The 'Super Heroes' Are Already Here

After conducting my instructional observational rounds of teachers one recent week, I could not help but recall the visceral reaction I experienced when I saw the documentary "Waiting for Superman" over a year ago.

The first thing I wanted to do after leaving the Houston Street cinema in a huff that night was haul a documentary film crew into my public school, Millennium Art Academy, and make an immediate sequel that would depict a great number of public school "Supermen" and "Superwomen" inside one small, Bronx Title 1 high school.

Maxine Nodel

I thought about this again when I observed Richard Ouimet’s English class at my school. Mr. Ouimet, who is a tenured New York City public-school teacher with over a decade of experience, is able to transform the ethos of any high school classroom into a college one by simply combining the ingredients that all teachers with the "it factor" possess: intellect, passion, compassion, the ability to motivate and inspire and, most important, the ability to treat each student with intellectual dignity at all times — regardless of that student’s learning ability, plight or societal baggage.

In the case of Mr. Ouimet, all his students know that he truly believes in them and, as a result, they flock to their Pied Piper of English literature, discourse, rhetoric and hope throughout the day.

In the senior English class that I observed, Mr. Ouimet’s 34 students (the same students who had entered our school three years earlier reading below grade level), sat in a circle, entirely engaged in a sophisticated Socratic dialectic centering on psychoanalytic themes in Sophocles’s "Oedipus the King."

The group included students with disabilities and English Language Learners, and all of them were able to articulate their claims (and counterclaims) by finding textual evidence and making connections via multiple perspectives, as well as with other texts they recently read.

But Mr. Ouimet is not the only "super hero" educator at our public school; the vast majority of our teachers immerse their students in critical thinking, and all of our staff members spend more time at school with our students than they do with their own families.

Our "Supermen" and "Superwomen" engage in relentless outreach, visiting students at home when they have missed too much school, providing counseling and solace to students who are homeless, who might be leaving their fourth foster home, or who were raped by someone they know, all while simultaneously convincing these students that there are really good reasons for them to wake up each morning and take two or three buses to "come to us": that attending school regularly, passing their courses and mandated state exams, and preparing for college will all lead to something — a different life script, perhaps.

In essence, our school’s public tenured "Supermen" and "Superwomen" are the ones who hold the hope and vision, the proverbial torch of life, for those students whose flames may have been blown out by unwitting circumstance — and who need adults who believe in them and who are patient enough to wait for them and push them through the darkness until they realize their integral place in the world.