An Educator’s Obituary: Teacher, Buried at 70, Died at 25!
  How Will You Be Remembered?

“It is a shame when you are buried at 70 years old, but you died at 25. Many teachers enter the profession at 22 years old and within three years, have allowed their fire to be wiped out by a deluge of societal problems which every day affects the minds of our children and the learning process..” 

By Calvin Mackie, PhD 

If I have heard it once, I have heard it from educators a thousand times: My students are not motivated, they are not inspired. Well, I say this, many teachers and other educators are neither motivated, inspired, nor prepared  to accept and deal with the daunting challenges facing us today. Education is not for the faint at heart nor the easily discouraged. However, I ask anyone to walk the halls of any public K-12 system and observe the behavior of the teachers or look deep within their eyes, and tell me what you see?  When I do it, I do not see the fire, the will or the hope necessary to grab a life in the critical moment of development and send it on a trajectory of personal growth and development and professional success..
I was taught that he or she who controls the diameter of your learning controls the circumference of your actions. A teacher is charged with motivating and inspiring students to go further than ever imagined. As such, as a teacher if I do not want my students to go anywhere, all I have to do is not teach them anything. We know we have succeeded when the prodigal student returns and begins to teach us things we do not know.
To teach, one must be passionate, motivated and inspired – full of life. However, many teachers died soon after entering the system, showing up routinely everyday as part of the walking, breathing, living dead, with no hope, inspiration, or motivation.  The poet William Bulter Yeats stated, “Education is not the filling of the pail but the lighting of a fire.” Famous boxing promoter, Don King when asked what is success, replied, “Set yourself on fire and people will show up to watch you burn.” Maybe our students are not on fire, because we, the educators, are not on fire.  Many of us have become fire fighters, pouring water on the fire of our children’s hopes and dreams, rather being the fire lighter, and igniting them every day to go beyond their limited view.  Be honest, which are you: fire fighter or fire lighter?
I am convinced that graveyards hold much of the community’s rich potential. So many people go to their graves with their dreams, hopes, and true maximum potential never tapped or reached. It is a shame when you are buried at 70 years old, but you died at 25. Many teachers enter the profession at 22 years old and within three years, have allowed their fire to be wiped out by a deluge of societal problems which every day affects the minds of our children and the learning process.  Martin Luther King Jr. stated in a 1963 Detroit speech, “If a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” For educators, it is our children and students for whom we must be willing to die. I am convinced that many of us became educators because we believed and bought into the hype that one day we were going to transform lives and change the world. However, many of us have allowed the enormity of the challenge, the growing bureaucracy, and the unfair public criticism to steal our fire, our dreams and our passion. Many of us have allowed our dreams to die too soon.  We have died.

Wake Up Call: Educators Must Decide to Live Again!

Educators, we need to decide to live again as our children depend on us.  An old man taught me that a dead fish can go with the flow, but it takes a mighty strong and alive one to go against it. Many of us have blamed the children for things they cannot control. Many of the kids arrive at our doors unprepared, undisciplined, and clueless about why they are there. However, we cannot blame them because clay does not decide what it will become; we, teachers and educators, mold clay. Many educators, especially those occupying positions in institutions of higher education are becoming like doctors in hospitals who do not want to treat sick patients. They only desire and admit the healthy, well prepared and equipped students whom they can nurture and graduate. Then, they spend a lifetime bragging about how their great, healthy, and well students never became ill.
 There are three things many educators need to do to rekindle their fire and live again :

1. Rediscover Your Passion. If children, teaching and/or education are not your passion, then please quit the profession. You, the school, your colleagues and especially the students will be better for it. James Baldwin said, “A passion is not friendly. It is arrogant, superbly contemptuous of all what is not itself, and, as the very definition of passion implies the impulse to freedom; it has a mighty intimidating power. It contains a challenge. It contains an unspeakable hope.” As educators, your passion is the fire that will ignite you to challenge the status quo and bring out the speakable hope in our children.

2. Become Unreasonable. Refuse to accept things as they are, push, and work for the way things ought to be. We have begun to rationalize the failure in ourselves, our leaders and our students. Create high expectations for yourself and become the example for your colleagues. George Bernard Shaw said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”  It has always been the unreasonable teacher who gets the most out of students. The educator who is loathed and cursed is usually the one which is respected and loved in retrospect by the students.

3.  Take Pride in Your Profession.  It is time for teachers to stand up for their profession and claim their role as contributors to society. Teachers, if they came together, could teach an insurrection. However, as long as teachers are maligned and not respected, first and foremost, by themselves, our true power and abilities will never manifest. Teachers must police teachers and root out those who are disrespecting and damaging the profession. It is a shame that we need to debate dress codes for teachers. If we want to be treated as professionals, we must behave and carry ourselves as professionals. As teachers, we must understand that we can be among the most important ‘real role models’ for children..

Malcolm X said, “Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.” We must commit to giving our children that education today so they can compete in today’s globally competitive world.  Long Live Educators!

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Speaker, professor, author, and inventor: Calvin Mackie is a former associate professor of mechanical engineering at Tulane University in New Orleans, specializing in heat transfer and fluid dynamics. President Bush honored him with the 2003 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco appointed Mackie to the 33-member Louisiana Recovery Authority, which is leading the state’s rebuilding efforts following hurricanes Katrina and Rita. He is the author of A View from the Roof: Lessons for Life and Business. He was featured in Spike Lee’s HBO documentary “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Parts” and on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer as a panelist discussing the one-year anniversary of Katrina.