The lines snacked past the rows of rainbow Post-it notes,
boxes of mechanical pencils, and 3-ring binders. Staples,
the office supply store, is a traffic jam of red carts and slowly expanding
backpacks. This summer Staples ran a crowd-sourced commercial
of people showing off their excitement for back-to-school sales by busting out
shopping cart moves (a gimmicky 1980’s dance move).
For the first time in five years, I’m joining the crowds,
piling my own shopping cart high with binders, notebooks, pencils, pens, and
reams of lined paper. Two days ago I
entered my new classroom, backpack filled, papers pristine and took a seat
facing the blackboard. I’ve swapped
curriculum development and activity plans for problem sets analyzing
standardized testing and books on leadership styles.
As a master's student at Harvard’s School of Education I’m
staying up late – no longer grading stacks of essays, but poring over readings
on the economic trade-offs of countries seeking to provide greater access and
greater quality education. Over lunch I fall
into conversations about the possibilities of creating mobile teacher corps in
Tanzania and drawing out production possibility frontier charts on the tops of takeout
boxes.
I must say it is rather fun to be a student again.
My classmates come from teaching in larger inner-city public
schools and from small charter schools. They come from large consulting firms, law
offices, college admissions, think-tanks, research centers, Pre-K classrooms,
middle school classrooms, high school classrooms. And they come from as far away as South Korea
and Tanzania. Having talked to just a handful
of my 650+ new classmates I have learned that our ambitions are equally diverse,
but that we share a common passion for improving what is happening in schools
around the world.
As the autumn air begins to turn crisp, I hope you will join
me on this new adventure – sharing in the conversations, experiments, and ideas
that will be filling my weeks. And while
I might not be getting on a plane to a destination thousands of miles away, I
am confident that come May I will have covered a great distance.
