Only a teacher could work seventy hours a week, twelve months

a year on an eight month contract ... and earn

less than most of the public school teachers

she works with in the schools.

Only a teacher could be a genius, thirty years ahead of her

time ... and be psychologically abused as

unworthy ... as though writing for buddies was

the only form of creative thought.

Only a teacher could spend her life recreating curriculum

from the experiences of children and their

communities, leaving a regional legacy of

compassion that will last generations ... and

be punished for her efforts.

Only a teacher could spend the few hours she might have to

herself, endlessly consoling those who are

struggling to make it through school while

working two jobs, while caring for ill parents

or while raising children alone ... and be

condemned for not having more time for

committee meetings...

Only a teacher could go out into the schools day after day,

year after year, trying to help teachers and

children catch fire with creative excitement

... only to have the ex-coach administrators

look past her, gladhand the boys, mumble about

sports and drool over dirty jokes...

Only a teacher could be culturally invisible and abused,

minute by minute, hour by hour, week by week,

year after and year ... and then be faulted

for not being a team player.

go ahead..give Jeanwins your "satisfactory" rating...

it only shames them..

it shows only you know that true membership in the academy requires you

to aspire to be truly alive, creative, generous and human...and in

your success, inspire others ....

long after the sour articles have been forgotten, long after the

consulting money has been spent, long after the grants have been

lost, a teacher's creative life will live on in the hearts and

souls of those who yearned for rain on cracked land.

the teacher...not the entrepreneur nor the bureaucrat...knows that

the academy exists to create gifts for the world...

they are clothes for humanity, woven from the legacies of the past

and the obligations of the future into the profound possibilities

of being richly alive ... part of the vast and sacred universe...

because of a teacher like Jeanwins.. teachers, parents and students

get up every day and look around at their own worlds with keener

interest...they gather stories from their elders like ripe wheat

... they poke with gusto into the history of their communities to

learn what was there before them... what have they inherited..and

ponder what they will contribute to the next generation...

all this and more...for a pittance....

there are few in our academy who give the community more value and receive

less recognition...

I have grown ashamed to be a member of an academy that would treat

a national treasure with such contempt.

I urged Jeanwins to protest this humiliation....

the bureaucratization of this university (and others) has finally

gone too far...it houses too many soulless droops who rise each

morning and could as easily be driving to an office at Sears or to

an army barracks or to a mailroom...

well, save their souls or let

them go....they are sinning against our humanity...and it must

stop...

we have lost our sense of responsibility for the "world" and must

earn it back...

Jeanwins is my symbol of the battered teacher in an academy dulled

by fading bigness and glutted by self-indulgence that passes for

social contribution.

But she probably won't file...

she will be defiant to the end...because in the end she knows she

never really needed them...

but they couldn't exist without her...

all she ever really needed was a little room of her own and a few

students who knew why they came to the university...to learn to

teach...

she and they will plant gardens in the hearts of the young,

teaching them to care for themselves, for each other and for the

next hundred generations...

and the gardens will bear flowers and fruits and herbs...and

children will dance with gaudy grace with grandparents...

and they will learn to create gifts for citizens of the future... and all the

souls who have come before and for all those who are waiting to be

born...

and we will cherish the cloth that's been given us ...and we will

weave our stories for those who come after...and we will teach them

how to weave with gaudy grace...

Thank you, gaudy Jeanwins, for creating life with grace..

June 1994