"Teaching students is not something you can DO.
To truly teach one must BE a teacher.
Find the connection to the student, and open their minds."
- Donnalynn Civello (who is my yoga teacher in New York)
Waiting for Superman from Get Schooled on Vimeo.
There has been quite a lot of buzz and attention around this film, from Bill Gates to Oprah to TIME magazine and a week of programming - including an appearance from President Obama - on the Today Show, all peeling back layers to 'the problem' that the film is highlighting: education in America. If you have time, please click some of these links and read the articles - and what big brains like Bill Gates is writing in his personal blog about it. While the trailer brings tears to my eyes whenever I watch it, it's encouraging to think that some big fire power is finally drawing our nations' attention to this problem, and hopefully better balancing what we value most as a society.
In the TIME article I read how David Guggenheim was approached to make this film and he wasn't interested. Too complex, too 'political', no easy answers. It was a moment when he was driving his three kids past public schools in LA to private schools when it he first changed his mind, out of guilt, and ultimately a sense of society obligation:
"I just could not escape the fact that I was driving by these schools and not doing my part," he says. "I was helping my kids, but what about other people's children? How can I make a movie that will make parents care about other people's children as much as we care about our own?
I've been spending some time immersing myself in this partly because we have clients such as Boys and Girls Club and America Scores who are national after school providers: well respected organizations that often fill a critical gap for kids when they are in school systems faced with deep education cuts. I'm also paying attention for another reason entirely: my father was a teacher.
As a daughter of a long time teacher, I always felt that teaching was one of the most important professions, certainly for its critical role in 'educating' but also its profound role in impacting - positively or negatively - countless lives of kids during development years. When you're a teacher you are the adult outside of parents and immediate family that is the fork in the road, either helping to engage, inspire, guide, enlighten...or not. For years growing up, whenever we'd be out as a family to dinner or at a game, often a well adjusted, happy looking, fully functioning adult would come up to us and say hi to my father and we'd always know - it was a former student.
This video below is David Guggenheim's thoughts on 'great teachers.' "We're never going to have great schools without great teachers," he says. Mine was Mrs. Owen, my third grade teacher, who first discovered I loved to write, and always my father.
Mrs. Owen was my favorite as well. She had an amazing ability to make every child think they were the smartest child she had ever known. I remember thinking I could do/be anything I wanted to be/do because instilled that kind of confidence in me. She was amazing. And I remember the screenplay you wrote, "Raggedy Ann and Andy Go To The Moon!" for our 3rd grade play. It was a hit!
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