I am a teacher and I am starting a new course

I am about to return to the school corridors, to meet again with my colleagues, to think systematically (if possible, together) about how to organize a new school year. Having temporarily set aside some of the tensions from the past year, we will need to remind each other that we are professionals in the service of a right: to make it possible for all children and adolescents to access the same educational opportunities. We cannot forget that we are not simply hired hands to do a job; we are teachers in a public service — the school — that guarantees childhoods.

The first question, however, that returns year after year is what my students will be like, how they will be different from those of the past year. I will have to update my skills in observing, listening, and asking questions. If the commitments agreed upon after the strikes become a reality, this year I will only have to get to know about twenty children. But I will have to dedicate time to looking at and learning about their lives, which, now, perhaps, have components that I do not know. And, especially, I will have to find time to discover the families (increasingly diverse), explain to them the school we run every day, and agree with them on ways to educate together.

It is time to review everything that all and each one of my students must know by the end of the course. From the area of knowledge that I master and from the other areas that, in an integrated way, they must discover, understand, and master. It is possible that some of the (didactic) methods I used last year will only be partially useful. But I have always been inventing, sharing, new ways of doing things. Perhaps this year everything will be a little more shaken up by the immersion in generative intelligences. Now, questions will predominate, the ways of searching, the curiosities I will have to awaken, the way to know what remains of everything they discover. Perhaps the keys will be curiosity (as always: the desire to know why things happen or to find the answers that already existed) and distrust (starting by not trusting anything that appears in the digital universe of information).

Nor does it make sense now to forget that the school is part of a neighborhood and should be part of the community. Again, the first check will be whether all children come or only those from some families. The diversity of the neighborhood may continue to be the uniformity of segregation. I do not forget that we work to build a just school in the midst of injustice.

In the same way, I cannot fail to consider that learning (or not learning) happens throughout the entire day. That what they have discovered at school is useful in life and that what they discover in non-school life serves to learn more and differently within school.

I got lost with the list of professionals who will now come to school to attend to the collection of diagnostic labels that we have all created together. I hope, however, that the social worker, the psychologist, and the social educators from the neighborhood, from the municipality, are the same people: they had already begun to know the school in depth. They did part of their work here and, together, they looked for variable ways to support students and their families. I will not send any student adrift (refer) following any protocol. I hope that mental health professionals will come to do "therapy" in the tutoring session and that they will entice the boys and girls to ask for help, if necessary, in their office.

This year I will have a sixth-grade class. Whether or not external evaluations are made about our work, I know it's time to discover and value what nine years of their lives spent in an environment like school have been for them. It's not about evaluating results, but about reviewing journeys, stories, processes. I know I will have to work thoroughly to reduce the number of those who will leave school reluctantly, refusing to learn. I know that, preparing the transition to secondary school, I will have to convince everyone that they know and can learn. And, when June arrives, I will have to help them leave childhood and open the doors to exciting adolescence.

No. I am no longer a teacher. Sometimes I return to the classroom. But I am sure that a good part of the country's teaching professionals are having these reflections these days, just as they enthusiastically begin to build a new school year.