I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about how teachers affect students’ lives, and that’s led me to think about the teachers who changed my life. It’s a fitting time of year, I suppose, to look backward and think about the educators who impacted us most deeply. So as teachers all over the country are preparing for summer (or have already started), here’s a meme for everyone….

What three teachers made the most impact on you?

I’ll start:

3) Mr. Tom Mazak — Fifth Grade — he was gruff and to the point, but he also really made learning exciting and memorable. How did I learn what it meant to invert a fraction? Mr. Mazak called Aaron Finklestein, the shortest kid in class (about 1/4 inch shorter than me), to the front of the room, and he said, "Today, we’re going to learn to invert fractions, and you’re going to remember it, because now I’m going to invert Aaron."

And he did. His classes were always fun and challenging, and I remember always feeling like I had to do my best or risk disappointing him.

2) Professor Tom Sobol — Graduate School (second time) — I’ve written about Prof. Sobol a few times, so I won’t go into much more detail, except to say this: Professor Sobol gave passionate and intelligent and reasoned language to so many things that I felt to be true. He gave all of us an example of a way to live our lives to make the most difference we could. And he has the singular ability to make your words and ideas sound so much better than they probably are.

1) Mr. Al Wilson — 11th and 12th Grade — "Big Al" Wilson was the TV Sports advisor and my English teacher, and at the ooint in my life when the goals my family had for me and the goals I had for myself didn’t seem in sync, he was the person who said to me, "You have to decide for yourself what you want from your life. You can’t do it because your parents want you to." He also was the person who, at a time when I didn’t believe those goals were achievable, helped me to believe in myself. And he was an acerbic wit who showed that you could care about kids and still be funny and gruff and stern when he had to be. His office was where the "TV Sports Dudes" (Dude was a unisex term) hung out, and that office was the template for the Tech Office at Beacon years later.

Who were the teachers who had the biggest impact on your life?

This case should be a reminder of why it’s really important to vote in those off-year elections, especially when the school board members are up for election. Leslie Pinney is a recently elected school board member in Illinois District 214. According to the Daily Herald, Ms. Pinney was "elected with a vow to bring ‘Christian beliefs into all decision-making.’" And she apparently tried to be true to her word, looking to block a book order that would have replentished the numbers of nine books already in the curriculum on the grounds that the books are pornographic. The books? (source: The Chicago Tribune)

• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
• The Awakening by Kate Chopin
• Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
• The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
• Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
• How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez

Much has been made that Ms. Pinney has not read these books, but rather claims that a google search led her to believe that they were pornographic. I’m guessing that, given her backing from conservative fundamentalist groups, she just cross-referenced the school’s book order list with the list from organizations like Parents Against Bad Books in Schools and bing came up with her list.

(For the record — I looked through PABBS "list of lists" — here’s the list of books on the list I’ve personally taught (at least pieces of) in my career — 1984, A Separate Peace (on SLA’s 9th grade list), Am I Blue (Coming Out from the Silence), Black Boy, Brave New World, Canterbury Tales, The Crucible, Death of a Salesman, Fahrenheit 451, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Hamlet (HAMLET?!?!?!), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Jane Eyre, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Othello, The Awakening, The Great Gatsby, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Lottery, The Scarlet Letter, Their Eyes Were Watching God, To Kill A Mockingbird (also on SLA’s 9th grade list) — and I found a ton of my favorite books, books we taught at Beacon but I hadn’t personally taught, books that I’ve always wanted to teach. Take a look at the list. It’s mindboggling.)

The good news here is that the school board voted down the resolution 6-1 and the community came out in droves to debate the issue — most coming down in favor of keeping the books in the curriculum. But the frightening thing is that no one can expect that this is the final salvo in this fight. What’s the old saying — The price of freedom is eternal vigilance….

Interestingly, the Chicago Tribune offered Ms. Pinney the opportunit to respond to her critics — and for her critics to respond to her. The debate has been civil, but overwhelmingly against banning books. Ms. Pinney claims that she never intended to "ban" books, merely to take them off of the required (classroom) lists. The point — made by several commentors — by attempting to stop the purchase order that would bought the class sets of the texts, she was, in effect, banning them.

In the end, English classes in high school are about more than learning grammar, they are a place to debate difficult and challenging ideas. They should be a place where texts challenge us to examine our own lives. Sometimes that means that we have to encounter ideas that push us… frighten us… force us to come to terms with our own beliefs and illusions. By examining our own ideas, by exposing ourselves to dissenting ideas, we grow. The texts that I have read that Ms. Pinney sought to ban (five of the nine) are powerful, challenging, engaging texts. They belong in our schools — and bravo to the community for coming out in support of allowing teachers to teach books that matter, and bravo to the six other board members who stood up and voted Ms. Pinney’s resolution down.

Will Richardson has a great opportunity tomorrow — he’s got a captive audience made up of 49 Superintendents, and he asked for input about what to say to them. I was grappling with this one for a while, and I finally hit on what I wanted to say when I talked to Will on the phone today.

Tell them that our schools have to change or die.

Tell them that there are more and more people arguing that the classroom… the very thing that we have spent our professional career in love with… is becoming obsolete.

Tell them that those people are right unless we learn to change.

Tell them that our kids already have changed.

Tell them that our kids need us to teach even more. Our kids have more access to a more varied level of information than ever before in human history and our kids need us to teach them how to navigate that space more than ever.

Tell them that locking out the sites and tools of this new world our kids live in will render us irrelevant and useless when our students need us most.

Tell them that this new world means that teaching skills — cognitive and meta-cognitive — is now more important than memorizing content.

Tell them that multiple choice tests can’t possibly measure the new skills our kids must master.

Tell them that our students can be content producers now as much as content consumers.

Tell them that many of our students know how to reach a larger audience more quickly than any school district memo could ever hope to. Tell them that our students need our help to make them understand how powerful that is.

Tell them that we have the opportunity to use these tools to extend our reach far beyond our school walls… far past the hours of the school day. Tell them that we can build the 24/7/365 school if we embrace the technologies our students are already using.

Tell them that there are too many teachers using these tools already to think that our schools won’t be affected by them.

Tell them that it’s unfair and unsustainable to think that the lone teacher, using yahoo groups and hotmail accounts without explicit school support, can make enough difference to create institutional change. Tell them that the change has to come from our schools using the tools as part of their mission and part of their infrastructure.

Tell them that our students are already telling new stories… and tell them that it’s time for our schools to do so as well.

Tell them that this matters more than they are willing to admit.