Abstract:

Attending a science conference with a group of girls from her Girls Excelling in Mathematics group leads Laura Reasoner Jones to think about how teachers can wield their power. "Where do you get your power?" she asks her colleagues.

Jones, L.R. (2004). Wielding our teacher power. Teacher Leaders Network diaries. Retrieved from the Teacher Leaders Network 11 Apr 2008. Link: http://www.teacherleaders.org/old_site/diaries04_05/LJ40_04_05.html

Full Text:

Wielding Our Teacher Power

"A kiss on the hand may be quite long in coming,
But power tools are a girl's best friend"
– Ann Reed

As the days become beautiful and spring is finally here, (although in Northern Virginia it only lasts a week, and then becomes summer with a vengeance) we school system personnel are slowly coming to the ends of our ropes. So, I think it is time to stop and think, time to reflect on what really makes us feel good about ourselves, on what makes us feel successful or strong. We need this.

For some of us teachers, it is the memory of a particularly good moment with an especially difficult child or parent; for others of us, it may be something that someone else did—a student or a colleague—that we had a part in. For me, oddly enough, it is something only indirectly related to work; it is the experience of successfully building something.

I will never forget the first time I felt this feeling of personal power. Many years ago, I moved into a small townhouse alone with my two daughters, ages 7 and 13 at the time. We had brought half of our furniture but all of our books, and we needed a bookcase for the books in Julie's room. So, I bought a metal bookcase at Target, brought it home, and opened the box of a million parts on her bedroom floor. The girls just stared at me; this was the first real challenge of our time alone together.

"Who is going to build that, Mommy?"

"Mom, you don't know how to do that."

Scorn and fear filled their voices, because 'Daddy' was the builder and the fixer in the house. Well, with the help of a trusty $3.95 Phillips screwdriver, I did build that bookcase and 13 years later it is still in use. And when we bought a new computer desk for Julie's room this year, I put that together with the same Phillips screwdriver. Correctly assembling furniture gives me a very powerful feeling.

We all need to have something in our lives that makes us feel strong or powerful. As teachers, we are so frequently at the mercy of the people over our heads that it sometimes feels as if we have no power at all. And then we begin to act that way. In Special Education, it is called "learned helplessness." But we have more power than can ever be imagined even by the most creative or stifling administrator.

We have the power to make large groups of children feel successful or to feel humiliated and trampled on. We have the power to make individual children love poetry, the magic of numbers, and the beauty of pastels, and we have the power to make each of them feel lower and stupider than a whale's belly, as they used to say in my landlocked Indiana.

Recently I have been feeling personally empowered by advances in my own technology skills. These are small things: installing RAM in my wonderful husband's laptop and in the family desktop computer, formatting an Excel chart so it will print out in 10 pages rather than the 65 that originally went to the printer, and using layers in Photoshop to make an important photo look better. But I want to shout when these things were finished—I actually did it!

A few Sundays ago, I participated in the National Science Foundation's Taste of Science, a fun sidewalk event for kids held in conjunction with Arlington's Taste of the Town. My little GEMS club was honored to be the only non-national organization there—I was in the exalted company of PBS' Zoom, the EPA, and the Space Science Institute, among others. But I have to say, I had one of the coolest and most popular activities: children dissecting floppy disks and taking a crack at taking apart an entire desktop computer.

It was very empowering to be guiding the teenage girl volunteers as they used screwdrivers to take the entire desktop apart down to the last little piece of RAM and miniature speaker. Kids kept coming back during the afternoon to check our progress, and we dragged it out to make it more exciting. When the last piece came apart and was laid on the table, the looks on the spectators' and the girls' faces were priceless. The girls had done something they had never ever done before—they had used real tools and had completely disassembled this machine, watched by and marveled at by hundreds of smaller children. I used my power as a teacher and mentor to help these young women feel their own power, and none of us will ever be the same.

So, teachers, think back. How did you use your power this year? Who was mightily helped by you? Where do you get your power?

As they say in The Incredibles, "You have more power than you realize."

And may we always use our powers for good.

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