When the going gets tough, tough teachers get going

Guest columnist

By Steven W. Simpson
Special to The Times

IT has been a difficult year for the special-education teachers in my school.

Teaching special education anywhere is tough, but we had to open a new school, learn five new software programs, review the 90 thick student files we inherited, and write about 35 individual education plans the first three months. This was in addition to writing lesson plans and actually teaching our classes.

As we got ready to leave for our two-week winter break last month, we congratulated ourselves on a job well done. We were worn out and run down, but we had survived what we thought was the worst and went off to our families for some rest.

Then something happened that changed me, changed what I thought about the job I had been doing for the past 13 years. In Kabul, Afghanistan, suspected Taliban guerrillas dragged a teacher from his classroom and executed him at the school gate. This teacher was killed because he refused to follow orders from the guerrillas to stop teaching girls.

This man knew the danger. He had received many warnings. But he was a real teacher, a believer. He risked his life in order to provide his female students with education. And Taliban thugs dragged him out of his classroom and killed him.

I read the newspaper article and could not stop thinking about the teacher who was killed for doing the same thing I do every day.

A few days later, I read another article. This one was on The Seattle Times' front page, with a large photograph of a classroom in Pakistan. The photo shows 83 students crammed into a single room with one teacher. The walls are cracked from the October earthquake.

A second photograph shows another teacher in Pakistan sitting in a chair in the middle of a rocky dirt field. Crouched in neat rows in the dirt are second- and third-grade students reading from their workbooks.

These kids and their teachers are tough. They want education so badly that they crowd into dangerous, earthquake-damaged rooms and squat in the middle of dirt fields for hours. Their teachers want so badly to provide education for these children that they work with classes of more than 80 students. They risk their lives to teach.

I know how hard my job is. We worked every weekday and every weekend trying to get our school running, our paperwork done, our lesson plans written and our kids taught. We worked until we were bleary-eyed and exhausted. We did good work and should be proud of our accomplishments. But really, what does that all mean compared with the teachers in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

I teach in a brand-new school. I have five computers in my room and a projector that lets me put on a screen anything my high-speed Internet connection and imagination can create on my computer. I work in a beautiful room with carpet on the floor and a wall of windows that look out on trees and sunlight. We have heat and lunches and bathrooms. We have education assistants to help us work with our classes.

The local villagers don't storm in and drag us out of our classroom. They create foundations and raise money to provide us with even more than what taxpayers have given us. And if they are not raising money for us, they are in our classrooms volunteering, feeding us, helping us do our copying, reading to our students, telling us how great we are.

If I have a problem I can't handle, I have three experienced administrators who will help me. If they can't solve the problem, they have district administrators to help. I see them in our building, walking around, solving problems. They smile at us and tell us how great we are.

We work hard and we are excellent teachers. But I wonder how well we would do teaching classes of 80 in earthquake-damaged, one-room schools. I wonder how well we would do if we had to risk death to teach.

I have always been a believer, passionate about my work. But I sit in my beautiful classroom, filled with the latest technology, supported by parents and administrators, and I think about that guy getting dragged out of his classroom for teaching young women to think.

I wonder why teachers who are so brave, why students who want so badly to learn, have so little help when I have so much.

Steven W. Simpson teaches special-education at Pacific Cascade Freshman Campus in the Issaquah School District. He publishes a weekly online education newsletter, Ed.Net (www.edbriefs.com). He can be reached at simpson@edbriefs.com

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