What does a conversation with a teacher tell us about our kids, our society, and ourselves?
In the spring of 2020, my friend Liza convinced me to start writing about teachers.
Always visionary, Liza came to me with a clear vision of what we needed: an online space to amplify teachers’ voices, inspire teachers to think about their craft in new ways, and connect to one another across geographic, disciplinary, and other boundaries. The months after its founding injected the work of In REAL Time, the blog we built, with a valence of importance that neither of us expected. As media chattered about the importance of teachers in light of Covid-19 and a divisive presidential election, I talked with them. I learned much more, admittedly, than I thought I would.
A conversation with a teacher opens a new way to see the world. Teachers occupy a perhaps-unique temporal space in their work: charged with teaching the discoveries and knowledge of the past, they must always think forward to imagine what students will need in an undiscovered future; in this task, they must, to be effective, remain relentlessly present to the worlds of their students, which are never the same from one day to the next. As I speak with teachers - a simple and still-unrepresentative slice of them - they lead me to new questions and realizations about the world in which I live, the children who will inherit it, and myself.
This Substack, Talking With Teachers, is the place I’m dedicating to exploring those questions and realizations.
It’s important to keep this mission separate from the mission at In REAL Time, in order to preserve that for-teachers, by-teachers space. Here, I write in my own voice, and I write to everyone: policymakers and parents, athletes and armchair experts, investors and innovators. I invite you to listen and think with me.
A note on this medium: as Anna Wiener wrote for The New Yorker last December, Substack kind of sucks. At its best, it democratizes publication, but at its worst, such democratization devalues craft. I’ll post here weekly, and true to my Humanities-teacher word, I’ll work to edit as effectively as I can. Still, the affordances of this medium are manifold, and I hope that as I release words into lines of internet code (an act that’s always a little egocentric), you’ll support me by questioning, building from, sharing, and offering new ideas to each Friday post. If this is a seminar discussion, I’m hoping to make a good, first, new point: one that gives us a rich direction from which to grow together.
I can’t wait to get started.
Katherine Burd
In the meantime, tell your friends!