Let the light in

Education notes


 

 

“I had never seen a black Jesus before, and this sight both knocked me for a loop and opened up a space in my mind that I’d never known needed light.” So says the 12-year-old white narrator in Robert Mc- Cammon’s, A Boy’s Life, upon entering a black person’s home for the first time, and seeing a portrait of a black Jesus wearing a crown of thorns. This beautiful sentence lingered on my mind, an expression of the often unwitting, but not malicious, ignorance that plagues humanity. At some point, I realized that what happened to that 12-year old has also happened to me in the last 10 years of my teaching career. Spaces are constantly being opened, by students, or workshops, or colleagues, or books or articles in journals – spaces that I’d never known needed light.

W.H. Auden once said, “We would rather be ruined than changed.” While that is certainly sometimes true, there are also things that change can ruin. The trick is to find the balance, to decide what to keep and what to let go, when to hold and when to fold. I believe in teaching and in life, our values must be retained, but content and processes, products and appearances, the route we take to those values, can be changed. Just as Martin Luther King said we should judge people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, so also should we judge education, not by appearances or trends, fancy devices and gadgets, number of sports or electives, whether teachers are brand new or experienced, but by the consistent quality that lies beneath the surface. And Port Aransas ISD delivers.

We have always delivered: When we played basketball in what is now the elementary P.E. gym, only the floors were hollow wood slats, and there was no air conditioning and we had to raise the heavy windows and brace them up with boards to get a breeze going – we delivered. When we taught in a school with a student smoking lounge and open classrooms and all levels of students in the same class and few sports and even fewer electives, and no technological devices, we delivered. (Well, we did have Macbeth on a cassette tape until James Pate and I taped ourselves over it, a joke that our excellent English teacher, Rita Reed, did not find amusing.)

Ask students who went to school here in the 80s if they were prepared for college, and they will tell you they excelled. The same was true for students in the 90s, and is for students today. We have changed our outward appearance and methods to include cutting edge technology, new resources, new safety measures, new course and sport offerings, new sidewalks and playing fields. We have kept our commitment to excellence. Dear friends have gone, but the lessons they taught us and the spirit they embodied live on. PAISD models what is essential to continued success in anything: change the packaging as times and needs dictate, but retain the core values. Know what to keep, and what to let go. Change for the sake of change, or meeting for the sake of meeting, is not the goal. But we embrace both when they can help us carry our values into the next decade of students, and the next, and the next.

That is why PAISD had a strategic planning meeting in partnership with several community members, business leaders and parents last Thursday (Sept. 11) night. This group of people with open minds, from all walks of life, came together with a common goal: How best can we serve the children of our community? We looked at spaces that are shining brightly, and those that might need some light. Participants were dedicated, enthusiastic, purpose-driven, open-minded and optimistic. This is why we will always offer quality education at PAISD. We are all invested. We constantly seek to be better when we are already one of the best. We love our history but aren’t afraid of our future. We aren’t afraid of the light.

Melanie Mayer is a Port Aransas High School English language arts Teacher and PAISD college/career readiness coordinator. She has published two books, her latest is called Miles to Go: What I Learned While I Was Teaching and was released in May. Her first book is titled Two Roads Diverged and I Took Both: Meaningful Writing Instruction in an Age of Testing.


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