National Council of Teachers of English
Convention theme for 2025: “Dream Boldly.”
How we can Dream Boldly together.
Proposals due by January 29, 2025.
Program Chair, Antero Garcia.

I’m getting excited.

I got the notice in an email. I read the set-up by Program Chair Antero Garcia. Some lovely rhetoric that says what I myself think and feel.

Of course. What would you expect? These are English Teachers.

But reading leads to thinking, and my Rhetoric Meter Warning Light went off.

“Consider the dreams for and of varied and diverse learners and how our pedagogies are intertwined with laboratory dreaming.”
Uh…

“Our dreams are networked to a broader, more-than-human world.”
Uh…

“Let us revel in the fact that dreams are small gifts of liberatory abundance.”
Uh…


Careful there!

Of course I thought of the students I had and the things we learned.

At the start of the semester, “What are your dreams?”

At the end of the semester, “What are your dreams?” and “How will you achieve them?”

My hope always is that students, as they read and write and think and speak, will grow, expand, change for the bigger better. They won’t be the same at the end of the semester as they were at the beginning.

I so much want them to go beyond me. We’ll stay friends, keep in touch, they’ll share their lives. But I want them to no longer need me, strong enough to lead their lives on their own. When they succeed, I succeed.

I want the world to be better, for them, for me, for all of us.

And we, my beloved colleagues, can make it so.

But I’m of two minds, ambivalent, because most of us will not be able to participate in the Convention. Those who do go will have an impact on the profession, but it’s just not enough. We need to unify, be together, all of us. I argued in an article many years ago in the English Journal, “A Plea for Cooperative Continuity,” that after twelve years passed hand to hand up through high school, our students should be ready for the world if we’ve done our job and worked together.

My students would tell me, “I like to read now.” “Poetry is wonderful and I can write it.” “I can make my writing say what I want it to.”

But it breaks my heart when they, trying to tell me something, would say, “You’re the first teacher who…”

I don’t want to be the first, or the last. I want us together, finding what we agree on, teaching collaboratively.

I want us to unify, beyond Conferences, Councils, Unions, Confederations. We as English teachers are the bedrock. We unify the whole curriculum.

We can save the world, and I want to live to see it.

That’s my Dream.