To the Editor:

One doesn’t ordinarily think of Education Week as providing laugh-out-loud coverage of serious pedagogical issues. That however changed in an instant with John Zich’s front-page photograph of Fernando Chavez (“Bilingual Mandate Challenges Chicago’s Public Preschools,” Dec. 1, 2010) as he sat on a rug in his classroom, wide-eyed, with such a winning smile, listening intently to his teacher. It has to be one of the most risible photographs of a schoolchild published in your distinguished archives.
And that photograph, as much as anything else that could be said or written about education, symbolizes the reason so many of us entered the teaching profession in the first instance and found it to be such a rewarding and satisfying career so many pleasant years later.
John Travers
Fairport, N.Y.