The Making of a Presidential Mathematics & Science Educator An Autobiographical Archive of Presidential Awardees

Only one mathematics teacher and one science teacher can win this award each year from each state, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, United States territories, and the Department of Defense Education Activity. This prestigious award is the highest award in the U.S. that anyone can bestow on mathematics and science teachers. It is the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching (PAEMST) and issued by the President of the United States for grades K-12. This book is a gift to the teaching profession, and to other groups concerned with teaching, from 50 experienced schoolteachers recipients between 1989 and 2009.

This book is a collection of the teachers individual stories, written by them, about how they first went about becoming teachers, then outstanding teachers, and ultimately career-teachers. All their stories are about practice about taking action in the world, specifically in schools, in hopes of making them more humane places. As such, the collected stories speak unequivocally about the central place that practicing goodness occupies in teaching.

Goodness is an unusual emphasis in contemporary education discourse where scores on standardized achievement tests aligned with standardized curricula are trump. And, readers may notice, why stories about schoolteaching? Why not a formal genre associated with expert, generalizable knowledge, such as expository research articles or policy reports? And why stories about teaching written by teachers? The value of stories is that they are the most elemental and common form of human communication. We all know how to tell stories and how to hearken to them. We converse with each other in stories, using them to fashion ideas and information in accessible, compelling, and, therefore, exchangeable form. If teachers want other citizens to join them in thinking about schooling, stories are the medium. The value of stories about teaching written by schoolteachers is that they express teachers perspectives, and teachers work is at the very heart of schools and of any reform. Therefore, if one wants to know what teaching is (perhaps in order to propose feasible ideas about what it ought to be), one has to consider how teachers view their world. This is not mere courtesy. Like all humans, teachers act, based on what they deem is sensible in particular situations. When they resist a policy change, they are not being obstreperous or unwilling to learn new tricks. Rather, the new policy may not make sense in light of teachers knowledge about life in classrooms. Accordingly, teachers views of practice are crucial mediators of any policy. Their perspective, when written down and collected, constitutes a public record of teaching, one that can be consulted, contested, and continually revisited to see how teaching persists and varies with individual and societal change. Teachers views are especially vital now, when education is on the ropes, yet teachers professional authority and autonomy in regard to practice are increasingly restricted.

This book exemplifies the promise inherent in schoolteachers stories about their development as teachers. Wonderfully accessible and richly detailed, the collected stories succeed in taking readers into the teachers world so that, however vicariously, readers feel that they are there with the teachers, able to understand the teaching world as teachers do. The stories call to readers, compelling interest because, instead of the usual generic list of best practices or stereotypical platitudes about teaching s joys, they put readers in touch with the particulars of teaching. Visible is the multidimensional, strenuous, and always uncertain effort that is involved in determining how to act well with others...