[img]139|left|||no_popup[/img] It’s that time of year again when teachers are blogging like crazy about what’s wrong with parents, with kids, with administrators and how all of that coalesces to make their jobs difficult if not impossible. The blogs read like an indictment of everyone else involved in the process of education: The parents are too involved, hovering like helicopters, believing their children can do no wrong. Or else the parents are too absent, neither making sure that their children’s homework is done nor that their kids are properly fed and clothed before school. The children are too rich, and treat the teachers as servants and education as a form of goods to be consumed. Or the children are too poor, coming to school late because they have to care for other siblings, and neither they nor their families truly understand the value of education. And then there’s the morass of No Child Left Behind like icing on a cake of unpleasantness.
Public school teachers don’t want to take all comers. There seems to be some utopian world of students and education out for which many are searching. A perfect world in which students always come to school engaged and on time. Their parents are only shadowy figures who help, but never hinder the process. The classrooms are equipped in the best affluent suburban style: five thousand dollar SMART boards and high-speed internet on a laptop on every desk.
I Am Not a Fan
Yeah, if only practicing law were like L.A. Law, or Ally McBeal – complete with perfect justice and swift resolutions — I’d still be in the profession. Life isn’t like television. Someone needs to tell the teachers.
As you can probably tell, I’m not a fan of teachers. I’ve never uttered that phrase publicly because somehow it likely ranks up there with admitting that you eat babies for breakfast, puppies for lunch or kittens for dinner.
There appear to be only two views of teachers in our society – pious, upstanding, never-to-be-questioned pillars of our community who have sacrificed all (money, time, real ambition) for the sake of our children. Or they are portrayed as lazy, part-time government workers who teach because they can’t do. As with everything, I assume the truth lies in between.
Despite my educational environments being pretty close to ideal (parochial school, then affluent suburban school, followed by post-secondary degrees obtained from small liberal arts and Ivy League institutions) my personal experience with teachers has been less than stellar. I remember very few crazy parents, and the poor kids were bussed in – so they, too, were few and highly motivated. I’ve always marveled at those people who chalk up their career (or even their existential being) to a teacher who “changed their lives” for the better. I cannot gild this digital page an Oprahesque story of a teacher who saw me and pronounced me the second coming. I didn’t have that good fortune.
They Tried to Demoralize Me
Instead, I was treated to a string of folks who would have demoralized a better kid. They tried to bully me, stifle my intellect, shuffle me off, and push me as far to the back of the classroom as they could.
My good fortune was in having a parent who stuck up for me before helicopter parenting made it taboo to go to bat for one’s child.
In first grade, I had a teacher whose idea of challenging me was to have me read second grade textbooks in the coat closet among the jackets, boots and lunches of the other kids. It wasn’t the best learning environment. It was hot and close. I dozed off for hours at a time. This was where I learned about teaching to the middle and low expectations. Those of us ahead of the class were shuffled off somewhere uncomfortable, not to be seen.
My fifth grade teacher treated lunch table assignments like a Lord of the Flies experiment. There were twenty of us, so weekly she assigned four table captains each to choose three lunchmates. Yes, your math is correct. That’s sixteen people with table assignments. Four were assigned to the leftover table. It was often where I sat. Perhaps learning about social pecking order and betrayal were the lessons, but it seemed an awfully cruel way to teach them.
I had a sixth grade teacher who, for reasons I’ve never figured out, liked to make fun of me in front of the class, and even brought in rubber spiders and other things to try to frighten me. Fortunately, I don’t scare easily. I took a lot of bullying from him before I told my mother. She was able to stop it dead in its tracks. When she told other parents about it, they said I was fortunate that he hadn’t made me stand in a bucket of garbage in front of the class like he’d done to other kids. Memories like that that make one distrust teachers unions.
In middle school, an English teacher pulled aside my then-best friend to tell her she shouldn’t hang out with black kids because we’d only pull her down. Down where, I never figured out. My suburban Connecticut life was boring.
There were no gangs to run with, no drive-by shootings to get involved in. I guess she didn’t get the memo, but there’s nothing like a little racism for eighth graders and their already difficult hormone rush.
I also remember the little letdowns like the teachers who were on near permanent sick leave. I still don’t think we did anything in fourth grade other than torture the endless string of substitutes. And how fondly I recall those teachers who were clearly burnt out; the highlight of ninth grade was that my math teacher did only a short stint at a mental hospital.
After years and years of disappointment at the hands of such teachers, not a one who “changed my life” for the better, I find reading about today’s teachers and their attitude that they share no part of the blame for the abysmal state of education in this country as quite galling. It smacks in the face of what really goes on in the classroom.
My experience and news reports support the notion that our schools are circling the drain. I don’t know where the answer lies, but surely it’s not in giving teachers the benefit of the doubt in all situations. Nothing gets me in a tizzy faster than discussions on how unions protect bad teachers from getting fired.
Should we dismantle teachers unions and privatize education? Admittedly, that’s probably not the answer, either. The griping about teachers’ generous benefits and vacation time likely has more to do with the poor state of our own thankless jobs and less to do with teachers getting undeserving perks. But one does have to wonder how so many private schools are able to succeed where public schools fail.
I don’t claim to have any answers on how to save our broken education system, but I can tell you it probably should start with fixing the teachers.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
