Top O' the Mornin

I read the Education section of the New York Times first thing every morning. It is a depressing habit. Between EdWeek, a host of teacher blogs, and the Boston Globe, I end up with a well-rounded diet of horrible. This teacher got fired, that superintendent is incompetent, this testing frenzy is ruining the lives of children everywhere, this that this that.

Lo and behold, this morning featured a fantastic and uplifting piece about Irish step dancing in the Bronx. It seems a young Irish lass moved to the Bronx to teach music. A long way from her River Liffey, Ms. Duggan has inspired a troupe of young girls to love (like obsessively love) Irish step dancing. The troupe is dubbed "the pride of the school." She even raised enough money to take 32 students to Ireland, where they performed on Irish television.

We're going to file that, here at Education Action!, under freaking awesome.

This positive story about appreciating one another's culture, the bonding between student and teacher, and kids feeling engaged with their school, feels tragic to me on account of its rarity. I can remember being mid-grad school and feeling like I wanted to run from the education world as rapidly as possible. It was the most depressing field in the world, near as I could tell. It was going to be nothing but an uphill battle, to no avail, forever. I spoke with a fellow student who was feeling similarly. We left the library early and watched Mr. Holland's Opus in my living room, and balled our little teacher eyeballs out. How could we ever, in a million years, choose any other profession? It took one sappy ass Richard Dreyfuss film to put us back on track.

Education is, in my fair employer's words, a beautiful profession. Of all the jobs out there, it is the most challenging, the most essential, but also the most rewarding. We stay in it because when a bunch of elementary school girls, who didn't even know where Ireland was a year ago, fall in love with learning Michael Flatley style, it makes an entire year of uphill climbing worth it, a thousand times worth it. Now they just have to read Ulysses and I'll be happy...