This morning at 7:00 am, I was writing to a former student of mine — she’s approaching 30 and trying to make sense of how she got to this moment in time. She’s a student – a person – who has meant a lot to me, and she’s been through a lot and come through as this amazing person on the other side of some real heartache. I had to tell her that I tried as hard as I could to help her back then, but I was a young teacher – younger than she is now – and I wish I would have known more of what to say or what to do. She had the kindness to point out that many years later, it still makes her happy that I’m proud of her and still in her life. What I have told her, but I don’t know if she really understands, is that being part of her life, being an important adult in her life has informed so much of how I think about teaching.

Tonight, at 6:15 pm, I listened to a teacher in a Philadelphia elementary school tell me that she couldn’t stop to find out what the kids knew about science because she would fall behind on the planning and scheduling timeline if she took the time to teach to their interests.

Tonight, at 2:30 am, I was watching the finale of the first season of Glee, laughing at myself because I couldn’t stop crying.

Glee is a soap opera that stretches the limits of credibility over and over again, but what the show gets right is when they sing. When the kids sing, you see what that space means to them. And what it reminds us is what happens when we create communities of care for kids. It shows us what kids can do when they are somewhere they want to be… with adults who care about them and listen to them and try for them. And what it shows us unabashedly is how much the kids means to teachers.

I watch that show and I think about every 6:30 am practice I ever had with my teams. I think about car rides to tournaments, and subway rides all over New York City. I think about English classes that were over too soon because the debates and dialogues and ideas were so intense that we couldn’t believe an hour had gone by that quickly. I think about trips to the coffee shop with a student to try to help them make sense of their world. I think about all the names and faces of the kids I have taught and coached… those kids who stay with me every day because they made me better for having taught them.

High schools are funny things. For four years, kids share their lives with us. We see them grow up through some of the craziest times of their lives, and if we are lucky, we get to have some small impact on them. Within the context of f(x) = x -3 and Newton’s Laws and Their Eyes Were Watching God, we learn about each other, and we touch each other’s lives, and then they move on, and we have a new group of kids who we have to care for with the same energy and passion and dedication as we cared for the kids who just left. It is a bit twisted, really, but it’s kind of amazing too. And I can’t think of any other way to spend my life.

We teach kids. I know I say that all the time, but it remains at the core of everything we do. We teach kids.

What Rhee and Gates and Rotterdam and Broad and all of these folks who think we can automate, off-shore, contract out teaching miss is we teach kids. And that doesn’t scale. And a computer program can’t provide mentoring. And a computer program can’t listen. And as much as I love on-line learning and as much as I know that the bonds that can form online are powerful and important, kids need a hand on their shoulder. And if we try to make every classroom the same, we will lose the ability to listen to kids, and that’s what they need to be able to learn.

There is such a rush to monetize education, bring the market to bear, make it more efficient, scalable, replicable… but how do you scale care? How do you replicate listening? Much of what I’m thinking about these days are questioning the pathways to structure those things into schools to make schools more humane, to give teachers and students more paths to share their ideas as they learn. But it is never a black box to be replicated. And it never happens scripting the day down to the minute. And I’m not sure it ever really shows up on the test.

What is best about our schools is that they are filled with very, very, very human beings with all our faults and all our flaws. As a nation, we need to return to an educational dialogue that celebrates that, rather than one that is attempting to strip as much of that away as possible.