"Mira. Look."

“Mira. Look,” Maribelle* exclaimed as she tugged on her classmate’s shirtsleeve. Antonio glanced at the illustration in the book Maribelle was reading, smiled, whispered something into Maribelle’s ear, and then returned to his own book.

Their whisperings were indecipherable to me, both because of the soft tone of their voices and because they were speaking mostly in Spanish.

Yet, watching them in that moment – so engrossed in their 7-year-oldness and the new worlds they were discovering through their reading – I couldn’t help but smile. There was a lot of learning happening in Ms. Kramer’s classroom that day.

It started when the students returned to the classroom from specials (specials are the one-hour-a-day time during which students rotate through all their “elective” courses. They attend music, art, physical education, and extra academic support in math and reading one hour a week, respectively).

And it continued as students sat in eager anticipation for Ms. Kramer to tell them where they were all going to be for the next hour or so of reading lessons. She began to call out their names, one by one, letting them know what station each of them was going to be in that day. Students quietly and quickly started moving about the room, and within a few minutes the room became a buzz of reading, and cooperating, and questioning, and, well, learning.

Some students sat on a rug working on a word map, while another group of students worked with a reading specialist on a story at the front of the room with an interactive white board. A few students worked independently on lessons on the computers, while others worked with headphones and cassette players. And still others, like Maribelle and Antonio, read independently at their desks.

I had the privilege to witness all of this because Ms. Kramer invited me to come visit her classroom after a conversation about education we had had over a cup of coffee a few weeks earlier. She said, while looking down at my business card, “my school needs social justice.” She then shared that at a recent staff meeting, administration told the teachers that they must value compliance above all else – even right or wrong.

At the time she was telling me this, I wondered how Ms. Kramer could have sat through that meeting without walking out. And yet after spending an hour or two in Ms. Kramer’s classroom, it was so obvious why she hadn’t walked out of that meeting, her classroom, or the teaching profession. I think she realized that her kids need her there. Every day. To teach them. And understand them. And let them know they matter.

I think the students at this school, and schools everywhere, need teachers like Ms. Kramer – smart, and fair, and passionate about the work she does every day with the kids she is privileged enough to teach.

Because at the end of the day, teaching is a privilege. Gaining the trust and love of children, helping them to see the world in new ways, and knowing that you might have had some small part of altering a child’s life in a positive way, is a privilege.

The unfortunate reality, however, is that not all teachers take this privilege seriously. Ms. Kramer shared with me that she feels about 25 percent of the teachers at her school site are not only not helping the children learn, but are actually doing the children harm through their own apathy and lack of competence. And hearing this makes me feel a little sad for the future of education in this country.

But then I think about Arturo, the little boy in Ms. Kramer’s class, who – when I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up – looked over at Ms. Kramer on the other side of the room helping another student with a grammar lesson, then looked back at me with wonder and a smile and, without hesitation, said “A teacher. When I grow up I want to be a teacher.”

Mira. Look. There is hope.

* All names and some of the details in this post have been changed to protect confidentiality.