Chapter 36
Patrick, the journalist from the Friday writing group, published a piece about Marcus in the Kingston Observer in Marcus's second year of teaching. Not a profile Marcus had not agreed to a profile but a piece about pedagogy in under-resourced schools, for which Marcus had agreed to be interviewed and to have some of his classroom approaches described.
The article ran on a Wednesday. By Friday, Marcus had received emails from two other schools asking if he would speak to their faculties, and a letter from the Ministry of Education expressing interest in a meeting.
He was twenty-two years old and deeply uncomfortable with the attention. He talked about it with Leroy over the phone.
'You have to use it,' Leroy said. 'This is exactly the platform that lets you do more.'
'I'm a classroom teacher. That's where the work is.'
'You can be a classroom teacher AND someone who influences how other classroom teachers teach,' Leroy said. 'That's not contradiction. That's multiplication.'
He thought about this for a week. He agreed to speak to both schools. He declined the Ministry meeting for the time being he did not yet have enough experience to speak about policy, and he believed that speaking about things you did not fully know was a form of dishonesty.
He did the school talks, speaking to the combined faculties of two secondary schools in Kingston about what he had learned in his first year and a half about how feedback shaped student self-perception. He spoke from his research, from his classroom experience, and from his own history as a student who had been shaped by a teacher's attention.
Afterwards, a teacher in the audience a man in his fifties who taught Science and who had been in education for longer than Marcus had been alive came up to him.
'You reminded me why I started,' the man said.
Marcus did not know what to say. He thanked the man.
On the bus home he thought about Mr. Okafor. About the weight he had put into that single word Good when Marcus had written the essay about the mango tree. About the way certain things travel forward in ways we cannot see.
He wrote in his journal: 'The work goes further than the room. The room is where it starts.