O My America: A First-Grade Tale

by Lawrence Bush

My wife Susan is an educator who trains teachers in the use of creative movement in the classroom to teach curriculum. That’s right: Susan teaches grammar, arithmetic, history, literature, science, and more through kinesthetic lessons that get the kids up out of their seats, turn the hyperactive ones into classroom leaders, and restore the light to everybody’s eyes.

Whenever Susan comes home from work, she tells me these moving, redemptive stories about education, and I always yell at her: Write them down! Don’t just tell them to me, write them down!

Others of the stories she tells are about systematic stupidity. Here’s the latest, about two of her favorite teachers, a first-grade teacher and a second-grade teacher, both of whom actively use the arts in their classroom, and one of whom often has difficult children placed in her classroom because she has such success with them. Both teachers were recently evaluated by an observer from the New York State educational establishment — this is “a school in need of improvement,” after all — and were criticized for being “too nurturing.”

“Too nurturing” — to kids who have parents in jail, kids who bring home backpacks filled by their school on the weekend to make sure they have enough food, kids who are told “No, we can’t” whenever they want something, kids who are already convinced by age 6 that life is a bitchin’ struggle. You are too nurturing, dear teachers, because you’d better be preparing them for that standardized test, that “race to the top,” that system where competition, competition, competition, is the only virtue.

What a way to build human beings.

You can read more about Susan’s work at Minds in Motion.