With 39 years experience in education, seven as a teacher and 32 in educational leadership, Mr. Martin Silverman has seen a lot.
Yet, after almost 40 years of caring for the youth of San Antonio, Texas, he is still innovating, striving to improve, and holding tight to the belief that we will endure.
Which is exactly why I reached out to him and asked him to write a piece on overcoming, on staying strong amidst the struggle, and holding tight to hope. Because very few have lived this long in education and have come out on the other side with a passion for the profession, love for kiddos, and an eagerness to help and encourage those around them like Mr. Silverman. In this, he is truly a unique inspiration.
When most educators of 30+ years are looking for the exit sign, Mr. Silverman is finding new ways to invent himself. Instead of reaching for his 401K, he started a podcast - The Second Question - continues to find ways to innovate and inspire this profession, and when asked, write a guests post for distant friends.
LESSONS FROM THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN
Growing up in the Northeastern United States, one of the iconic sights to see was The Old Man of the Mountain rock formation in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I admit, I never got to see that formation in real life, but that image was quite famous, and a true symbol of the State of New Hampshire. There are many lovely legends of this formation from the Mohawk tribe that bring life to this series of granite cliff ledges on Cannon Mountain.
One legend tells the story of a community leader who fell in love with a beautiful Iroquois woman who joined him in his village. When she had to return to her village to help her people, he promised to wait for her on top of the mountain and watch for her safe return. The Iroquois woman never returned, having died in her native village. Her Mohawk lover remained at the top of the mountain, now turned into stone, to watch over the land forever.
The image of the Old Man of the Mountain reminds me of so many timeless icons that endure through history. That which is built to last endures. And that brings my thoughts to my long career in education and the challenges that these past few years have brought to all of us. When I started my career in 1983 as a young first-grade teacher in Houston, Texas, I could never have imagined that 39 years later I would still be at this education game. And yet, here I am, not quite ready to stop. It would be easy to throw it in now and retire, but I think about all the monumental societal changes that have happened in the world since I began my career and I realize that this too shall pass.
Here’s an example. In my first year of teaching, there was this bright, talented Speech Therapist who worked in my school. He served the students with joy and delighted them with captivating lessons that made the students want to go to their therapy sessions. In around March of that year he started missing days due to illness, and at one point stopped coming in even to pick up his paychecks. We were worried about him, but those who were close to him said he had stopped taking calls and had moved back to his hometown to ride out his illness. By the time the next school year began I had transferred to a different school. One of my former colleagues told me several months in that the Speech Therapist had passed away from this newly discovered, and deadly disease called AIDS. He was the first of several educators I knew that passed away from this illness. It seemed like we would never be the same again. And then we were.
Then the next school year, the state legislature decided that schools needed “help”, and one of the ways to do that would be to give basic skills tests to all teachers and students. As a way to make this look like good school reform, they also gave us duty-free lunch periods and limited class sizes in elementary schools to 22:1. Having just finished my second year with 34 first graders and no duty-free lunch this sounded great. I was also 23 and just out of college for two years, so the basic skills test for teachers was a piece of cake. However, this new requirement devastated some teachers who had been in the field for decades and had not taken a standardized test in forever. Note: At that time there was not a certification test in Texas, nor had there been one in New York where I graduated and got my initial teaching license. Educators were going to leave in droves, and our profession was going to be decimated. And then it wasn’t.
My point in all of this history is to encourage those of us in the profession for just a few years that perseverance is key in weathering through these tough times. We have to remember that pedagogy has come and gone, methods have come and gone, educational theories have come and gone, and we are still here, maybe not in the same form, but we are here. We persevere because what has not changed is the basic relationship between an educator and their community of students, families, teachers, school staff, etc. We are never going to be cog-builders, we are always going to spark minds to think about things in a different way, and the peripheral nonsense that goes on around us politically and socially are cyclical. Remember, there has never been a “good” time to be an educator…there have always been challenges, but when you look at the long game it’s still the most impactful profession there is.
Which brings me back to the Old Man of the Mountain. This true symbol, the cultural icon of the State of New Hampshire, collapsed into the lake below sometime in the spring of 2003. This was not a cataclysmic event as the structure was known to be weakening and had been patched up several times over the previous decades. However, the symbol still appears on the New Hampshire license plate, and a group has constructed steel profilers which when viewed at the correct angle, create the profile of the Old Man as it appeared before the collapse. While the actual Old Man of the Mountain does not exist in granite, it remains a symbol and an icon.
Isn’t that the true nature of our profession?
While everything changes and everything stays the same, we continue to renew and sometimes reinvent our passion. We endure.
If you have an idea you’d like to share or someone you believe we could all benefit from, please reach out and let me know! I am eager to share your story.
For more on . . .