Ted and Me: In Memoriam

Like many, if not most, I had a rough first year as a teacher.  I was 21 years old and full of passion and desire but little else. I had survived student teaching on the Navajo Reservation for six months, but arrived on the other side of that experience with much to learn. I was teaching two-hour blocks of seventh-grade history and English. I was struggling on almost every level in almost every area. 

You name it and I was having difficulty with it. Content — struggling.  Implementing pedagogy — struggling. Connecting with students — struggling. Connecting with colleagues — struggling. Lesson design — struggling. To top it all off, I was new to town, and the woman I loved was across the country working on a master’s degree. It was bad all over.  And don’t even remind me of the classroom management disasters I was experiencing.

Things had gotten so bad that I had taken to writing my letter of resignation as a stress-reliever. On particularly bad days I would go home, lock myself in my bedroom and write out a letter to my principal explaining why I was such a failure, asking him to accept my letter of resignation.

It was the day after writing my letter of resignation for the second time that I was introduced to Ted Sizer [2]. That was when an older teacher whom I had never seen before stopped by room and said, “You’re new right?  Here,” and then abruptly left.  I didn’t know until later that she was leaving the school forever, retiring in the middle of school year.  She had handed me a book entitled Horace’s Compromise by an educator I had never heard of named Ted Sizer.  It was old and battered, underlined, with questions and recriminations scribbled in the margins.  I was obviously a book that had been loved and examined repeatedly, mined for all its nuggets of knowledge. 

I sat down right there in my classroom and began to skim it.  I read the majority of it that night and had read it all by the weekend. The book gave me energy, a bounce that I needed to keep alive.  On Saturday, I went in pursuit of Sizer’s second book, Horace’s School, and devoured that one as quickly as the first. Sizer’s writing style was unique for an educational text.  He wrote through the eyes of an “everyman,” a fictional English teacher named Horace Smith who examines and explains the compromises that educators face working in a system without the time and support to do their jobs as well as they need to it. In the second book, Horace Smith becomes a part of the reform at his school site. The books were honest and hopeful and it is not too much to say that they saved my career. It was through these books that I was introduced to Ted Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools and the underlying educational philosophy and pedagogy that he developed.

If you’ve ever used an essential question, ever backwards planned, ever engaged students in a Socratic Seminar, or ever had students complete an end-of-unit or end-of-course exhibition, then you have been the beneficiary of the work of Ted Sizer.  It is with great sadness that I mourn his passing on October 24th, 2009.  He will be greatly missed in the educational struggles that are ahead of us, and all around us.