Right now, I am training to be a teacher in Baltimore, looking for a school to teach at for the next couple years. And during my training with Baltimore City Teaching Residency, my instructor showed me a TED Talk from Rita Pierson titled "Every Kid Needs a Champion." Pierson, someone who spent her whole life in or around a classroom, a teacher since 1972, meditated on the meaning of being a teacher in the decades she'd been teaching to this point. And so it was after I saw her TED Talk that I said these words in my mind:

"Wow. This is what it means to be a teacher."

Of course, reality is far more complicated than our ideals. I have absolutely no idea if my training and my high hopes and expectations for my ability to empower, motivate, and teach my students will just fall short in a lot of ways. But a teacher is more than a teacher, in the words of Pierson, "great actors and great actresses, and we come to work when we don't feel like it, and we're listening to educational reform policy that doesn't make sense, and we teach anyway." Teachers do that because learning nad teaching should bring joy. And although teachers weren't meant to be saviors to kids, as is often the case in so many Hollywood movies that show how teachers re-charted their kids' lives, "every child deserves a champion, an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists they become the best they can be."

Teaching is hard, but it isn't impossible. Educators were born to make a difference in kids' lives.

And teachers won't always get mandates and directives from educational reform that make sense and won't be so easy to apply in the classroom. But what isn't taught and discussed is that teaching isn't technical, but relational, and maximal learning is unleashed by "the value and importance of human connection."

James Comer elaborates on this theme in saying that "no significant learning can occur without a significant relationship." George Washington Carver once said that "no significant learning can occur without a significant relationship." Kids can't learn effectively without having a teacher they have a good relationship with and they like. If they don't like their teacher to some degree, then learning in that classroom will be a chore rather than a joy, as was the case in so many of my classrooms growing up.

Again, the skeptic in me, in us, teaches us that reality is far more than these far-reaching ideals. But Rev. Sarah Brouwer at Minneapolis Westminster Presbyterian Church once said that "if we can't be idealists in church, where can we be?" And as educators, if we can't be idealists in the classroom, of all places, where can we be?

Quantitatively, the statistics in a lot of schools locally and nationally will tell us that we're not doing well, listing all the problems that we face in getting our kids to learn. But if everyone is a critic, talking about the problems and where we're all falling short, who is going to be the solution? I speak for only myself, not other teachers in that the joy in trying to fix those problems at that deep level is that we try, that we dare greatly and ride that roller coaster of failure, sadness, and joy because society just needs more people to be a champion to kids.

One colleague said to Pierson that "they don't pay me to like the kids. They pay me to teach a lesson. The kids should learn it. I should teach it, they should learn it, case closed." Maybe that works for some people in college. Hell, maybe it works for the best of students in high school. But a classroom for our kids is not a Darwinian survival of the fittest competition where the best kids just succeed and get by and the ones who fail fall short.

No, a classroom is a place where we don't give up on anyone, where everyone is taught to believe in themselves and taught that they are capable of doing anything.

A teacher shouldn't seek to be understood, but to understand. A teacher should tell a kid "I'm sorry" when they went too far. These things seem simple and are easy to lose sight of when you're in the moment and struggling to be patient, and lose sight of your objective and mission. Pierson tells the story of one time, when she taught an entire lesson wrong according to the teacher edition of a book. She apologized to the class for teaching the lesson wrong, and they told her: "that's okay, Ms. Pierson. You were so excited, we just let you go."

She has taught in classrooms so academically deficient that she was hopeless of how she could take those kids to where they needed to be. "And it was difficult, it was awfully hard. How do I raise the self-esteem of a child and his academic achievement at the same time?" One year, she told all her students that "You were chosen to be in my class because I am the best teacher and you are the best students, they put us all together so we could show everybody else how to do it." And she gave those kids a saying that "I am somebody. I was somebody when I came. I'll be a better somebody when I leave."

And those kids said it long enough and preached it long enough that it became a part of them, that they believed it. In one instance, a student missed 18 of 20 questions on a quiz in Ms. Pierson's class. And instead of putting 2/20, -18, or 10% on the quiz, she put a +2 on his paper with a smiley face.

"Ms. Pierson, is this an F?" the student asked.

"Yes," Ms. Pierson responded.

"Then why'd you put a smiley face?"

"Because you're on a roll. You got two right. You didn't miss them all."

"And when we review this, won't you do better?"

"Yes, ma'am, I can do better."

According to Pierson, it was a lesson in positive framing. -18 is something that discourages and sucks the life out of someone. +2 says "I ain't all bad." When her mother was a teacher, Pierson's mother, Ms. Walker, went above and beyond educating and taking care of her kids, making sure they had enough to eat and enough soap to shower. "See, it's hard to teach kids who stink," she interjected. Her days as a teacher were hard, exceptionally hard.

But one day, after she retired, one of those kids came through to say to her, "you know, Ms. Walker, you made a difference in my life. You made it work for me. You made me feel like Iike I was somebody, when I knew, at the bottom, I wasn't. And I just want you to see what I've become."

And when Pierson's mom died, so many of her former students were at her funeral, and Pierson cried, "not because she was gone, but because she left a legacy of relationships that could never disappear.

"If you have a lesson plan and it fails and you blame yourself, you're on the road to becoming a good teacher. If you blame the kids, you should find another job. And what Prez did was say, 'Why did I fail? Why didn't I reach them?" Ed Burns, Baltimore Police officer turned teacher once said of his experience and his philosophy on teaching.

Because how can we build lasting relationships and joy to kids if we blame them? How can we be kids' champions if we blame them?

"Every child deserves a champion, an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be," Pierson tells us.

And that starts with building, cultivating, and engaging in realtionships with our students.