LA Weekly profile unedited
Back in February right after the teacher strike, the LA Weekly ran a profile on teachers that included me. I wanted to share here the full answers I gave to the prompts. In bold is what got printed, in italics is what was edited.
Garry Joseph: In his 15th year of teaching middle school science in LAUSD, currently at Millikan Affiliated Charter Middle School in Sherman Oaks. National Board Certified teacher in early adolescent science and a Fulbright Distinguished Award in Teaching recipient in 2017. I represented our country and the district visiting schools throughout India, connecting my students to students in India through science and maker project collaborations
Teaching is a calling that I long resisted, probably because of my own negative experiences in school. An epiphany came on a visit to the old Exploratorium in San Francisco. Watching children and adults learn by curiosity, exploration, free choice and pure joy convinced me that I had just not gotten the right kind of science instruction. I committed to being the change I wanted to see and to grind out a revolution from within the school system.
I went to a private religious school from first through 10th grade and then finished at Hamilton High School here in Los Angeles. The culture shock was extreme. I don’t condone religious indoctrination but my secular classes were very rigorous in private school. Public school was a much healthier exposure to different kinds of people but it was nowhere near as academically demanding.
After graduating from UCLA, it was a relief to be free from institutions so I could learn whatever I wanted, wherever and however I wanted to. For a long time, though, I had no direction and never got the career guidance I needed. These experiences now give me empathy for my students, who are being pressured into conformity, intellectual mediocrity and standardization. There’s no time to wait to discover your true passions and move toward whatever brings you satisfaction. The concept of just getting students into college is thus so short-sighted to me. We need a longer-term commitment to students as people.
The months and weeks leading up to the strike were filled with anxiety for me. I just want to do my job, that is hard enough. The politics, the pleading for resources, the ever increasing class sizes, we had no choice but to make the ultimate stand. The parent support for the strike has already begun to transform the profession and give teachers hope. The struggle is real and will never be over. As long as there is injustice in the world, union protected public school teachers will be on the front line to speak truth to power and monied influence. Schools are a mystery to all but the teachers and students doing the work. For too long teachers have been treated like cogs in a machine, not the actual talent and spirit of education itself. An independent charter school that truly shares power as a collaborative and transparent community deserves to exist. I wish I knew of one.
Once I became a teacher there really wasn’t much that fell “outside” of teaching. Every thing I do and am interested in goes back into my practice: music, nature, the outdoors, traveling, film, virtual reality, digital media literacy, you name it and I want to share it with my students. That said, we all need down time and I am an introvert in a profession that demands the opposite.
The radical solutions to the education crises are pretty simple to me: Eliminate everyone who isn’t teaching and allow teachers to share more responsibilities if they have the drive and ambition to do so. Everyone in a school should be able to do whatever job is needed. Absorb the salaries of those who don’t deliver the educational product (especially textbook publishers and educational researchers) and redistribute it to teachers. That would make teaching one of the highest paid and most respected positions in our culture. I’m cool with Ed-Tech companies making a profit if they provide a valuable service. Philanthropists are free to support the institutions they choose, but why not our existing community schools? Let teachers evaluate their peers. Let students choose their teachers. That’s how you’d run it if was a “market driven” business. Eliminate all tests that are not authentic to the instruction students actually participate in. Help students move away from the antiquated concept of earning grades and competing, and instead practice networking, collaboration and focus on a single task at a time. Consciously balance the real with the virtual in this out of control technology experiment we are all participating in. When every adult sees themselves as a teacher and all children as their own child, the problems will just fall away. Then we can roll up our sleeves and really get to work on the problems we now deny. It will be fun. Our students already know this. As Superintendent Beutner likes to say, “the kids are counting on us”.
https://www.laweekly.com/arts/beyond-the-classroom-la-teachers-share-their-personal-stories-10132705
Afterward: Upon reflection, some of my comments I would change or clarify. I’m not really against religious teaching as long as it includes tolerance for other faiths. We need to display more of the universality of human and ecological values in our schools. As a recovering ex-cult member, I just get bristly when children are discouraged to ask questions.
I also didn’t mean to imply that administrators are not necessary. They certainly are. I would like to see barriers between administrators and teachers become more fluid. If there was a path for teachers to do some of the administrative tasks while staying primarily in the classroom, many would do that. When administrators are so overworked that they lose their teaching chops, they become out of touch with the real work of education. Teaching is easy to just talk about, mandate about, but very hard to do. Everyone who has ever been to school has some basis to form an opinion but only teachers in the classroom today really know what’s going on. This article was an opportunity for me to share some of the path and experience, and be a little outrageous! Hope you enjoyed.
Here are the original questions I was asked to respond to:
1. Please give me a brief bio here that concerns your teaching career. Include current school, classes, grade, etc. and others if there are any.
2. Tell me how you got to where you are now as an instructor and why. Basically why did you become a teacher & what has been your path?
3. Please tell me about your own experience as a student in LAUSD or another school system and how this has affected your career or influenced your approach in the classroom. 4. Comments about the UTLA strike- What it was like, how effective it was and why you felt strongly about it. Any views on Charters and how they’ve hurt the system or not…..
5. What are you interests outside of teaching?
6. What are the misconceptions about public schools & what are the challenges and how do you think we can overcome them?&. Anything else YOU want to add/include that you think people should know about teachers, their value, their goals, or how can parents and/or the community help make our educational system better?
