This post was originally written in response to an excellent essay, by Publius, on education over at The Gods of the Copybook Headings.
The public reason for public education is compassion and justice. The state must provide education because of what economists term “market failure.” The phrase is loaded and intentionally so. To describe something as a failure is of course to implicitly establish a standard of success. The market is only a mechanism and it guarantees nothing. The ability to buy and sell freely is in the end all a free market entails. What men do with such freedom is something else. They may behave foolishly or rationally. What is certain is that if a society is composed of short-sighted fools its government will be no better composed …
You cannot force men to be rational or good or honest, they must choose to think and behave.
When markets fail it means only that human beings have failed another human being’s, or a group of human beings’, standard of the good, the right and the proper. The alleged “market failure” in education is that a free market would not provide universal education. In truth nothing can provide “education” for all citizens.
The full post is an excellent read and as I stated in my first reply, I felt my best response would simply be an anecdote. This would be a prime time for me to announce to my readers that I have been employed as a public school teacher for about the last two months, which is essentially why there have been no posts. Hopefully this trend will change and I’ll find more time to post my experiences and continued thoughts on the world of educational news. Without further ado, here are my replies to Publius’ essay.
” I am now employed as a public school teacher in the States. This choice of job was in part financial and in part a mix of curiosity and personal education. In the future, I would prefer to work in a private school environment (and much later have my own school). However, I felt it would be useful for me to experience, first hand, exactly the problems (and potential benefits) of being in a public school, as a teacher. In the past 5 weeks I’ve realized a few things that should be obvious to most people that agree with Publius’ position.
” The willing and able are trapped with the criminal and incompetent until the age of 16. “
1) The amount of time that a teacher can spend with students who want to learn, much less those students who excel at learning, is cut almost in HALF due to the pervasive problems of disruption from hostile and apathetic students. In class, I find my time being sucked away by these students who demand too much attention, simply to keep them on task so they will be *as minimal* a disturbance to others as possible.
After class, during conference time or after school, the time spent on disciplinary phone calls home, paper work and trying to keep track of which students need to make up what (due to excessive truancy) steals away almost all the time I *NEED* as a new teacher for creating lesson plans.
This was a harsh lesson for me. The amount of helplessness I felt for the other 90% of my students was quickly turning to anger… an emotion incompatible with student discipline. Since the second week of school, I began using any resource I could to stop these students. Some of them were given detention (a bland threat for most habitual trouble makers). Some were sent to the office (some of them would rather be there anyway). At least one was taken from my room by a police officer. Many have begun to taste an older form of discipline, such as being thrown out of class into the hall or having to stay after class and pick up text books.
I keep hearing that new teachers face all sorts of problems like this, but I refuse to keep such a high amount of my attention on these students if it means stopping my instruction. The impossibility of public education, however, is that these students can never be fully kicked out of school, leaving the parents to find more appropriate solutions on their own time and money..
We can put them in In School Suspension, send them home for extended suspension, or even remove them to an alternative school.. but never for an entire year. At some point, these students who are incapable of interacting with the rest of the student population, are simply dumped back into the system. Teachers have to figure out how to keep them in order as well as catch them up (sometimes 6 weeks worth of work). Both, in a realistic sense, are borderline impossible. Assuming the teacher is giving instruction in a proper hierarchical fashion, it is not appropriate to say, “Well, they shouldn’t be held accountable for the previous material,” because they will not be able to understand the new material without what came before.
What is a teacher to do? I can’t simply forget about the problem (behavior) students. If I do, I can’t teach my class. Even when they’re not in my class, I know they’re coming back. Either I devote an even larger portion of my day to those students and privately tutor them in an attempt to connect on them at some social/emotional level with the goal of reducing the behaviors some small degree (as well as keeping them up to date on my curriculum) or the problem completely takes over my class, again, when they return.
In the horrendous excuses for teacher education/certification classes, one keeps hearing a veritable hodgepodge of idealistic (yet philosophically disconnected, irrational) jargon about how to “reach every student”. Suggestions for dealing with disruptive classroom behavior include: move desks around so you can walk, recognize diversity, consider home situations, remember biological developmental stages…
Not once, in all the courses I’ve taken, has a single instructor ever dared to mention that the actual content being offered has anything to do with student responsibility. Not once, in all these courses, has anyone ever suggested that academic standards have anything to do with all these disruptions. And not once has anyone ever DARED to suggest that a system where teachers can’t give proper academic marks (nothing below a 50 for a report card), can’t use academic consequences for disruptive behavior, and can’t permanently toss students out of a classroom… might, just might have something to do with the apathy of parental involvement.
I absolutely love being a teacher. The thrill I get from even a single student who asks a question, based upon her own curiosity due to some tiny thing I’ve mentioned, is one of the sweetest experiences in life. Watching my students struggle through the beginning stages of a new concept to the last moment when I’ve asked them to think imaginatively and critically about that same topic holds the same joy for me, as if I had also just experienced that same intellectual triumph. The pleads of “read it again!” or “say that again!” or even “how do you spell ‘obnoxiously’?” are a rare form of music I know I am personally directing.
In a sense though, teaching in a public school is like directing a symphony next to the highway. A few instruments will still be heard, but the end performance could have been vastly superior given a different location. The obvious enormous distractions and detriments are offered to me as normal and expected and in the end, the advice offered to me is about as effective as putting up a fence next to the highway.”
[And Part 2 ...]
“At the repeated request of some readers, I offer a “part two” which was originally supposed to be in my first post.
2) If one desires to become a new public school teacher in the states, they must become familiar with the word “contradiction”. It will never be used by your professors, mentors, administrators or parents; however, it will haunt you continuously, making you doubt any rational thought you have managed to acquire thus far in life.
The summer before I got this job, I took a required course on multiculturalism that espoused the wrongs of the majorities (so long as they weren’t composed of minorities) the moral grayness of presenting single sides of complex ethical decisions as “the only right choice,” (discussing sexual orientation with 3rd graders who have no range of knowledge to understand it meaningfully) and was expected to ignore direct evidence of meaningful standards for unealistic, impossible standards. (That is, English should not be considered an official language because it is discriminatory.. However, the only person in the class who had to learn it as a second language thought it would have been easier for her to have learned English, had the national standards been higher.)
The week before school started, our administration took us through a fairly generic pep rally for new teachers, a convocation for the entire district (complete with motivational speaker), constantly repeated the slogan “Every child, every day” and urged us to do our best as sculptors of the future.
Before school started, new teachers were advised that the “mean” teachers are the best ones in the school. Those who don’t put up with anything, who keep the kids working, who the kids hate on the first day of school.. Those are the ones our administrators liked. Many new teachers repeatedly hear, “Don’t smile until Thanksgiving” (late November). I.e. “Put the kids through boot camp”.
The first week of school, a fellow teacher told me, “One of the hardest lessons I learned my first year as a teacher was that I wasn’t going to get through to every student.”
Two weeks into school, I had to attend a seminar on class discipline and management, where I was taught repeatedly that being hard on students doesn’t do a damn thing. You must connect with the students, find out what’s going on with them, read their signals.. be a psychologist to figure out their motivations for acting out. But you’re reminded never to “be their friend.”
Three weeks into school, I’m told that it’s perfectly appropriate to send students to the office. After all, that’s what they’re there for.. to back up the teachers.
The weekend after the third week, I’m taught that teachers who send students to the office aren’t dealing with management and discipline properly, and that “Master” teachers almost have no office referrals at all.
In the fourth week, I am told by my administration that it’s ok to send students to the office and that in fact, many of the students are already “frequent flyers”.
Also in the fourth week, a parent of a student who was talking during a test (and consequently was awarded a zero) decides to challenge my decision, stating the rules about how it’s illegal to give academic consequences for behavior related reasons. My administration does not back me up, telling me that it’s against the law to do what I did. Explaining to them that talking during a test = cheating is a universal law in practically every classroom did not seem to sway my contact in the administration. I am urged to allow the student to retake the test.
This weekend, I am told by another teacher (for a class management course) that my rule (re: talking during tests) is good and to ignore the law. It is suggested to me that I stand up to the parent, since it might be the first time this student has ever had to meet some kind of standard of behavior.
This weekend, I am also told about a student who failed all of her subjects and state tests with the exception of science (in which she made an A and received a commended performance on the test), because the teacher had made a connection with the student. The teacher had become the student’s friend and the student “didn’t want to let her down.”
This weekend, this same teacher tells me about one of his students that is excelling in mathematics to such an extent that he does not need to write his problems in order to understand concepts or to get the right answers. He explains to us that he is going to attempt to hold a field trip (as bribery) over the student to get him to do his homework (which he obviously does not need to do). Suggestions from myself and classmates that it’s hellacious to have to be restrained academically seem to be ignored. “Put him in the accelerated class.” … He already is .. “Put him in math that’s two years ahead..” No, the field trip should be enough to make him do something he doesn’t need to do.
Connect with your students, but don’t be friends. Be mean, but don’t be angry. Don’t take it personally, stay calm, but deal with it at all hours of the day. Help every student, but not some. Deal with your problems, we’ll help, but not when you need it. Worry about the worst students, ignore the best students, unless they’re misbehaving.
And oh yes.
Don’t bother trying to get help for the students who have no discipline problems, but are honestly struggling, and who are also too far away from moving from “not met standards” on the state test, to “passed”. Focus ONLY on the ones who barely failed… so we can raise our standing in the district by passing just a few more students.
Teach, but don’t worry about it being meaningful to those who need it the most.
Con * tra * dic * tion
n.
A denial.
Inconsistency; discrepancy.
Opposition between two conflicting forces or ideas.
The mental process through which one becomes a public school teacher.”
