I began teaching at Washington Irving in the fall of 2002, not knowing a thing about what I was in for. I had moved to New York from Chicago a few months before, and before that I had been in San Francisco. As well, I had never been inside a public school. After two days, I felt sure I would fail the students and myself. After two years I thought I could last a couple more years maybe. Now I look back and see how this experience of teaching at Irving has sustained me and given me purpose. As well, it answered this question: what is New York City?

My whole life I had been in awe of New York, amazed by it, and when I moved here I thought, I’ll finally understand what New York means. I went to Midtown, hated it. Went to Coney Island, loved it, but it felt like 1898 mixed with desperation. Went to Ellis Island, the ocean was beautiful, the halls were inspirational. But where was this New York I needed to find? The bridges amazed me, Brooklyn neighborhoods reminded me of the other cities I had lived in, or had those reminded me, in retrospect, of Brooklyn?

Finally, I realized New York wasn’t in any of those places the way I hungered for it. But New York, the New York I needed, was right in front of me, in my classroom. These kids come from all over, the Heights, East New York, Q-Boro, Parkchester and the Lower East Side. I even taught kids from Staten Island — they grew up where Wu-Tang grew up: Shaolin, my friends.

My students are the New York I searched for.

And it was my responsibility to help them identify what their dreams were, to explore. It is my responsibility still.

The problems they struggle with are huge. The problems are bigger than any school, but the students can bring them here, and I will help them. We will help them. Every teacher I met here was more committed to this job than I would have imagined before I joined them. They were fighting for this New York. Every year I choose to fight with them. I can’t stop now.

The mayor says this is failure. But what is failure? Is it this struggle against poverty, against class and race division? The one group I don’t see here in my class are from the class that goes to Florida when it gets too cold, or wear their ski pass tags on their jackets when they come to school on Monday morning . They don’t come here. So what do the kids here matter to the mayor? That’s his people. And he’s made that clear since day one.

They close this school, our kids will get pushed around in the system, will disappear, sent from school to school, so that each school can play the numbers game politics forces them to play.  A school can focus on one thing if it is to do that thing well. The choice we face is do we focus on a school’s future? Or its students’ future? A message will be sent to other schools, is being sent: protect yourself, give us the numbers we want, so the newspapers talk about those created numbers like they mean something besides “protect yourself.” Meanwhile, pushed around a system focused on itself, our students will be nobody’s responsibility, so they’ll be everybody’s problem. Most importantly, their dreams are the ones we won’t count.

I will fight to count their dreams, I’ll fight for this school, because this school doesn’t turn away students, doesn’t try to hide the problems these students struggle with. We are proud of our struggles, we wear them like badges, even when they’re scars. We might not have numbers, but we aren’t trying to make numbers here, we’re trying, against all these odds and divisions, to create students who get to count their dreams, and I dream they’ll need more than two hands to do it. They’ll need a community to do it. So I ask Gramercy, I ask New York, I ask the mayor, be part of that community that counts their dreams. Don’t close schools, open your minds, and make this school work. It deserves that.

There was a parade the day this school was opened. Right down Irving Place. This city was one that celebrated education and its possibilities, it wasn’t about answers we had, it was about the beautiful question our students future were. Move your numbers around, make your spreadsheet god dance. But all your data doesn’t have a place for their dreams in it, I say to you though: the biggest necessity our educational system faces is this: where are we going to put these dreams our students have?

David Z. Hambrick of Michigan State University concludes his piece with an appeal to common sense:

As a society, we have decided that it’s fine to pay a heart surgeon more than an electrician. We didn’t need to run a regression analysis to decide this — it’s important to keep the lights on, but only if there’s someone to keep them on for — and we don’t need to run a regression analysis to decide that we don’t pay teachers enough. A little arithmetic will do. In Michigan, where I live, the average starting salary for a teacher is about $35,000 for nine months. That works out to about $20 an hour. A bartender can make double that. Which job do you think is more important?

I’d like to begin by thanking my teachers in the fifth, sixth and seventh grades, Mrs. Pulaski, Mr. Burke and Miss Elmer. They taught us percentages and showed us how to “round down,” which I am doing now. The U.S. population is 312,624,000, and we have 3,198,000 public school teachers, which computes to 1%.

But this is not the 1% composed of Wall Street fat cats, professional athletes, entertainers and other rich people. I guarantee there’s no overlap between the two groups. The average teacher today earns about $55,000. At least 75 CEOs earn that much in one day, every day, 365 days a year. According to the AFL-CIO’s “Executive PayWatch,” the CEO who ranked No. 75, David Cote of Honeywell, was paid $20,154,012, for a daily rate of $55,216.47.

Whether posting a memory to Facebook (@storycorps), thanking them on Twitter (@storycorps, #thankateacher), taping a tribute on YouTube or sending a ‘thank you’ card, the 2011 National Day of Listening will send a powerful and necessary message to teachers across the nation: they matter, and we as a nation are grateful for the impact they have on our lives.

You can also record a face-to-face interview with a teacher—or anyone else you’d like to honor for the National Day of Listening—using the the tools on this page.

Once you have participated, tell us about it on our Wall of Listening.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew, in an email to members, called it a “powerful piece” that “shows just how harmful and senseless an effect the rhetoric and contempt of so-called reformers is having on our children and profession. It will make you proud to be an educator who makes a difference every day. There truly are people out there who understand and support our work inside the classroom.”

[Editor's note: José Luis Vilson is a math teacher, coach, and data analyst for a middle school in Manhattan. He blogs at The Jose Vilson where this post first appeared.]

You’ve got to be wondering what a teacher like me is doing marching against the “reform” trends. For those of you unfamiliar with my background, I graduated with a degree in Computer Science from Syracuse University. A year later, after 6-8 months of unemployment and a stint as a data entry person at an educational database firm, I went into the NYC Teaching Fellows program, an offshoot of Michelle Rhee’s New Teacher Project. On the surface, I’m a perfect candidate to follow the corporatist thinking about education, and should be easily molded into the dominant thinking from elites who ostensibly believe they’re going into education for the common good. All it takes is the right amount of fear, the right amount of frustration, the right amount of ignorance, and the right amount of failure to tip people into the hands of those who wish to rotate our profession backwards.

Fortunately for me, I lucked out. And if you’re reading this, I’m thinking the same goes for you.

You see, I teach at a school that, somewhere along the line, decided to value veteran leadership and collaboration. They fostered a culture of discussion and unity that stems from decades of hardship from a neighborhood and administration standpoint. As leaders changed and gangs ran the block, teachers fortified the brick walls of the edifice. When I first came to that school, that legacy was indoctrinated in me in ways the teachers who mentored me probably didn’t realize. That first year, ideologies and trends changed so often, the only resort for me was to seek stability. I found that in the most experienced teachers in my building.

As many of those mentors retired throughout my six years of teaching, I gained a profound respect for that unity, because it’s really easy to say kids first and it’s quite another to be it. For the better part of 10 months out of the school year, you’re a teacher. Even when you’re at home reading the paper or hanging with your closest friends, your job ends up defining you. You get used to people using your last name and find it weird when others use your first. You’re sensitive and perceptive to things happening on the street. You wake up having to change your energy to teacher mode so it’s already simmering when students walk in the door.

You’re a teacher, and that’s great.

We can debate the merits of the ideas tossed out there about how to improve this wonderful profession, but without the base of respect, honesty, professionalism, and progressive thinking, we can’t come to the table thinking we’re eating the same meal. When teachers have one of the highest approval ratings of any profession out there, deformers prefer to buy the public through ads and mainstream media diversions. When teachers take summer breaks, they proffer a set of changes to exams so more of them are administered and used to determine the effectiveness of teachers, but never finding time to truly audit and assess themselves. When teachers pay out of pocket for school supplies and professional development, they assert that teachers bare the blame for their widespread, expensive, guaranteed contracts. When teachers invest their whole beings into the futures of hundreds of students through their career [many spanning a literal generation], they say that their monetary contributions to their pensions weigh too heavily on the economic crisis.

When teachers say they want unity, they try to turn us against our unions with hallow promises.

At this point, deformers have sought to tell the general public that the tip of the iceberg is indeed the whole structure. That’s why we must continue our advocacy. Where others left off, this is the tide upon which we must ride. We can’t do things “in response” anymore. We have to create the new narrative.

I will be marching because, from where we stand, I can see that there are those who prefer we step backwards. But we can’t settle for simply standing here a few feet away from getting pulled in. Thus, I march onward. It’s my only direction.

Researchers at the University of Houston suspect that the stress that teachers undergo in the classroom may actually not be healthy for them, mentally or physically. A $1.6 million federal grant will fund an inquiry into how chronic stress impacts the classroom.

This investigation, reported recently in the Houston Chronicle, is undergone in good faith but if the outcome is not a foregone conclusion, then the sun has commenced to set in the east.

The stress of teaching surpasses that of practically any other career activity. The pressures are many-layered and often intractable. The rewards can be commensurate, which amount to a very rewarding professional life indeed, so certainly there’s a trade-off. But anyone who has actually worked “in the trenches,” knows that the wear and tear on the body and psyche can be momentous.

Law enforcement officers, even if their lifestyle and genetics contribute decisively to eventual illness, are presumed by law and public sympathy to have developed sickness and disability as a direct cause and effect of the nature of their work and receive lifelong payments accordingly. But if a teacher develops high blood pressure or is compromised emotionally because of the abuses and insults of the edu-political system, which need not be documented here but are unrelated to the enduring joy of teaching kids, then the tabloids raise the red flags of suspicion that these teachers are shirkers out to betray and scam the city.

Teresa McIntyre, a professor at the University of Houston’s Texas Institute of Measurement, Evaluation and Statistics, says that the education system is “at a time of a lot of change and change can be stressful.” Change? What change? That word is too ambiguous, all-embracing, and defused of its lamentably explosive charge during this so-called “reform” era.

McIntyre acknowledges the “toxic combination” of what the Chronicle calls the “constant interaction and minimal levels of control.” They report that a goal of the research is “to pinpoint triggers and coping mechanisms for increased stress.”

Anyone out there reading this have a clue as to what those “triggers” might be?

Interestingly, a pilot study found that “experienced teachers — those 55 and older — were better able to handle the stresses of the day. McIntyre suggests that pairing veterans with newer teachers may help the latter to deal with the stress,” says the Chronicle.

Any potential evidence to support that conclusion would no doubt be “dead on arrival” at Tweed where experience is viewed as a millstone and a menace.

The results of the research study are due next May. Stay tuned and stay on your feet until then.

Share your story

The UFT is collecting the stories and reflections of its members. If you would like to share your experiences on 9/11 or the days that followed, please email bgibbons@uft.org by June 17. Your comments may be part of a special project to honor the contributions of educators on that fateful day.

Each and every one of us has a story about 9/11 and its aftermath. Stories not just of loss and heartache, but also of courage and heroism, hope and inspiration.

New Yorkers came together that day like never before. Among them were the educators who helped rush students to safety and the schools that opened their doors for the displaced and distraught.

In the weeks following the disaster, teachers were there to help console students and colleagues who had lost so much, while also searching for ways to explain to their students what had happened and why.

As we approach the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the country will pause to reflect on the events of that tragic day and the many, many indelible stories of bravery and compassion that came out of that dark time. We want to hear yours.

See all “Yo Miss” excerpts here »