I haven’t been able to write anything coherent recently aside from a family Christmas letter, until I felt the need to write this piece that found its way into The Salt Lake Tribune. In summary:
Our schools are more than clearinghouses of information for our students to consume, and our teachers are so much more than deliverers of a sequence of pre-planned facts. Our classrooms are the places where our next generation of citizens learn how to analyze data, to solve problems, to work together, to communicate and listen, to discover themselves.
Our kids, our future leaders, deserve as much; and our teachers deserve the respect and agency required to provide such an education. If we can’t support our teachers in their professional roles, our state and our children will lose them at exactly the moment we need them the most.
I’m not sure the difference this will make, but it was a nice reminder that I could write something, and it was a good bit of momentum to double down to support educators and learning. There’s work to do.
