I first became politically aware during the Bush era—I was the right age, and between the 2000 election, 9/11, and the resulting wars, the times were dramatic enough to hold my attention. But if you were to ask preteen me to explain any government policy, I would have skipped right over the Patriot Act and gone with No Child Left Behind.
No Child Left Behind was the Bush administration’s attempt to improve public schools, but in my household, it was the subject of much criticism. As a 12-year-old, I would have told you that the focus on standardized testing would detract from teachers’ ability to actually help their students learn and instead incentivize teaching to the test; judging teachers for students’ performance (and pulling funding for low performance) would not actually improve public education.
These talking points were drilled into my brain by my parents, who were both teachers. My mom was a math teacher in my high school; my siblings and I would all have her as our own teacher. My dad had previously been a middle school teacher in my district, but had lucked out in the 1980s and gotten a job as a professor—his master’s degree in computer science shepherded him in at a time when few had a Ph.D. in the subject. But he got a joint appointment in the math department, and I always told friends that “he teaches math teachers how to teach.”
Both my parents being math teachers, our last name being Matthews, their insistence that we have a math hour every morning before swimming lessons during the summers of my elementary years—it all made for a fun story. As a kid waiting at the bus stop, I used to beg my dad to challenge me with addition problems in different bases (our numeric system operates on base 10, but you can count in any!).
I knew very early on that my parents cared profoundly about making math interesting to kids. My dad ran a Math Olympiads club in my elementary school and middle school, and if he was chaperoning a field trip, I knew that meant he would be whipping out either the strawberry ice cream problem or the chicken nugget problem on the bus ride home.
All the recent coverage of new vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and his wife, Gwen, naturally made me think of my parents. They too are a married couple of teachers who have brought an extraordinary amount of passion to their life’s work, according to the many accounts from their students. As one former student of Gwen Walz wrote in the Washington Post: “She taught her honors English classes like they were college courses. We were expected to think and analyze, not just regurgitate information.”
And the Walzes’ political ascent gives me hope that we will commit, as a society, to better valuing teachers. Not just because they will presumably fight for better policies in schools, but because their personal histories, and the stories that are coming out about how meaningful their life’s work has been to those touched by it, has reminded us how valuable dedicated teachers are. They are the foundation of society, but we’ve stopped treating them as if they are. We could all use the reminder of what teachers can mean and do.
My mom’s physical classroom was a prime example of this dedication. She taught AP calculus, and made taking the AP test a must for those taking her class (a unique stance in my public school), but she built in a benefit: Class ended after the May exam. For the rest of that month and through June, all of her calculus students embarked on a project that had to relate to the subject matter in some way. So a group of students always made a hilariously old-fashioned weapon of some kind (a trebuchet, a potato gun, something where calculating the velocity and the arc of the shot mattered), and another set of students tended to paint a mural on a wall of her classroom (yes, the mural had to be about math in some way, but … loosely so). There was a Rosie the Riveter over one chalkboard, with the woman rolling up her sleeve to show a tattoo of an equation on her arm with the instructions to “integrate this!” It was a direct challenge to the subsequent classes, and the student from each year who figured it out first got to paint their name under the mural.
These traditions—the launching of the trebuchets, the murals, the extra prep she did at our house before the AP exam that came with Klondike bars for all attendees—made it feel like we were doing more than memorizing methods. We were engaging with mathematics on a level that actually provoked joy. That was the point—and why the Bush-era policies that incentivized teaching to tests irked my parents so much.
All the stories about the Walzes are imbued with a similar ethos. They co-led trips to China during Tim Walz’s tenure at Mankato West High—an extraordinary way to supplement their Midwestern students’ worldviews (they made it a point to tell students what they were eating after they had sampled foods, to try to help expand their palates). A coach who turned around the fortunes of the football team, Tim Walz also advised his school’s first Gay-Straight Alliance, knowing how much his presence as a straight male football coach could bolster the club. Gwen Walz advised the student newspaper, encouraging the students to represent a wide range of views, even if they weren’t popular. Tim Walz supervised the lunch room—which is part of how later, as governor, he understood the importance of not making kids bring in paperwork to prove they needed free lunch, and instead enacted a free meal system that wasn’t means-tested.
We all know that there are occasionally teachers out there who are the total opposite—who abuse their power, who don’t have kids’ best interests at heart. But the stories of the Walzes, which then remind me of my parents, really show how the care, encouragement, and support of genuinely good teachers can make a lasting difference in students’ lives. The LGBTQ+ students who praise Tim Walz’s early support now remind me of the student who years later wrote my mom a note for the year she spent packing an extra lunch for him: “That meant so much to me, you have no idea”—the last bit double-underlined. There are so many unique vulnerabilities kids suffer as they navigate through school systems, many of which can be softened at least slightly by the kind of caring that so many of our teachers take on.
Even loving parents are often not the right people to help their kids handle the roller coaster that is adolescence. My own teacher-mentors were the one who helped me create my high school’s student newspaper, and the one who let me do my poetry class project on Jim Morrison because as an 11th grader, I was really convinced he was a poet. When the Walzes were the faculty advisors of their school’s prom, they worked to make sure no one was showing up alone. That is attention to detail.
It’s thrilling to see where Tim Walz’s decision to step out of the classroom has led him. He transitioned from teacher to politician in the early 2000s, after he tried to bring his students to a Bush rally and got turned away because of the perception that they were Democrats. He was encouraged by his students, and he won his first congressional race in 2006, and the rest is now history. His wife stayed working in education until he became governor, and has spent her time as a political spouse engaging in education policy, including bringing a program to Minnesota that helps inmates access education.
Over the course of my lifetime, starting with No Child Left Behind, I have watched our country fail to invest properly in its teachers. The average teacher’s salary is lower today than it was 10 years ago (inflation accounted for), and what we have asked from teachers has only increased. They were expected to figure out Zoom classes and masked learning during COVID, and are now dealing with unprecedented learning loss. I remember coming home from college and telling my parents about the friends of mine who were going to do Teach for America—I thought they’d be excited. Instead, they told me how they felt that the existence of such a program showed how much America didn’t value teachers: The program’s short training period suggests that learning how to guide a classroom of students is way easier than it really is, and often leaves both the short-term teachers and students struggling. Teachers are professionals tasked with an incredibly serious and difficult job, one that in most cases requires the expertise of a master’s degree, and they should be respected and compensated accordingly.
Not only that, we are currently existing in a political climate and media landscape that requires its citizens to have adequate training—in reading, in history, in civics—to navigate. The current state of America is inarguably linked to the way we support and value teachers. Right now, I think it shows—but it also can change. I hope that change is something the Walzes bring to Washington.
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