Money quote from my book:

from Herbert Kohl, whom I want to grow up and BE.  Well, I actually what to grown up and be Studs Terkel, but becoming Herbert Kohl can occupy my middle age before I end up in broadcasting at the age of 75 or something.  

I quote, italics mine:

"Not-learning tends to take place when someone has to deal with unavoidable challenges to her or his personal and family loyalties, integrity, and identity.  In such situations, there are forced choices and no apparent middle ground.  To agree to learn from a stranger who does not respect your integrity causes a major loss of self.  The only alternative is to not-learn and reject their world."

H. Kohl. "I won't learn from you: Confronting student resistance," pp. 134-35 in Rethinking our classrooms: Teaching for equity and justice (Milwaukee: Rethinking Our Schools, 1994), p. 134.

This gave me a strange feeling as I reflected today on working in an American School for students who are Mexican.  How am I, as the stranger who is doing his best to respect the integrity of my students, perhaps unintentionally causing a major loss of self.  But how much self are we always asking our students to chuck out the window at every opportunity?  Modern schooling encompasses with it the devaluation of self.  Now, of course, most classrooms create shallow "tributes" to self, or artifacts that only coincide with many student's interests.  At the end of the day, period, semester, school year, and school career, it always comes down to how well you squeeze yourself into the "Successful graduate" shaped hole, regardless of how broad or strange your peg may be.  Its easy for me to criticize, because I am a hypocrite who asks students to do stupid things all the time.  I'm a terrible example of my own ideals.  Sorry, sad but true.  

The more I experience education on this side of the teacher's desk (my 18 years on one side left me unimpressed to say the least) the more I think the variable problems with the training of teachers.  There is so much training, professional development, research, and everything out there, why are the "bad teacher" stories so ever-present?  

I am in dangerous territory, now, I know, but I blame a cancerous teacher "meme."  Its an idea, but with attitude--something that spreads itself like a virus.  Words are just "memes" you can pronounce, for example.  There are other "memes" you cannot pronounce (this comes to mind)

or:

Give this a look for more clarification on the "meme", its succinct lecture by a smart man who looks like Santa, regardless.  

Its the giving up on a kid doesn't matter "meme," its the "this is the real world, they have to deal with it" "meme," its the "meme" that first latches on to a teachers exhaustion and then amplifies a teachers natural muscle for justification.  Much like the tiny phorid fly in Texas, teachers become the headless zombies of the status quo.  Now I'm about to go enjoy a relaxing evening and I have no school tomorrow due to the Mexican holiday, Teacher's Day.  Honoring the profession with, of all things, something that most veteran and expert teachers loathe, a full day off of school.  It means we're one more day behind, after falling two weeks behind due to flu outbreak...I am thankful, though, for the appreciative gesture and for my sweet laser pointer pen that I received from a student today.  Hopefully we'll have a smooth ride to the end of the year.