I started this entry on the day of pink slips, March 15, the Ides of March, the day when Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC and also the day when thousands of teachers were laid off, in most cases because they were the most recently hired. Sure this will make classes bigger and decrease support for arts and athletics and other services that some have deemed less important than core subjects, but it will also reduce the chance that students will be taught by that one teacher with whom they might connect, that one teacher who’s a bit like Barack Obama’s Mom.

In the NY Times on March 13, David Brooks focuses on this point in “‘No Picnic For Me Either’”:

In his education speech this week, Barack Obama retold a by-now familiar story. When he was a boy, his mother would wake him up at 4:30 to tutor him for a few hours before he went off to school. When young Barry complained about getting up so early, his mother responded: “This is no picnic for me either, Buster.”

That experience was the perfect preparation for reforming American education because it underlines the two traits necessary for academic success: relationships and rigor. The young Obama had a loving relationship with an adult passionate about his future. He also had at least one teacher, his mom, disinclined to put up with any crap.

Even if many of us are not so lucky to have a parent as dedicated to education as Obama’s Mom, school can fill the void if students manage to connect on a fundamental level with at least one teacher who requires, also, that they perform academically. Unfortunately, if this doesn’t happen, it becomes so much more difficult for students to understand what education means:

We’ve spent years working on ways to restructure schools, but what matters most is the relationship between one student and one teacher. You ask a kid who has graduated from high school to list the teachers who mattered in his life, and he will reel off names. You ask a kid who dropped out, and he will not even understand the question. Relationships like that are beyond his experience.

The need for significant, educational connections between teachers and students is the reason it’s so important not to run a school like a business. While business efficiency may work for a school’s finances, our students are not consumers of education: for education to work, they must become partners in learning. Teachers are not selling education;students are not buying ideas. Instead, teachers and students are working together, when education works most effectively, to  improve skills and understand an increasingly complicated world.

And if teachers and students work together as partners in education, there’s a chance they’ll connect on a significant and fundamental level, changing them both in the process.