Oct
23
Coleen Armstrong
You might think that by the end of a 31-year teaching career, I would have had every problem put to rest and every dilemma resolved. No such luck. In most cases, in fact, the only resolution I reached was to accept that there was none–-and there probably never would be.
For example:
• The 5:30 a.m. body slam.
From my first day of teaching in 1968 to my last in 1999, my frame never grew accustomed to the shock of hearing the alarm go off before dawn. There were many, many days, in fact, when I fell back asleep while standing under the shower spray.
Who ever decided that the world should revolve around morning people, anyway? Expecting a teacher to be vibrant and bouncy at 7:00 a.m. every day without exception is, in my mind, a crime against humanity.
And each time I read a new report stating that teenagers’ internal clocks weren’t set for early learning, I couldn’t help wondering why we keep on, decade after decade, torturing so many people.
• The myth of the three-month vacation and the six-hour workday.
How can any reasonable person still believe that teachers are laboring only when they’re physically inside their classrooms? When do they think tests are graded, worksheets are typed and lesson plans are written? Not to mention all of those meetings, parent conferences, e-mails, and recertification classes.
Yet I still periodically see letters to newspaper editors insisting that if teachers want to be respected, then they need to get full-time, rather than part-time jobs.
• Nationwide, culture-wide lip-service.
“Teaching is the most difficult, yet the important assignment in the world.” Yeah, right. If we really believed that, would we still be expecting teachers to pay for their classroom supplies out of their own pockets? Would we still be blaming them every time a child misbehaved?
Would we still be huffing and puffing that 30-year veterans with masters’ degrees don’t deserve salaries above $50,000, when 20-somethings starting out in other professions earn that much and more? My 26-year-old niece is a newly minted CPA. She earns $86,000. Draw your own conclusions.
• Homogeneous versus heterogeneous grouping.
I had wonderful classes filled with bright kids who learned at a breakneck pace. I had equally wonderful classes where across-the-board mixes meant that the slower ones learned from the shining stars, and the stars learned that not everyone was born with their intellectual advantages. My heart warmed every time I witnessed two students of widely different ability levels forming a close friendship which never would have materialized if it hadn’t been for my class.
So which is the best way to go in regard to tracking? I still don’t know.
• Talking less, teaching more.
It pains me to admit it, but I never quite learned when to shut up.
Oh, I certainly grew more concise and reticent with age. But over the years I can recall only a handful of classes where halfway into a discussion I could sit back and let the kids carry it. Now I wish I’d tried harder to make that happen more often––instead of feeling a need to fill every silence.
• There, their, and they’re. Two, to, and too. Your and you’re.
No matter how many times I went over proper usages, my students continually misappropriated all of the above. For all 31 years. Sometimes I wondered, “Couldn’t they occasionally get one of them right by accident?”
• Getting all of my classes to work as hard as I did.
The greatest challenge of all, and one which I never managed to overcome. Remember the term “passive learning”? It describes what so many unmotivated kids do––just sit there, watching the teacher emote, bubble, cavort, dramatize, and turn cartwheels––and then later, turn in a “response” paper of three sentences. For me, nothing less than best of show would do. For them, minimal performances were plenty; they got me off their backs, didn’t they? Unfortunately, yes. But if I’d insisted on stellar efforts from everyone before moving on, we would never have gotten past chapter one.
Today, years after the fact, I know that although I gave my students a 120 percent commitment of energy, what was really called for was closer to 200. Which probably would have killed me by age 40––but it’s what is expected of today’s teachers, and rightly so.
Yet another unresolvable issue.
What about standardized testing of kids that simply are not “standardized”? That’s another unresolvable situation! Why do legislators continue to insist on testing all of our kids as if they were clones of one person? Don’t these people realize that every human being is different? We all have different ways of learning and there is such a variety in our brains that it is impossible for everyone to remember the same information in the same format. Our government needs a wake-up call in regards to the way we teach and assess our students today. We don’t live in the 1800’s anymore! Anyone else out there feel frustrated by these unresolvable issues? What do you do to stay sane?