Dewey - The secret lives of teachers

For many years, my colleague Bob Oros offered a history elective at my school called The Working Class. The course covers an enormous range of territory, from the Spartacus Revolt in the Roman Republic to contemporary sweatshop labor. But more than anything else, Bobs class is an experience in what might be termed urban anthropology. His first assignment calls for students to go forth into their respective neighborhoods and observe people working. Upon identifying an occupation and a worker willing to talk, students are required to interview that person and take some pictures. They are then to produce a photo essay about the workers occupation, with captioned pictures of the workers in action. Years ago, students used disposable cameras; nowadays they use their phones.

This assignment struck me as a good idea in the abstract. But the finished products I saw were stunning. I say this not because the quality of student work was so good (though there were many fine projects) but rather because the implicit message of the assignment was so palpable: there is simply no such thing as unskilled labor. The workers who came to life before my eyes in this assignment didnt necessarily love their jobs. But even seemingly simple occupations proved to have complications and nuances that arent obvious when, say, youre ordering a burger and fries (be careful not to do X; always make sure you do Y, but not if theres a Z involved). Ive never looked at work in quite the same way since. Nowadays I often try to strike up conversations with the workers I encounter on any given day and query them about the nature of their routines unless its obvious, even to me, that doing so is making me a pain in the ass.

Bob has another assignment in which students are asked to write a paper tracing the existence of a consumer product back to its source. One student chose a custom-made shawl that his mother and a few colleagues had chipped in to buy for a colleague recently diagnosed with cancer. He went to the boutique in midtown Manhattan where it had been commissioned, talking with the owner and manager of the store and following them into its back rooms, where immigrants from Taiwan and mainland China, laboring long hours in a high-end business, spoke with what he described as a vague sense of escape in their voice. He heard a story from a manager of the seamstresses, a woman who had tried to start a business in China but could not succeed because of her gender (she described one customer who simply walked out upon learning that the store was hers). The student also heard about a worker whose health problems slowed her down but whose colleagues covered for her until she left the company to care for a grandchild. Toward the end of the piece, he turns his attention back to the final product. A turquoise shawl lays across the table in the show room, he wrote. There are bright colors that scream for attention all throughout the room and it looks like it belongs. Made of cashmere, it is exceptionally soft. It is warm, yet not overly hot. Finding the seams that keep it together is a job for Scooby Doo and the gang. The perfection was not easy to achieve, but it has been. Not bad for a high schooler. But I suppose I would think so: the student is my son.

I mention Bobs class, and my sons experience in it, by way of explaining how it is that I am now trying to explain my own job. Its not any more fascinating than anybody elses. But I now believe all jobs are of intrinsic interest, because theyre always about a great many more things than whatever task is at hand. The trick a piece of work in its own right is figuring out a way to get at those things, whether they involve geopolitics, shifts in public attitudes, or the compromises that sometimes must be made in balancing conflicting imperatives.

Finding the right mode of discussion is a particularly vexing challenge in the case of teaching. Unlike some occupations, it engenders a good deal of curiosity. A lot of people have ideas about teaching, and a lot of those ideas involve how to get teachers to do their jobs better. Or how to find more good teachers. Or how to get around the need for them. Theres nothing inherently wrong with any of this; many people engaged such enterprises have honorable motives. The problem is that relatively few of them have ever been teachers themselves (and almost by definition these few have not been teachers for any length of time reformers are often too busy working on systems to actually perform the workaday tasks of teaching). And while its possible for nonteachers to understand what teachers do all day, identifying and retaining good ones is more than a matter of monitoring the results of standardized tests.