We can make a difference

If we are to have TRUE and REAL educational reform, and not the same old stuff packaged with a new bow, we need to stop being afraid of asking the hard questions because we are afraid of the answers. We must stop focusing on “yellow highlighters”. We need to rise up and start a crusade to ask the hard questions of the hard problems that get at the heart of teaching and educational reform. We need to start a crusade for change by displaying “boldness” by asking the “deep questions”. The answers to these questions may sting, hurt, and cause us pain. But they are necessary if we want to become the teachers we want to be, to have the schools we want to have, and to help build our students into the people we need them to be to create a society we dream of.

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.


~Theodore Roosevelt, Paris at the Sorbonne in 1910



I believe in my heart that all of us want to help our students to be better people. We all want our schools and the world to be a better place. If enough of us have the courage to ask the hard questions and to honestly look at the answers together… CHANGE WILL HAPPEN.  We all can be independent teachers and have the lives and success in teaching we dream about.  All this can happen if… each one of us is willing to ask the hard questions and to listen to (the sometimes painful) answers and not to give into fear.

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.


~Susan B. Anthony

Shawn