It's 10:20, twenty-five minutes ago, I set my blue book on the table, took a Reece's peanut butter cup from the bag ("You may decide whether I am a good witch or a bad one," my instructor said before the exam was handed out), put on my jacket and went outside. Exam taken. Done. I feel like it has been too many days since I've had ten minutes to myself. I checked out a computer at the library, made my way up to the third floor and settled back into Kozol's "Letters to a Young Teacher," and was again enthralled by the passion, the reality. Do you ever read something written by someone more articulate than yourself and think I am so glad that you found the words that I've been looking for. Here's another little piece to enjoy with me:

"What happens to [dynamic and engaging] teachers when they come into one of these heavily test-driven schools?

One of the first things they discover is that they cannot just walk up to the chalkboard on a Monday morning and write out in big bold letters as the outcome of a lesson: 'Today I read my favorite poem of William Butler Yeats, or Gwendolyn Brooks, or Langston Hughes, to my third graders and discovered that they love it!' No, that kind of outcome will not be regarded as acceptable. What children love or do not love has no role at all within the world of tough and testable accountability. Instead, if the teacher wants to read a poem she loves, she has to manipulate it somehow to pretend it belongs in one of those compartments of officially ordained proficiency that we have talk about before. 'I used'-- or preferably, 'utilized'-- 'a poem by William Butler Yeats to deliver the following three state proficiencies' that will be measured on exams. And she also has to put those state proficiencies right up there on the board, and put official numbers from the standards guidelines next to them, so that the skills that she 'delivers' will be easily identified by any of those middle-level supervisors-- 'curriculum cops,' as teachers call them-- who stop by from time to time to check on her.

Even when the stories and the dialogue found in those children's classics most of us grew up to love-- the mystical adventures and the soft epiphanies of Pooh and Piglet, for example, or Eeyore's sorrowful pronouncements-- cannot be presented simply as the literary treasure that they are but have to be treated as a kind of 'quarry' from which numbered stated proficiencies (or 'competencies') can be hacked out and held up to th bright light of curricular illumination. The charm and innocence of the stories can't be valued for themselves. Instead, they have to be exploited for an external purpose. So, apart from all the other thefts they undergo, children in these schools are robbed of any understanding that the reason, certainly the best of reasons, human beings read books is for the pleasure that they give us.

School officials pay lip-service now and then to the wroth of learning 'for its own sake.' But these statements do not hold up very well in schools where kids are being told it's not just important that they pass their teats, but as a teacher at one New York City school observed to me, that 'passing this-- the test-- is actually the only thing that is important.' When teachers have to underline this point by sticking Pooh and Piglet with official numbers that connect them to the items on a state examination, this message becomes utterly indelible."

I am often struck when people say that we are not to teach values in school-- that this is the place of the family, in the home. However, examples such as the passage above make it abundantly clear that we are teaching values, not matter what we do or don't say. We live in a world where everything is labeled: it's a "Liberal stance," a "Christian moral," a "Communist idea." We get so upset if someone else from a different label imposes their ideas on us-- how dare you imply that I might be wrong? And we get so busy making sure that the name of God is kept in the school that we ignore the fact that that which he loves and values the most gets pushed out. What does it matter if students are allowed to pray or we make sure the ten commandments are posted in the front lobby when they enter a classroom that tells them that there is no value in loving life, literature, the wonder of nature-- that as students they are simply commodities, means of productivity. Is that appropriate? I could care less if "Christian" ideas are in the school-- I'm more concerned that students are being told that which is true. It isn't a matter of who's ideas are best, pushing the thoughts of the squeakiest wheel, but actually telling students truth that is going to make their lives the most full of love and enables them to discover the deepest parts of their humanity and existence. Have we entered a world where joy must be sucked out of everything to shield ourselves from the depths of pain that make the beauty all that much more worthwhile?