When I worked in Chicago for a few years, visiting schools and observing teachers, I got to see a tremendous range of talent and dedication in all kinds of classrooms. The methods teachers used often varied dramatically, and some were clearly better than others. But none of the methods turned out to be remotely as important as an individual teacher’s commitment to succeeding with whatever method was at hand. I decided then that even though I was a big believer in a few specific approaches, it would be madness to force teachers who were good at teaching with methods I didn’t like to adopt my favorite alternatives.

 
With few exceptions, the magic that the best teachers had in the classroom dimmed when they were handed a new approach that they didn’t believe in. It’s almost like walking up to someone hammering nails into a fence with a too-small hammer and saying, hey, try this one, it’s a lot better for what you’re trying to do. Maybe that hammer had been a gift; maybe it was a symbol of a special person, or a special job well done in the past.

 
It’s true that a good worker with a lousy tool should do even better when given a great tool. But if that lousy tool means something special, if the worker is invested in making that tool work wonderfully well, there’s not much upside in swapping it out for another.

 
I still have the plain, stained, wood-handled hammer that my father used around the house when I was a kid. As hammers go, I’m sure it’s far from state-of-the-art, but if you try to take it away from me, I’ll lose a lot of the joy that I get banging nails when they need to be banged.

 
One comment in particular from a teacher back in my Chicago days pulled me out of my foolish notion that better techniques would make the decisive difference in many classrooms. A fantastic young teacher had been leading literature discussions, and leading them well. But there were a couple of tried-and-true methods I was there to push, and I pushed them. In my mind, this brilliant teacher plus the great methods would combine for a huge benefit to the students.

 
At the end of the day the teacher just took my breath away – made me ashamed – with this comment: “Doing it your way, I began to see myself differently. I saw my work differently. I lost that sense that I was working with the kids, me and them, and this other thing, this ‘right way to teach,’ just got in between us.”

 
It was the first time, she said, that she thought that maybe teaching was not the right long-term career for her. And of course, that was exactly the opposite of what I was trying to achieve. I had to adopt a new approach. I had to focus more on the joy the great teacher brings to the classroom, and start there: cherish it, nurse it, celebrate it. Avoid the deadly notion that “I’m here to show you a better way.”

Great teaching is situational. Different groups need different strengths, at different times. If you’re working with a student who does not have solid skills in basic multiplication and addition, or an understanding of the vocabulary you’re using, and you share a lesson in algebra that looks and feels absolutely brilliant in a different room with different students, you’ve probably done very little good and more than a bit of harm. In fact, you’ve probably presented this student a model of not getting it when a teacher teaches that makes confusion, or tuning out teachers, feel normal.

 
The great lesson – the great teaching – isn’t great if the learning that it seeks to make happen isn’t happening. In fact, there is no great teaching if there’s no great learning. How good a job I do as a teacher is really not the point: how good a job the students do learning is the whole game. If I help that learning happen – however clumsily, with whatever amount of bad form or rule-breaking – I’m a great teacher in that moment.

 
It’s often hard for teachers – and even more importantly, people who supervise teachers – to grasp this. The teachers whom we are most likely to be impressed by are the ones who have that dazzle – if they were actors, they’d own the screen; as soldiers, they’d be the natural leaders in battle; as salesmen, they’d rack up the biggest sales, because they’re the kind of people who make the rest of us feel good. They make us feel like we’re in the presence of someone special, and we like hearing them talk and making them happy. Many of these gifted charmers are indeed great teachers. But only if they listen, only if they go where their students need to lead them. The charisma and attention-commanding charms that so many of us love to see – in the classroom as well as anywhere else – can be profound distractions from what the students need to be doing and thinking.

 
The clearest place to see this is in the videos of teachers teaching that many faculty job applicants and education-school graduates carry around with them. The first clue is whom, exactly, you see when you watch the video. At one extreme, you see a teacher in front of class, and clearly the film suggests that the teacher is the center of the room, the actor on the stage. You see students from behind, or at a sharp angle, and while you see the teacher doing his or her thing, you don’t see the students do the things that really matter in the classroom, the learning things.

 
At the other extreme, you don’t see the teacher. Instead, the teacher is holding the camera, and you – the viewer – find yourself moving around the classroom, looking over students’ shoulders, looking students in the eye when the teacher has a one-to-one conversation, and seeing the students pop up and listen when the teacher says something like, “Hey everyone, while you’re working on your boxes, keep this in mind. . .”

 
The teachers-as-performers do something we’ve all come to expect – they are the stars in the theaters of their classrooms, performing. They create the energy in the room, they direct the lessons, they’re the movers and shakers in their little worlds. They might play that role well or poorly, but it’s their role. The process of learning centers on them; students follow the teacher’s lead.

 
Teachers-as-coaches do something different: they present the class challenges, stir the pot that is already bubbling with energy and talent, and follow the paths that students chart. These teachers set the parameters and offer challenges and tools, but they want students to lead as they spur on their classes to get things done.

 
The idea that school teachers should not simply teach from the podium, and that their strong and direct leadership of the classroom could have limiting effects on their students, was largely a new one that mavericks in the twentieth century from John Dewey to A.S. Neill fought to make heard. They certainly succeeded. Today it’s a cliché to say that instead of being “the sage on the stage” the teacher can be “the guide on the side.” Many are ready to argue for the traditional mode of teachers as masters of their classrooms, but it’s no longer a safe assumption that your child’s teacher or mine sees the world that way.

 
But the big mistake here is to see one approach as the right approach. Again, great teaching is situational. There are times a student, or a class, needs to hear something said, write it down, think about it, and remember it. There are times, too, when a class needs to break into contending opinions and voices, and there are times when a class learns best with each student focused on a distinct task, workshop-style. This is what the ninth-grade math teacher understood, and acted on. She might not have been brilliant when she spoke to the class – but she was brilliant in her higher-level thinking about the kind of instruction the fit the moment perfectly.

“I teach because I love seeing the kids learn. And if I am totally honest about it, I love the person I am when I teach. I give, but I also take. I can see that I have the chance to change lives, but my life is changed to. Teaching is my way of living the best life I can live, of being the person I most want to be, and feeling that my work connects with my heart every day.” – High School teacher, Chicago Illinois

What makes a great teacher great? Is this teacher’s case, a big part of the answer is the way she sees her role. While this teacher generally does the right things in the right ways in her classroom, that’s not even close to the source of her greatness. Here’s the core of it, the clear statement of teaching as a way of life: “Teaching is my way to live the best life In can, of being the person I most want to be.”

 
For this teacher, teaching is a particular way of being in the world. It is her art, and not just the expression of who she is, but a structure and support for the best version of herself. Teaching is the embrace that gives her life the form and shape that she loves most about herself.

 
While it is unusual among most teachers to hear people say “I teach because teaching makes me the person I most want to be,” in my experience it’s pretty common among the very best teachers. As this high-school teacher in Chicago says with such beautiful clarity, it’s a matter of her heart.
Here’s another teacher who put a similar idea in different words:

 
“There’s something almost selfish in what I’m doing. They don’t pay me all that much, but the fact that they pay me at all is kind of amazing. I get so much from what I do, even when it’s a struggle. Maybe especially when it’s a struggle.”  – Math teacher, Los Angeles, California.

 
We can probably all agree that there’s little risk of teachers being paid too much for their hard and essential work, but this math teacher is expressing the kind of joy and wonder that remain inside the very best teachers even though a hundred forces in our society, from overeager supervisors to under-motivated students, sometimes seem engineered to erase them.

 
Both of these teachers represent something vital in the way that we should think about educators in our society. Too often we focus on discrete skills and tasks that we teach. They are certainly vital, and no good teacher can focus too much on the abstract when there are more practical thinks like writing, science and mathematics to be learned, and we’re the ones trusted to make sure that students learn them. And yet consider for a moment the easy – and false – distinction that I’ve just snuck into this little paragraph: skills and tasks (like science, math and writing) versus abstractions (like, for example, critical thinking, or the very broad range of soft skills we often put under the label “learning how to lean.”)

What we now take for granted as the facts of mathematics, or the lists of memorizable details of living organisms that we study in science class, or even the rules of correct grammar, are all the results of complicated and quite abstract ideas interacting with each other. I can quiz you on the periodic table to see how well you can use this complex tool that presents key information about all the elements, but the table itself is the product of social and philosophical debates that help us understand what, exactly, different elements are and do. When the people doing the most cutting-edge research into the physics of planet formation focus on the middle states between gasses, solids and liquids, we often teach the periodic table as a fixed and final list of the way things are.

 

‘Then we take out the container of liquid hydrogen so that we can freeze things like helium balloons and hot dogs to demonstrate important scientific principles. “Wait,” some observant student will say, “I thought hydrogen was a gas. How can it be a liquid?” “Well,” the teacher says in response, “under some conditions some gasses can become liquids.” So, the difference between gasses and liquids isn’t as simple as we often present it as being. The world that science describes is more complicated, if we are totally honest about the world, than we generally present it as being when we teach. The same is certainly true in every other subject. We teach short-cuts to student writers – like “Never begin a sentence with a ‘And’ or ‘Because.”

 

But we read beautifully crafted and perfectly correct sentences that begin precisely so: “Because I could not stop for Death,” Emily Dickinson writes, “[h]e kindly stopped for me.” Perfectly correct. But if we pretend that language is a simpler thing than it truly is, it becomes easier to teach. If we pretend that the physical world is simpler than we know it to be, then science is less taxing for the teacher – but missing so much of its magic. The challenge is to allow into our classrooms some of the complexities and even some of the contradictions that give the subjects we study their particular and humane shapes, so that students will understand that teaching and learning are soft-edged processes, friendly to experiment and imprecision, and requiring trust and forgiveness every now and then.

American poet Walt Whitman captured this quality of education – and of life – perfectly when he replied to his critics in his long poem “Song of Myself”:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
This small bit of poetry says a tremendous amount about the teacher’s vocation. Our classrooms certainly contain multitudes and innumerable contractions. Our academic subjects are filled with (wonderfully) unfinished ideas and challenges, our educational goals are multiple and – alas – often contradictory themselves. But most clearly Walt Whitman is talking about the contradictions within himself and within all of us – contradictions that we may wish to cure, but which he tells us are the very origin of our human depth and sympathy. We each can be different versions of ourselves, versions that contradict. If we reject this human fact, we fight something inherent and inherently good. Through our internal contradictions, we learn sympathy with people who are not like all of whom we are, but part of whom we are. We find the connections of common desires and common fears, even if we would prefer to deny those desires and fears in ourselves. We learn the range and flexibility of the individual human mind and soul, and we learn that contradiction is itself an engine of understanding.
The great teacher sees the multitude within and cultivates the teacher-self, but he and she also cultivates an acceptance of the other sides of identity, and uses that un-resolved complexity of who we are as a way to accept the contradictions and affirm the richness of the classroom, the school community, the form and the shape of the world that we teach about, and ourselves.
Listen to your students. Contain multitudes. Who do they need? Be more than one person. Be your favorite teacher for a few minutes. Or be your favorite student. You don’t have be everybody, but take the challenge to be more than one.

My friend Bill Siegel was about to arrive at my new school in Los Angeles and I was anxious to hear what he would have to say about teaching – about his life working with teachers and kids, our school, his own family’s life in the public schools in and around Chicago, and what he still sees traveling the country from school to school, helping teachers practice a particular brand of inquiry-based learning that he is arguably the best in the world at.

 
Until about ten years earlier, we’d worked together, talked a lot, and walked through some schools together comparing notes, and tried to understand new and better ways to help make teachers more effective, and to bottle the magic of the schools where it all really worked so that we could sprinkle some of that good stuff on the many places where it didn’t. Bill in those days was mostly on the road; I was mostly in the office. But we’d felt a pretty good connection, and I trusted his testimony more than anyone else’s.

 
For years we’d been in touch only through a note here or a briefly crossed path there. I was anxious to learn what he’d seen in the last decade, and hear what he’d have to say to a group of teachers over a couple of hours of conversation and workshop time.

 
We began the teacher workshop by reading a text – a short essay about a hero who died rescuing people in a plane crash. Bill asked a question about the text; a few of the teachers in the room offered their thoughts in reply. He listened to their questions carefully, asked each a follow-up question or two, and kept the conversation focused on the essay. We were all seeing more layers to that essay, more reasons to like it or dislike it, more of the writers’ methods and ideas.

 
I mentioned, later in the workshop, how much I continued to think about the method of teaching by asking questions that I’d first thought seriously about when I worked with him those years ago, at the Great Books Foundation. He asked me why it was still on my mind – still in some ways an unanswered question for me. Because that kind of teaching represents my values, I said, but not my inclinations. I want to teach like that – but when I start teaching, I say too much, too often. My values tell me to slow down, to ask more and listen more, and I have to keep my personal-talking engine under control because it wants to keep revving itself up. The teacher wo listens more than he or she talks is the kind of teacher, in fact, I wish to be, but am often not.

 
Bill asked me about those values about teaching I hold, and he asked me about those inclinations that keep trying to run away with me. I remembered a philosophy professor thirty years earlier who had asked direct questions to me about why I believed what I believed. I remembered how I’d been so moved by that classroom exchange.

 
Bill was right there – and I don’t think any other teacher had been in that spot in the three decades in between – and I loved it. I felt listened to. I felt challenged. My ideas leapt ahead – I had to think fast, think deeply, think with my whole mind to keep up with his simple and direct interest in what I was saying. Every word I said, he weighed carefully. He didn’t say “Great, great.” He didn’t even smile. But he was clearly, profoundly interested in what I was saying.

 
A bit later, he said in passing, “If the hardest working person in the classroom is the teacher, you’ve got a problem.” I thought: Bingo. That’s the crux of those inclinations – I want to be the hardest worker, even when the work is better done by others. I was focusing too much in my story, on what I was doing, and too little on the stories of the students – what they were learning, with me or without me.

 
“If the hardest working person in the classroom is the teacher, you’ve got a problem.” That’s one of those fundamental ideas that changes everything. And it’s true. It shares a deep connection with two addition notions about teaching and learning.

 
When I took the job as the head of a school in Los Angeles, one thing I noticed right away was that aside from a case of sports trophies, the walls were mostly bare. In the weeks before we opened the doors for our first day of school in the fall, colleagues and I hung posters, pasted periodic-table shower curtains to the wall, and layered vinyl trees to the corners of a couple of stairwells. We also painted a few key phrases on the walls.
Across from the teachers’ lounge, we painted this in big letters: “Great teachers enter the classroom in order to learn.”

One evening when my oldest daughter was a teenager, I was excited to find that one of my favorite old movies was going to be on television. I convinced her to sit with me and watch it. We popped up some popcorn and were pretty excited. “I saw this as a kid,” I told her, “and it made me think of how glamorous and free living in Manhattan would be. I was dazzled. It’s all about that freedom that comes when you’re young and you feel like you’re in the most exciting place in the world.”

 
Or not. The movie came on, and I’m sure that half an hour into it I looked shocked. As a teenager, this movie spoke to me all about freedom. As an adult, I saw for the first time the deep sadness in the film, the loneliness of its key characters, the warnings about investing too much hope in a place or an adventure as an escape from inner sadness.

 
I began thinking about so many of my favorite films and books from my younger days. I really shouldn’t have been surprised – I go back to my favorites again and again, and they’re always different, because I’m different. I need different kinds of counsel and inspiration and insight from, say, Henry David Thoreau than I did when I was twenty, and I take a different kind of pleasure from Emily Dickinson or Jane Smiley. And so it was with this old movie. I saw in it what I was able to see in it when I was very young –what I needed to see in it. As an older man, I saw a lot more, and in some ways a lot less. I noticed, finally, that the glamour of the film was meant to be thin and misleading. I saw the film as a much more complex work of art, one that spoke to different people in different ways at different times of their lives.

 

The same holds true when I watch great teachers teach. I notice different things, and I usually learn best the lessons that I most need to learn in the moment. I’m primed to fill the holes that I have in my life as a teacher at any given moment – and I always have holes.

 

I’m especially conscious these days about what’s happening in the classroom for everybody other than the teacher. I spent so many years of my life as a teacher ambitious for myself, asking what I could do to be a better teacher, how I could perform my part in the classroom drama better, where and when I should gaining steam and when easing back for just that right rhythm – and so little time, I’m ashamed to admit, focused on the others characters in the room: the students. I suppose I needed to live through that phase of my teaching life, the phase of being my own most-engaged audience member. I wanted to perform, and to witness, the Peter show, and I was just so focused on how Peter was doing. The twenty other souls in the room were interesting, but secondary to my big act.

 

Now I cringe when I replay those teaching days in the theater of my mind’s eye. I try to pan around the room and see those students. I know some were engaged, but I know too that many were just not interested in my show. They had their own shows going on, and I missed so many opportunities to tune into that much more important set of stories. I’m a lot less interested now in crafting my own identity in the classroom, and much more in learning about and learning from my students. Partly this is because I’m older and in some ways I’ve completed the business I was transacting by thinking so intently about what I was doing and how I was doing it in those early years. But there’s more here. There’s a better way to focus on the classroom than through the lens of how great or poor a job any of us are doing. Just like that movie I saw with my daughter – a movie could and does mean different things to different people, but is only fully understood when that sense of sadness is appreciated – the classroom only makes its full sense, and does its most important work, when we stop asking how the teacher is doing as a teacher, and focus instead on how the students are doing as learners.

 

“I have a lot of trouble talking with my colleagues about this, and getting them to work with me to stop hiring the best-talking, best-looking, smartest and most energetic teacher candidates. I have to get them to think about how much magic these applicants have with the kids. The meeting and greeting around a table is worse than pointless – it’s misleading. It encourages us to fall in love with candidates based on how they talk to adults, and make their colleagues feel. I want to know how they make kids feel. So we always have a couple of demonstration lessons with real kids as part of an interview process, and even then I have to get people on the hiring committee to stop looking at the teacher, and to look instead at the students. Where’s the learning happening? Who’s lighting up? Which kids are making progress, and how many are scratching their heads? These are the things that show us what a teacher can really do.” – Middle-School Principal, Massachusetts

I had a group of three new teachers at my school in California one year. All three were great, each in a different way. One was a classically-trained opera singer who was raised by his Spanish-speaking family in the U.S., and taught music and Spanish at our school. He’d been teaching for a number of years elsewhere, and had some tricks of the trade to help him day to day. One was a brilliant recent college graduate, just back from a fellowship year in Asia, and enormously warm-hearted, if a little overwhelmed by the practical aspects of becoming a teacher. One was a new college graduate who was teaching science for the first time, and volunteered to take on a heavy teaching load in order to offer a couple of classes in environmental studies.

 

A mixed group of ages, background and interests, but a powerful team. The veterans in our building understood that they were bringing some new perspectives and new energy to our little school, and all with a good spirit. They all made friends easily with other staff, and they all had early success becoming part of the community. Every one of them – without trying, I suspect – wound up with two or three students who would tell their favorite teachers from prior years how great these new teachers were. That really sealed the deal for a lot of the veterans. They know the students so well, and when a student with real character and judgment spoke up in a quiet moment and said, “You know, Mr. V – he’s really awesome,” that did something important. And every one of these three new teachers – different from each other as they were – had a similar appeal to a core group of students. One of the students finally explained it to me: “They make me happy,” Tiffany said. “Because they’re happy. They really act like they’re lucky to be here, and I love that.”

I really admire this teacher. He does things that I’m not sure I can do, and he does them well. He teaches in Virginia, mostly middle school math, and in a school that most of us would recognize as a tough place. Most of the students in his eighth-grade class come from low-income homes, very few of them with two parents in their lives, and many raised by grandmothers, aunts and foster parents. They are not, as a group, high scoring on most of their tests. Many don’t meet their grade-level standards in many subjects. But some do – more, in fact, than at many comparable schools. This teacher is tough, but never angry. His energy level is amazing. He seems to be talking almost all of the time, sometimes standing in front of the class, but sometimes leaning over a student’s shoulder, in a quiet voice.

 
He recognizes his students when they do the right thing. “Thank you, Joseph, for getting that pencil out. Thank you for being ready. Shawna, thank you for being ready.” The students might not feel that his thanks are deep and personal, but they like hearing them, and they rely on his acknowledgment to stay on track, to know that they’re doing the right things at the right time. In an otherwise chaotic environment, this guidance and reinforcement are obviously important and powerful. And he’s a fine teacher. He explains math concepts clearly, he cares about his students, and he gives them a surprising amount of one-on-one attention – not an easy thing to do in a class of 25 students, many struggling with the work.

 
In a different school in the same town, not far from the first and with a similar student body, another teacher is teaching math to eighth graders. The scene is very different. She doesn’t have the other teacher’s patter – she’s not thanking her students, and clearly they’re not as focused as a group. In fact, she has them sitting at clustered tables rather than in rows, designed, it seems, to have them less focused on the teacher and more on each other. She’s standing at the Smartboard in front of the class, talking about how to find the area of a triangle. She has a small girl standing up there with her, on the other side of the board. She’s talking to the class. “You start with the base, right?” she says, looking to the girl at the front of the room with her. The girl nods. “Once you know how long the base is,” the teacher continues, “you can start making your equation. But you need that first number to start with. So how long is the base?”

 
She turns her face to the girl up there with her, expectantly. The girl points to one side of the triangle. The teacher thinks for a minute – it’s hard to mistake the expression of a teacher thinking, especially when the teacher is a little bit surprised. This teacher was thinking of the line running side to side as the base of the triangle – the lower side, certainly the side I’d think of as the base, being a non-math person, because it’s right there at the bottom. But the math works with either of these sides of the triangle’s right-angle corner as the base. So she thinks for a moment and smiles at the girl, with that particular kind of smile that comes when you quickly solve a challenging puzzle.

 

“Yes,” the teacher says with affirmation in her voice, pleasure in it too, and even a little bit of relief – because she was clearly thinking, “Oops, she gave me the wrong answer. But wait. Why does the base have to be on the bottom? Any line can be the base in the triangle – I taught them that, and she remembers.” The teacher continued to work though the problem, the student was shy but clear enough and right on the money with the rest of her answers, and got plenty of praise as she got back to her seat.

 
The first teacher was a great talker; the second teacher was a great listener. Some students need more of one than the other, but the risk of being unbalanced – of being all one or all the other – is what I worry about the most. Personally, I want more teachers in my school like the teacher who listened so well to her student, who was so open-ended and respectful of her student that she noticed how right the girl was even when she seemed wrong at first glance. But I want her to know what the skillful, commanding talker does, and have those skills at her disposal as well.

I’m visiting a classroom in a close-in suburb near Chicago. It’s less a suburb, in fact, than an extension of the dense streets of small houses, tall fences around many yards and bars on most windows, that fill large sections of Chicago’s south side. This is a neighborhood past the bloc of hard-core poverty and public housing, home mostly to families that live in tight spaces, send their children to school through at least the first one or two years of high school, and live with parents away more often than home – at day jobs and night jobs, on the other side of a border, or boarding with another family as a live-in nanny or maid. “These children are unpredictable,” says the teacher I’m visiting, a ninth-grade math instructor at a sizable but not huge high school. Midwestern public schools often run to three or four thousand students, massive brick buildings that no longer even look like factories, because no one builds factories like this anymore, square brick castles three or four stories tall. This school is, in fact, brick, but more sprawling, and enrolls about 1,500 students, still far too large for students to be well known by most of the teachers who work there but smaller at least than it might be.

 
The teacher I’m visiting teaches six classes a week, five a day, in 50-minute periods. She has lunchroom duty twice a week and advises the student newspaper which, in fact, has not published an issue in two years. Three teachers are, officially, advisors to the paper, but they have not yet found the magical combination of three or four motivated students who can write clear English and external funds – most likely from advertisers – to pay for printing of a physical issue. “When we find the next student editor, we’ll probably go with an online edition. But most students won’t go online to see it. The advisors have an official meeting twice a year – that’s required if we want the credit for the extracurricular duty – and last time we thought that maybe a Twitter feed could be good. So many kids have phones. But I’m not sure they use Twitter. So many of them work. They text short messages, less social or thoughtful, more about something happening, key details. It’s actually interesting as math – counting the number of characters, figuring out informal code. I hope I can find someone who wants to try it this year, and has the time.”

 
Her classes are larger than she’d like, but absenteeism is so high that she usually has fewer than 20 students in the room, and sometimes a good deal fewer. Her lowest-level math course – Commercial Mathematics, not much more than addition, subtraction, multiplication and division – has twelve officially, and eight or nine on a given day. “This is a class that works. The size makes it the kind of class where we can get to know each other, and I can have students working on problems that really fit their personal level of ability. We’ll open with conversation about what’s happening in their lives, do about ten minutes of a presentation of a concept or a review of one of the times tables, and then I’ll have a group of about twenty problems for each student, about half the class can do the same problems, but the others will get some variation on the theme, pitched a little higher or a little lower.”
The students come in to class after an electronic tone hums loudly in the hall for three seconds, the halls fill with an enormous collection of sound: first tables, chair and doors, then a wave of urgent conversation with a few voices and words standing higher above the tide, and then in twos and threes, and then in a final trickle of three single students, they arrive. The first and most noticeable difference from their peers in higher-income schools: no big bags or backpacks.

 
A couple do have backpacks, but not bursting. They hold notebooks, pencils, phones, a little bit of food. There’s little mystery why: “They don’t do homework,” their teacher tells me. She’s not apologizing, though not happy about it.

 
“In this school, they simply don’t. We assign classwork as homework, and have them do it here. Or not do it, as they choose, but we encourage them. The question as a teacher is whether to meet them where they are and move them forward from there, or lay out some rules and standards, and see what happens. A lot of us have tried both and a lot in the middle. It’s not a matter of discipline, but it’s a kind of culture and language issue. If I came into your class and gave you a homework assignment with the instructions in German, or told you to do it on your private airplane, or assumed that you knew all the parts of some highly specialized game and just began talking in that language, what would you do? You’d scratch your head maybe, you’d ask a friend, your friend would say, no we just ignore that, it doesn’t matter, or you’d just ignore it on your own maybe, because you’re running off to work at McDonalds or to help your mother with the new baby, or to go clean houses. I don’t lose sleep about this. I start with who they are, where they are, and move from there. It’s meaningful in every way. It makes as much sense to focus on what we’re not doing here as it would to talk to a history major at Princeton and bemoan the fact that he’s not a chemistry major.”

My father was a teacher, though teaching was not his first profession. He’d become an engineer after finishing his degree at New York’s City University. He was surprised, though, by how little joy he took from corporate and military engineering.

 
Before he was out of his twenties, he began his first high school teaching job. It put him on a trio of busses each day, twice a day. He felt the pull of his new life – he now knew that he was a teacher, born for this kind of work – but his school was too far from home. When a spot opened up at a top math-and-science high school in much closer to his home in Brooklyn, he leapt.

 
He loved teaching. Three stories capture that love. None are about what he taught; all are about how he taught, and how he learned.
The first takes place in the junior high school he attended, though the important prologue to this story begins earlier. “The teachers could really have a bad attitude,” he recalled later about those 1940’s classrooms. “And one day when a teacher made a particularly obnoxious remark, I climbed up on my desk and punched him in the nose.” This would have been in fourth grade, maybe fifth. My father might embellish a story now and then, but I believe this one. He never shied away from conflict, and he was unstoppable when he thought he was right.

 
Fast forward to junior high school. By seventh grade, my father was on what he later called the “pre-delinquent track.” He’d been put in a program for poorly-behaved students. They had minimal academic classes and spent most of each day working in the school’s printing shop under the guidance of a famously tough man named Johnny Fontana who had never been to college, was lucky to have a steady job away from the usual dark and dangerous sites of his industrial printing trade, and found in my father a boy with talent.

 
Fontana set firm limits for my father’s behavior and enforced them. Certainly it helped that he was bigger and stronger than the boy. He saw that my father had some natural aptitude for math and pressed him to study for one of New York City’s “challenge exam” high schools. Along with thousands of other New York City students, though perhaps the only representative of the pre-delinquent track, he sat for the exam and to the shock of many he passed. He entered Stuyvesant High School and worked like coal miner every day to earn passing grades. He was, my mother later observed, a plodder: bit by bit, he would work at every problem. More through determination than flashes of insight, he would get the work done, pass his classes, and hold onto his place in this elite institution.

 
Another story. My father made his way to the faculty of Brooklyn Technical High School – a school that held much in common with Stuyvesant – partly because he could teach physics, but partly because he could teach the radio electronics shop course there as well. Brooklyn Tech did not offer a pre-delinquent track, but the least-appreciated among the school’s bright students would often wind up taking shop. So my father knew them, and knew them with some of the warmth he remembered from his own shop class in junior high school.

 
Once day, he later told me, there was a rumor spreading at lunch that two groups of tough kids at the school had formed into gangs, had knives and chains, and were going to do some real harm when the school day ended. When the final bell rang, my father peeked out from the radio shop – not much bigger than a closet, he said – and saw a scene out of West Side Story: the toughest of the tough boys was at the head of a phalanx of his followers, heading quickly down the hall toward his opposite number. The leader of the first group ran within arm’s reach past the radio shop door. My father reached out, grabbed him, pulled him in and locked the door. “End of riot,” my father reported a couple of decades later, still quite proud of himself.

 
My father had a lot of stories like this, and I know that he believed in them fully. That was part of who he was – and a big part of why he was a great teacher: he was a believer.

 
A final story. My father taught high school science in the age of Sputnik. The Russian marvel, the first man-made object to orbit the Earth, unleashed a flurry of anxiety over the “science gap” and a river of money meant to supe up science in American schools. One particular experiment began with the interesting observation that helping average teachers become better at teaching might do more good than luring more top performers into the classroom, if only because there are (by definition) so many average teachers. The National Science Foundation was, therefore, given a sizable amount of federal funding to identify a group of average science teachers and place them inside the nation’s cutting-edge research facilities to see whether this exposure to the best and the brightest might inspire the teachers to better-than-average heights.

 
My father was one of those lucky average teachers, and his experience leaving Brooklyn to work for a season inside the University of California’s Lawrence Radiation labs did indeed transform him. But not at first. He arrived at the lab and was given a fairly mundane task, presumably well suited to an electrical engineer like my father. He was asked to make lightening.

 
In certain of the large vacuum chambers at the Radiation Lab, scientists were splitting atoms and sub-atomic particles were (they hoped) shooting off in various directions when these atoms ruptured. But it was all happening microscopically. Without some way to verify the paths of the subatomic particles, the scientists were not entirely sure that they were accomplishing what they thought they were accomplishing. But if the experimenters could throw a bolt of lightning into the chamber precisely when the atom split, the lightening would follow the path of least resistance – the path taken by the spinning-out particle – and light it up for all to see. So my father made lightning, and was fairly content with that task.

 
Every week, though, he found himself in a staff meeting at the lab, and seldom understood the conversation. He was ready to head home a failure, a science teacher but not a scientist, when a lab-mate asked him what was wrong. I can’t follow it, he confessed. I just don’t understand. Well, what’s your field, the other fellow asked. Electrical engineering, my father said, not expecting the distinction to do any good. Ah, came the reply. You speak another language. When they say this in physics, they mean that in electrical engineering. The language was the issue, the style of reference, not the depth of the concepts.

 
With this key in his hand, my father opened the stuck doors in front of him, and had a fine fellowship. He came back to New York, came back to teaching, took two master’s degrees at night and went on to complete a PhD part-time. He moved from his high school to a community college electrical technology department. There he used the work of an engineering professor named Mischa Schwartz to translate electrical engineering concepts into more basic language that allowed a generation of technicians without any higher math to do the kinds of repair and maintenance on serious electronics that were previously the province of engineers only.

 
So this idea stuck with my father through his career as a teacher: it’s never as hard as you think it is. Learn the language, figure out how the other guys are doing it, and you can do it too. The will to get it done is the part that matters most.

My father was a teacher, but a certain kind of teacher, and for the most part only that kind of teacher. Not a leaper but a plodder; highly organized in his presentation of materials, reflecting not so much the orderly mind as the discipline of a man climbing a mountain.
He was organized because it mattered a great deal; because there was much going on he could not control or even understand and the proven pathways made some sense at least of how one might get from here to there. He propelled himself with a fierce work ethic and inch-by-inch progress through mazes of data, technical solutions to practical problems, and administrative bureaucracy. The most important thing he told me about his life as a high school teacher – when I was in my early 20’s – was that it was clear to him early on at Brooklyn Technical High School that most of his students were smarter than he was. There was no embarrassment for him in that fact, just a different kind of tuning necessary in his teaching apparatus.

 
My path was different. Less diligent in its way, though notable for periods of intense and extended hard work through courses taken and courses taught, periods all the more regular as I got older, left school for a time, returned with fresh perspective, left again, returned again, and made my way to and through an unusual teaching career.

 

I was more of the leaper to my father’s plodder. He was at one point the chairman of a two-year technology degree program at a city college in New York while I was a graduate student in literature at Columbia University. He regaled me with a story one day about sitting on a school-wide promotion committee, railing against a system that failed to reward faculty who published technical articles in non-academic publications, while giving promotion points to people who “sit under a tree reading poetry.” That sounded suspiciously like the kind of work I was actually doing in my own graduate program.

 
But once I began teach at Columbia, I began to understand my father’s experience teaching smarter students than he’d ever been, or was at the time. I also, at some level, understood the wisdom of his nonchalance about it. A few years further down the road, teaching full-time at Harvard University, I thought more consciously about that fact. Most of my students – just about all, really – were smarter than I was. They knew more than I’d known at their age (which was only eight or nine years earlier). Many knew more than I knew at the time. Unquestionably all knew more than a few subjects far more deeply that I ever would.

 
I taught writing classes, specifically Writing About History and Writing About Social and Ethical Issues. I taught my students some facts – and the teaching of facts seemed to me quite important; I enjoy it still and we need more of it, generally – but more method. In particular, I taught them – or tried to – how it felt to write well by the standards of the schools, workplaces and public transit points of ideas toward which many colleges and universities point their students.

 
And, in the words of poet Robert Bly, I tried to teach them a kind of leaping. Bly was a wonderful poet and teacher. He talked about poems doing their work the way that animals might, elegant step following elegant step, pausing in moments of beauty, radiating tension when the air sharpens for a moment, and then – after the measured pace of perfect stride after stride, they leap. A sudden movement that might end with a bloody encounter, or a short flight over a fallen tree: the leap is what an animal can do that a man or a woman can’t. It is what a poem can do that a simple story never does. It is everything we think is impossible, but it is also the clear culmination of every simple, beautiful step we have taken, now taken to its purist, most impossible expression for just one flashing moment.

One of the great things about being in love is that without trying, you are totally focused on someone else. When you’re in love, you’re not looking at yourself in the mirror and saying, “I’m looking pretty good today. ” Instead, it’s all about the other person: I love her. I love him. I love watching him walk through the park, I love being with her at dinner. She’s looking so great. I love the way he talks. And on and on.
When teaching is just right, that’s exactly the way it feels. It’s never, “I was great today.” It’s always, “I can’t believe how great my kids were today.”
Twenty years ago, the focus of school reform was largely on fixing school systems and models of instruction. Today a great deal more attention is being paid to finding and supporting great teachers. “Teacher quality” has rightfully become the focus (for the moment at least) of much of the perennial debate over American education.
All to the good. Great teachers – especially in struggling schools – make a tremendous difference for their students. Poor teachers in the best-arranged and supported schools, using the best methods, still shortchange their students – our students – in lasting ways.
But once we agree that great teachers are the key to great education, a big question needs to be answered: are great teachers special people whom we need to discover, or are they a collection of activities, outlooks and practices that most people can learn and practice?