Igniting a Renaissance of Wonder

Last Sunday, August 19th, the Perspective section of The Denver Post shared three articles about education. The first, titled, “How Can We Make Public Education Work?” by Tony Lewis, lamented yet another year of disappointing CSAP scores and suggested radical solutions such as “more student time spend in the classroom including …longer days, longer years, Saturday classes and after school tutoring.” The second article, “Break the Inertia with Drastic Measures” by Van Schoales, also proposed radical solutions such as getting “rid of teacher tenure,” and paying “for expertise, performance and student results, not years served.” The third article, “Awaiting—still—a Renaissance of Wonder” by Cherry Creek English teacher Michael Mazenko, described Mazenko’s dismay at the lack of wonder and passion in today’s teenagers and adults. About the lack of wonder in his students, Mazenko wonders, “ ‘have we killed it in [them] already?’ ” Happily, he concludes by describing the sense of discovery his own small children have ignited in him.

Guess which article made my heart pump faster. Guess which article made me eager to start the 2006-2007 school year. You guessed it: Mazenko’s reference to a Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem which includes the line, “I am awaiting, perpetually and forever, a renaissance of wonder.”

Although I am concerned about Arapahoe’s less than stellar CSAP and ACT scores, I’m not sure longer school days and school years will fix them as Lewis suggests. If anything, Arapahoe’s high achieving students will become even more overwhelmed by the number of AP classes and extra-curricular activities that define their success. The less successful ones will have more reason to zone out, skip classes, and complain about conventional hoops extended with more of the same academic rigor. If school days and years are lengthened, I hope we spend the extra time taking students to museums, giving them opportunities to volunteer for worthwhile causes, and encouraging them to learn about different cultures. They don’t need more of the same—they need a new perspective to help them appreciate all of the wonders this world offers.

And even though I agree with eliminating tenure and paying teachers higher wages to encourage excellence and abolish mediocrity, I just don’t believe it will happen. As long as well-known radio personalities suggest that athletes deserve multi-million dollar contracts while teachers deserve lower pay for a nine-month job anyone can do, we are fighting a losing battle against a negative public perception. Never mind all of the dribble about teaching being more of an art than a profession. And don’t consider how teachers hold the future of this country in their hands. Ignore the extra hours teachers spend meeting one-on-one with students, grading papers, creating five presentations a day, and agonizing over each individual student. The general public perception is that we have a job (not a career) anyone can do.

But I will not go gently into the end of my career. When I read Mazenko’s article reminding readers to recapture the wonder of childhood, I felt my passion for teaching once again ignite. My phoenix rose out of the ashes, and I knew my mission for this year: to create that “renaissance of wonder” in my students. So the very first day of class I will ask my AP students if they wonder why I assigned Beowulf over the summer. I will ask my sophomores why we teach so many “depressing” works of literatures rather than lighthearted pieces of escape fiction. And I will ask my Shakespeare students if they’ve ever wondered why Shakespeare is considered the greatest writer of all time. Then, after I ignite the first round of questions, I will hand them the torch. They must translate their wonder into questions.

Thank you, Michael Mazenko, for reminding me “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire” (William Butler Yeats).