on defiance.

Even the school bells, they tell us, have their history. Early public school children, their education aimed at creating successful factory workers out of farmboys accustomed to the rhythms of the sun, had to be conditioned to city time, to factory time. To it mattering that way, the way children and workers bellyache for the stroke of the bell, the way time feels when authority tells your body not you. Can you picture the blinking, barefoot, wild-eyed boy being herded, quieted, etched slowly away into the form of his caste?

But that is not my duty. I am building citizens - humans - not laborers. What I want is thoughtfulness, not obedience. Respect owed not because I am me but because we are we.

Now piece together incongruous fragments from our education: someone writes that "urban" (read: ghetto) children (who look to me much like other children on the inside), unaccustomed to the gentle and forgiving manner of the young white liberal teacher, are confused, their achievement threatened, by this approach and require the kind of toughness associated with love at home. (I won't unpack that sentence now but buy me a drink and I'll tell you all about it.) Our optimistic (read: naive) ears abound in progressive euphemisms for "don't smile 'til Christmas," they fall from the mouths of authority and collect at our ankles.

We have hammered into us this idea that you gotta be tough right from the start, to not slip, not accept anything once, not early on, or else there's no hope and you can never reel 'em back in. Sometimes it seems very sensible. I do believe kids need a consistent, solid structure. (I know I do.) But how can we teach them to think critically, if we don't allow them to criticize us? I have seen an entire class cower in silence as they are yelled at for not meeting miscommunicated, and sometimes actually incorrect or spontaneously altered, expectations. It is at these moments that I realize again that the majority of my struggles these days have to do with being made to feel as these kids are feeling. Where's the sense in teaching "open-ended questions," in believing in education as dialogue, but not accepting students' questioning of your self?

If I am making a mistake or being unjust, I want my kids to feel free to point it out to me. Otherwise, what are we teaching them to do when they encounter injustice in the world?

The night I found "A Teacher Ain't Nothin' But a Hero,"* by Bill Ayers, I had grown sick of cowering in silence with my students and exhausted at having to teach outside my skin. There was magic in there, words that showed my bruised instincts I wasn't crazy. In it, he tracks the Hollywood image of the teacher-hero, reading films such as "Stand and Deliver" and "Blackboard Jungle" for what they tell us a city teacher should be like, and for that idealized teacher the first principle is always assumed to be "classroom management" (read: discipline). The problem with that picture, as Ayers so eloquently points out, is that "real learning requires assertion, not obedience; action, not passivity." As he talks of "teaching defiance" I curl over the page, circling words and underlining passages, and feel myself begin to breathe again. I think again of how reading is so often about feeling yourself not to be alone.

"Teaching is intellectual work - puzzling and difficult - and at its heart it is ethical work. It is idiosyncratic, improvisational, and most of all, relational. All attempts to reduce teaching to a formula, to something easily predicted, degrade it immeasurably...

...it involves learning how to...embrace students as dynamic beings and fellow creatures. It requires building bridges from the known to the not-yet-known. And it demands liberating schooling from its single-minded obsession with control, obedience, hierarchy and everyone's place in it...

Real teachers need to question the common sense, break the rules, become political and activist in concert with kids. This is true heroism, an authentic act of courage. We need to take seriously the experiences of youngsters, their sense-making, their knowledge, and their dreams - and particularly we must interrogate the structures that kids are rejecting. In other words, we must assume an intelligence in youngsters, assume that they are acting sensibly and making meaning in situations that are difficult and often dreadful, and certainly not of their own making. In finding common cause with youngsters, we may also find there our own salvation as teachers."

Serendipitously, Mr. Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn were speaking the next day, in another context, a screening of the documentary of the Weather Underground, of which they once were a part. I hold my mother's hand as we watch, then wait shyly after the talk, wanting to tell him, thank you for helping me to breathe. Instead I manage to introduce myself. Nonetheless the day is beautiful and invigorating and I sit in the park, sunny autumn afternoon, blissfully reading the page where he's written "To Margeaux, With admiration for your journey so far and hope for a future fit for children - a place of peace and justice."

There are still only more questions. What does a classroom look like where rigor and freedom both thrive? How do I get us there? And always more words, falling. In a marginal vignette one of our textbooks warns us about the first-year elementary school teacher fired for refusing to say the pledge of allegiance along with her students, who were required to do so. What do I do about the tiny freshman girl in my homeroom who's already planning on joining the marines after high school, like her big brothers? What kind of space will I build with my students, once I am free to choose this for myself? What I found the night I read Ayers's essay wasn't an answer but something more dynamic, an affirmation of my own senses.

Even as I type these words, return to the moments of this reading, I feel myself healing again. Exhausted by the dissonance at my ankles, I had again lost track of my purpose for a moment. Telling you this story brings me back home to my journey.


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"A Teacher Ain't Nothin' But a Hero" is from the wonderful collection City Kids, City Teachers: Reports from the Front Row, edited by William Ayers and Patricia Ford.