Each of these sessions was very different.

Our meeting at NCCAT was about using technology in the classroom and how to best maximize students’ use of technology time. I made some great plans and had some wonderful ideas. And we were supposed to get new technology this year, but the district changed its mind at the last minute. Luckily, we received some training about writing grants, so that’s what I’ll be doing to make up for the lack of computers in my school.

The last PD opportunity was much more political. I made some interesting connections and look forward to doing what I can do to move the teaching profession forward in this climate. It was heartwrenching to hear from and about teachers and our frozen pay and to hear about how so many teachers, even Kenans in the room, are considering their options to move to other states or get out of the teaching business. But I understand. I am in the same situations, none of them of my own design.

This fellowship has already led to many other opportunities. I’ve made connections with people and with ideas that shape what I’m doing within my classroom and without. I’ve not felt the presence of an ineffectual government quite so closely as I have in this fellowship. I wasn’t able to use my developed curriculum yet in the classroom because of its requirement of government collected and run data sets. I’ve listened to two sides of the debate skirt the issue of education. No one wants to talk about what’s really wrong in education. The Education Minister of Finland has it right: the US does not have an education problem, we have a poverty problem.

I’m not from North Carolina. I grew up and lived in New England most of my life. My home state of Maine values education in a different way than this state seems to value it. So this experience of being mentored, of being paid to develop and use contemporary, valuable curriculum, of being treated as a professional by other professionals comes at a strange time in the educational history of this state. I’m being told how valued I am by the Kenan Fellowship (and I believe I am) at the same time being told how undervalued I am by the state that pays my meager salary and wants to pit me against all other teachers, to vie for students, schools, curriculum, access to technology, and other necessary agents for success in the new, capitalism-gone-mad world of public education.

I don’t mean to be a whiner. I know other people in the world have much worse circumstances that I do. But it seems that valuing public education is the best venue for making those worse circumstances go away.