming ways to promote and structure a course I’ll be teaching this summer that will help teacher-researchers write about and publish their findings.

Our excitement is at the new direction such a course might provide for an established form of professional development, little known outside the teaching world. “Voices from the Classroom,” as I see it, might provide a vehicle for the hard-won knowledge of frontline teachers to come to the attention of the public. Who knows, maybe one day research that’s done by real teachers in the classroom will compete with the “education research” done by wonks in cubicles that seems to currently inform policy making.

Our excitement at these new frontiers occurs in the shadow cast by the recent passing of one of the “founding mothers,” as Gail calls them, of teacher-research, Marian Mohr. Her recent death sent strong waves through both the writing project and T/R communities. Don wrote a touching remembrance. Marion MacLean, Marian’s collaborator on several books that more or less started teacher-research nearly two decades ago, is a current colleague of mine at TJ and has had a heavy heart in the lunch room lately.

More on this to come as the course and the ideas develop. For now, it’s time to do some serious end of quarter grading before spring break is sprung. Don’t want to have sleepless nights next week thinking about those never-diminished stacks.

Who am I trying to kid? Even if I get through the grading, I’ll probably be up a night or two, thinking about kids and learning. At least I’ve accomplished the first step: admitting I have a problem.

The opinions expressed in Certifiable? are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.