“I should be marching away from my classroom in victory, but instead I feel like slinking away in the dead of night.” These are the words of Jordan Sonnenblick, who after 14 years of teaching middle school English in an urban school, gave up his career while still holding firmly to the high ideals of the profession that has been defiled by four words: No Child Left Behind.
In the video that accompanies this post, Jordan expresses his anguish with eloquence and control. It leaves the viewer with a haunting sense of “what might have been” had he been in conscience and with stalwart heart able to endure NCLB’s insult to his students and its violation of the purity of what is to him almost the sacrament of education.
Jordan, who has published three books, says he feels like a traitor in a way, but in a sense he has spiritually died in defense of his classroom. Before NCLB, that classroom was a holy place in which he and the next generation partook together of the communion of ideas and values that over time have made civilization worth preserving.
No more time for that, thanks to NCLB. Jordan notes that “arts programs have been gutted, shop programs are gone, and foreign language is a distant memory.” History’s legacy of inspirations and what should have been the perpetual dialogue of ideas have been replaced by “mandatory after-school drill sessions” and “joyless, sweaty drudgery.” Subjects that traffic in the life of the mind are now “frilly extras.” NCLB has forbidden teachers from bringing the ages to a new generation and helping them build and bear witness to new explorations and discoveries.
Jordan asks the chilling question that has already left him cold: “What took their place?” He salutes teachers who have not yet made their exit, but clearly Jordan has not resigned his vocation even though he has resigned his position: “I am still an urban teacher in my dreams and in my bones,” he says.
And he says a lot more in this video.
