ABSTRACT
Working day after day in a setting renders commonplace the particulars of the
material environment. Stepping out of the setting, for interscholastic science
contests, for sports events with other schools, for district meetings held in
other school buildings, reminded the SET teachers of what they lacked. A sci-
ence teacher who frequently consulted to other public and private schools on
designing and equipping school labs and who taught summer school at
another school saw the utter inadequacy of his own lab space in light of these
other schools, schools where his expertise was solicited in ways that it was
rarely invited and only rarely heeded by those who controlled the budgets at
his own school. He remarked on his classroom’s lack of a gas supply, water,
electricity, basic microscope slides, or even lighted microscopes (bemoaning
that his “available light” microscopes were not old, but in fact too new to dis-
card). He spoke about going into schools within the same district where halls
were carpeted, the library “worked,” and the “teachers have a decent chair to sit
in.” He spoke for all these teachers who knew that they were working under
primitive conditions, yet responsible for creating a first-rate academic pro-
gram in sciences and technology. He saw the school’s importance to the dis-
trict as symbolic; the district role in the school was, in his view, often limited
to promoting and exploiting that symbolism. After sharing many reflections
on his teaching, he concluded, “This is a good school because it runs on the
blood of the faculty and the brains of the kids.”
