Teachers and students should interact meaningfully every day--in small groups and one on one. They should share stories, ideas, poems. Here's a poem I wrote this fall and felt lucky enough to share with my students (as they shared their poems with me) a couple weeks ago:
Serious Work Happens
on the Flattest of Tables
It is important that the table is flat.
On the table, serious work happens,
and one needs to keep one’s papers in order.
Imagine a classroom
where the tables weren’t flat!
Maybe they all had three legs instead of four!
Papers slipping off desks like sheets of ice
crashing to the floor!
Pencils sticking in the ground like wayward arrows!
What a disaster!
But maybe I prefer a slanted table.
I know what I was trying to get at as I wrote this poem (perhaps not successfully, I don't know), and Mr. Kozol just articulated it poignantly.
-Andy