Experience matters.  But what do I know?

On the front page of yesterday’s New York Times, there was a story about the relatively short tenure of new teachers in charter schools.  The story included a quote that left me, in the words of my British friends, utterly gobsmacked:

“Strong schools can withstand the turnover of their teachers,” said Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America. “The strongest schools develop their teachers tremendously so they become great in the classroom even in their first and second years.”  (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/education/at-charter-schools-short-careers-by-choice.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

To be fair, the article explains that new teachers in some charter schools receive a great deal of supervision, mentoring, and feedback, sometimes before they even set foot in a classroom.  Which is obviously a really good thing that undoubtedly makes them better teachers.  Of course, the article also says that studies show that a lot of teacher turnover has adverse affects on student achievement.

I’m not an education expert by any means, and I know very little about Wendy Kopp other than her Teach for America thing.  But as the mother of two children who’ve been educated in public schools for the last 12 years, I do have some thoughts about teachers.  Which basically come down to this:  experience in teaching is just like experience in any other field — it matters.

It’s not the last word on your value as a teacher.  Or your value as a lawyer, or a neurosurgeon, or a hedge fund manager, or a figure skater, or a supermarket cashier, or a journalist, or a mechanical engineer, or an architect, or a bus driver, or a real estate agent, or a groundskeeper at the U. S. Open, or the CEO of J.P. Morgan, or the Governor of New Jersey, or the Commissioner of Major League Baseball.

But there is a reason you want the lawyer arguing your case — whether it’s a case before the municipal court or the U.S. Supreme Court — to have some experience in litigation.  It’s the same reason you want your realtor to be a member of the “Top Sellers Club” (or whatever they call it), the reason that the Yankees have won more World Series than any other baseball team, and the reason you hire a real plumber, no matter how well your brother installed the laundry sink in his basement.

Sometimes, of course, long experience in a given profession just makes you cranky.  Everybody has a colleague who’s just phoning it in, no matter what field of endeavor you’re engaged in — teacher, bank manager, U.S. Senator, Sears clerk, parent.  Some people have a lot of experience and learn absolutely nothing from it.

Sometimes being new to your job means it’s easier for you to color outside the lines, to think outside the box, to bring a different perspective to a tough problem.  And some people are just geniuses at what they do right from the get-go, whether they are Mozart, middle-school teachers, or the guy who tiled my bathroom.  (Really.  He looked like a high school sophomore but he is a veritable artist with subway tile and grout.)

Mostly, though, in almost every field, we think experience is a good thing.  We think experience is a good stand-in for things like good judgment, maturity, and maybe even wisdom.  We know that experience isn’t a substitute for good judgment, or that you can be ignorant no matter how long you do something.  We know that energy, enthusiasm and creativity are not the exclusive purvey of the young.

But I think it is only when we talk about education reform that we say things like, “Strong schools can withstand the turnover of their teachers.”  What does that even mean?  Would we say that a baseball team with six rookies on the field is a better team than one with experienced players at all nine positions? Would you voluntarily fly across the country in an airplane staffed with pilots and officers who were all new to their jobs?  Study after study explains that going to the hospital in July, when all the new interns and medical resident arrive, raises your risk of dying by 10% or more.  Would you schedule your kid’s tonsillectomy in July because, hey, the strongest med schools develop their students tremendously so they can become great in the operating room in just a year or two?

All other things being equal — even though they never are — I’d put my child in a classroom with an experienced teacher instead of a first- or second-year teacher any day. And I bet Wendy Kopp would too.

I have what can probably best be described as a completely primal sense of place.  I don’t think I can tell you what that actually means, but every summer,  my family spends a week in Lackawanna, NY, where my mom still lives in the same house I grew up in.

As my mother ages, I don’t suppose I need to explain why I take my family to visit every year.  Our stated reason has always been to go to the Erie County Fair, which just happens to be largest county fair in the country.  (I swear.  You could look it up.  The Erie County Fair has it’s own website.  And if I’m wrong about that, at least I’m pretty sure that it was at some point the largest county fair in the country.)

We  try to get to the Fair  in the morning, close to 10am when it opens, although obviously this gets harder as one’s children become teenagers and no longer experience morning unless forced to by state law or their mother.  Or sometimes ski season.  My husband always makes me swear we’ll leave before it closes at 11pm.  Sometimes we even do, but more often we do not.  Say what you will about Paris or New York, but to me, there’s nothing like seeing the lights go out on the James E. Strates Midway from the parking lot at the Fair.

I make my family look at the rabbits and the horses — they balk at checking out the cow and pig barns, but we do watch the Swifty Swine pig races.   There were a couple of years where we saw the lightweight horse pull, which is pretty cool; once we saw the heavyweight horse pull, which is actually mind-bending.  The kids and I go on the rides, although my husband does not.  They play carnival games, I Got It and the one where you squirt water into something’s mouth and sometimes The Wand.  I don’t like the games, but some years they win big. (And I have never been able to toss those stupid stuffed animals they won at the Fair, which is probably some kind of karmic payback for making them walk 200+ dusty acres in the August heat.)

We check out the RVs and hot tubs, and one year we drove a Toyota Tundra over an obstacle course.  Last year, I had vertigo and I did the Fair in one of those electric scooters that really old people ride.  (Tt was not a good experience.  Those things are much harder to drive that you think.)  This year, I had a “Free Fall Experience,” which involved climbing up 30 feet to a platform and jumping off into an absolutely gi-normous airbag.  My children have a video on their phones.  It was pretty fun.  (Obviously, the vertigo is completely gone.) Before we leave, we usually buy something from what my family calls the “Infomercial Building” and the Fair map calls the “Commercial Building” — rubber band guns, rigid plastic cones to scrape ice off your windshield, special iPhone cleaner (although, to its credit, it also works on jewelry and glasses).

The part of the Fair we all really look forward to, of course, is Fair food — roasted corn dunked into a bucket of melted butter, cheesesteaks, Italian sausage with onions and peppers, frozen cheesecake on a stick, ribbon fries, Chiavetta’s barbequed chicken dinners.  My daughter drinks gallons of Fair lemonade; we buy Fowler’s salt water taffy for my mom, who can’t come with us anymore (even in one of those scooters, and I am genuinely sorry I was so mean to her about her scooter driving skills) , and candied nuts for us to eat in the car on our way back to New Jersey.  We leave completely exhausted, usually with a bit of sunburn and a bit of nausea.  The good kind.  Not the vertigo kind.

When the children were younger, we spent a day at Fantasy Island too — more rides plus a water park.  (It’s a testament to how much my husband loves me that he participated, almost always with extremely good humor, in these excursions.)  I’ve started insisting on visiting  historical sites:  Fort Niagara, Our Lady of Victory Basilica, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Graycliff on Lake Erie.  We hang out with my high school friends, and it makes me feel complete in some weird way to say that my kids are friends with my high school friends’ kids.   We go to Fran-Ceil’s for frozen custard, real, full-fat custard in fantastic flavors like butterscotch and raspberry and pistachio.  We’ve gone to Niagara Falls, to the Anchor Bar to have chicken wings, and to Stratford, Ontario for the Shakespeare Festival.

My children used to play in the playground near my mother’s house, which was full of tall, dangerous and fun things made of steel that were too hot to sit on comfortably on an August afternoon — steep slides with no sides, towers 10 feet off the ground with old metal ladders, swings shaped like horses.  They replaced all the equipment there last year, with lower, safer, plastic coated things and rubber mulch to cushion a fall. It’s bright blue, and, to my daughter, tragic.

Lackawanna, as I think I’ve mentioned before, is a steel-town suburb south of Buffalo.  It is not beautiful, and frankly, it never was. We don’t go for the beauty, although it’s there if you can see it.  We go because I still have friends there.  We go because my mom is 86 years old.  But mostly we go because, even now, it’s my home.

Even now.  Even now that I have a bright and beautiful home of my own in an upscale New Jersey suburb. Even now that my life’s foundation rests firmly in the heart and soul of a good, good man who knows me well and loves me anyway.  Even now — or maybe especially now, almost 40 years after I stalked away from my parent’s house, from the red striped awnings, that big front window in the kitchen, and my father’s rock gardens, with a fierce and frantic desire to go somewhere – anywhere – else, anywhere else but this narrow little town with a close grey sky, a smoking corpse of a once-mighty steel plant, and no place for somebody like me who always felt so different from all the people who seemed so damned comfortable there.

Especially now.  Now that I know the world’s a much bigger place but often not that much less narrow. Now that I know that even the widest skies can be grey.  Now that I know that people are not always what they seem to be, and that comfort is given and taken but is not a destination.

Because life, after all, takes place  — at your mother’s kitchen table, on the Ferris Wheel at the Fair, in the church on the corner of Ridge Road and Center that was demolished years ago.  Lackawanna is my place. Like the pencil lines we make on the door jamb to mark our children’s growth, I go home every summer to mark mine.