"Igniting the Spark: Rekindling Passion in Education"

Kai was an awesome kid, never caused any issues. He culminated this way of hanging over his table and holding his pencil in such a way that if you weren't paying attention very carefully, you'd really think that he was working, which he was not most of the time. He had hair that hung down before his eyes. You could tell that it was nothing personal, but Kai just did not get a whole bunch out of school.

One day, for no reason truly, I chose not to provide the lesson that was in the book. Instead, I asked my students to assume that a bomb had gone off and all capital letters had been destroyed. Would anyone even notice, and how would we solve that issue? Kai, at the back of the class, put his hair out of his eyes, raised his hand, and said, “Well, we could use different color letters.” What a great idea! I'd finally reached him, and I had no idea what I'd done. But in that moment of contact, I saw real brilliance, and that moment has never left me. It's brought me here today.

As you've heard, I'm an elementary school teacher. The idea that inspired me the most when I first started teaching was that education isn't the filling of a bucket; it's the lighting of a fire. We can think back to our time at school and remember those teachers who really brought that fire into the classroom for us. You can remember what it was like to be a student like Kai and just not engaged with that education.

I have some ideas about how we can bring that fire back into every classroom every day, and that's what I'm going to talk to you about today. But I'm going to be honest first because that fire almost went out for me in the last few years. High-stakes testing has changed so much of what we do in the classroom. I used to love, when I first started teaching, to spend half a morning reading and writing poetry with my students. But if you want to get through that book and get to everything that's going to be on those tests, as a teacher, you just have to stick to that schedule.

Tests are good, but to paraphrase Annie Cameron, a writer and education blogger, they are like a very, very accurate telescope that is focused on just a few stars at the expense of a universe of knowledge. I like to know how my math lessons are catching on with my students, but I also need to know how they solve their own problems. I like to hear them tell a joke that they've made up themselves. These stars are shining just as bright in our children, and they need to be seen because we don't want them to burn out.

If we're letting what happens in our classroom be so influenced by external priorities and testing, where is that discovery? Where is that fire? I think I got some insight through a pretty special experience, but I had to completely step out of the regular education system in order to get that experience. I started working in gifted education at the Day a Week School. That is a program for a group of kids, perhaps like the top 2%, who already know or understand pretty much everything that's being taught at school right now. So what you do is take them out one day a week and let them have a real challenge, and that challenge is teaching them how to think.

Why is this important? Civil rights pioneer Howard Thurman said, "Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive because what the world needs are people who have come alive."