CARNY COMING! WILL DOUG BE RUNNING THE TILT-A-WHIRL?

So—next week’s Carnival of Education will be here, in a Strange Land. A special invitation to all teachers, across the opinion spectrum, to submit a blog:

http://blogcarnival.com/bc/submit_5.html

Today is ED in 08’s Washington D.C. Blogger Summit, and blogdom has been saturated with posts filed from The Summit, including this one from ED08’s Roy Romer. Check the photo. There are some fine teacher-bloggers at the Summit, including Teaching in the 408’s Kilian Betlach and DailyKos regular TeacherKen—two diverse, but incisively intelligent perspectives, from real classrooms. The photo, however, is worth a thousand blog words about power, privilege, control and editorial content.

Tree-falls-in-the-woods question: How many people have to read a blog for it speak truth, inform the dialogue, or represent wisdom?

On the other end of the policy discourse spectrum, we have Doug, a low-key Teacher Dude in North Carolina who posted a YouTube video that pretty much guaranteed his involuntary resignation from his position as a special education teacher. Doug gives us a semi-dopey explanation of the logic disconnect between “all kids will reach proficiency by 2013” (which many scholars and statisticians have pointed out is nonsense) and the normed tests used to determine who’s on the right side of the bell curve—an especially egregious problem for teachers of the lowest functioning kids, whose real progress means virtually nothing in these psychometric conundrums.

Virtual communities of teachers are chatting—extreme chatting—about Doug today: is this sweet, sincere, shambling guy in a T-shirt the person we want telling our story, explaining the paradoxes of teaching, testing and caring about kids? Doug doesn’t seem to be grandstanding, and this video is not what you’d call impressive rhetoric or razor-sharp analysis. Still, he seems like a regular guy, a real teacher telling a common sense tale of frustration driving him to definitive action. And the first two dozen comments are mainly from parents and teachers who know him, and respect his work--that's worth something. Just possibly, Doug represents the leading edge of a wave.

I am waiting for the other shoe to drop on Doug’s head, tomorrow, when three dozen Ed-bloggers marginalize him with some dismissive sarcasm, clever language and a curled lip: Teachers. This is why we are in the disastrous position we’re in. And so on, right down to the rising tide of mediocrity.

If Doug needs a job, he can set up the merry-go-round at the Carnival of Education next Wednesday. Hope to hear some teacher voices—we’re riding this roller coaster together.