Caring is our job

A student from Ecuador says her first complete sentence in English. A boy chooses to tell his teacher about his feelings rather than throw a tantrum. A class learns the difference between opinion and fact.

These are the incremental achievements that students and teachers experience every day. They can’t be measured by test scores. But this is how children grow — one step at a time.

Now teachers at a Brooklyn public school have made a video that manages through delicacy and understatement to show the real successes and struggles in the daily life of teachers, students and schools.

The video has gone viral. Within a few days of its being posted on the UFT’s Facebook page, more than 480,000 people around the country had watched it.

In the video, you hear teachers narrating as the camera pans over students’ artwork and teachers’ instructional materials in their classrooms. You see a bookcase filled with baskets of children’s books, a poster displaying the range of human emotions, a wall covered with student self-portraits.

These are the everyday evidence of teaching and learning.

As the teachers in the video say, “When dealing with small people, you often are rewarded in small victories. Success is not always measured in grand, sweeping gestures or sharp peaks on a numerical graph.”

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has called for state test scores to count for 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation, clearly has no clue when it comes to public education.

The patient educators at this Brooklyn school are ready to teach him.