Dance Like a Wave of the Sea: A Teacher's Letter to His Students

A bright and curious student brought a controversial poem to David Olio's senior English class ten years ago in 2015. David considered it a teachable moment, but the experience would change his teaching life as his decision to allow his class to read and examine the poem was rejected by his administrators. Despite a twenty-three-year career of joy-filled and discovery-driven teaching, the South Windsor School district in Connecticut moved to fire him, effectively ending his secondary teaching.

This is a memoir of David's own learning and teaching life, animated by inquiry but stifled by a kind of censorship that would serve as harbinger for the twenty-first century confrontation educators currently face in the United States. Undermining open and honest conversation in a pluralistic democracy, words have been used to discredit an integrity of inquiry, threatening habits of discovery, so his story includes a reflection on the resulting silences prompted by cultural bias and anchored by institutional power. David harnesses writing itself in a heart-felt letter to his former eighty-six students about his journey in teaching and learning through the values of open, democratic conversation. Truly, the literary arts prompt us all, without fear or favor, to dance like waves of the sea.