What could you do if you had enough guys?

Yesterday was Father's Day, and so it seems fitting to remember one of the fathers of good teaching in reading and writing...Donald Graves (1930-2010).  Don Graves was one of a kind, an excellent teacher and a great person! 

One Saturday Reunion at Teachers College, I heard him tell this story, "What could you do if you had enough guys?"  It's attached here, taken from one of his books of inspirational teaching stories, Teaching Day by Day: 180 Stories to Help You Along the Way (Heinemann, 2004).

Of course, telling the story live was so much more powerful than reading it here.  He said...

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In May of my junior year of college, something spontaneous occurred that I've never forgotten.  Just after dinner on a warm spring evening my two roommates and I lazied our way back to the dormitory, lingering by the tennis courts to chat.  One of us posed a simple question, "What could you do if you had enough guys?"  My roommates were physics majors.  One of them whipped out his slide rule and began calculating.  "Yes!" he crowed.  "If each person in the junior class had a hammer and chisel on a scaffold, we could dismantle the brick wall at the south end of the dormitory in about 45 minutes."  We rolled on the grass with laughter.

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Our laughter attracted a crowd, with more and more students stopping to listen to our wild speculations about what you could do if you had enough guys.  Within 30 minutes there were 50 or 60 students calling out their own wild answers and laughing hysterically.  When the laughter finally died down, everyone went back to the dorms to study.  Final exams were only a week away.

At midnight the bell signaling the beginning and end of classes suddenly started ringing.  Spontaneously we poured from our rooms, half-dressed, still dressing, one question still on our minds, "What could you do if you had enough guys?"

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We raced across the campus.  Ten men picked up a VW bug and placed it on the library steps.  Milk cans were hauled up flagpoles.  The president's front door was nailed shut.  Huge empty boiler tanks were rolled across lawns and placed in strategic locations to disrupt campus traffic.  There was certainly power in numbers that night, the power to disrupt.  At 2am, we retired to our rooms.

I've often pondered the events of that night, the surge of energy that brought with it the feeling of sudden power.

What could happen if enough teachers and educators came together and speculated about what we could do for our children?

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It's four years now since Don Graves is gone.  It's over 10 years now since he published that story.  It's over 60 years now since the story happened, but the story is still relevant.  What do you think we could do if we had enough guys?  What could we do if as a group we showed everyone around us how powerful it is to give kids voice in their learning?  What could we do if we didn't fear Common Core, and testing, and evaluation, but took control of them through good teaching?  All of us.  All of us learning together and putting into practice what we learn, following new standards, but also creating classrooms that are exciting houses of discovery where kids are at the center as our greatest anchor standard...

Not exactly like putting a VW on someone's lawn or nailing someone's door shut, but just imagine the impact of what we could do if we had enough guys!

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