Our dear SWASHZONE tends to be more than a little angst ridden on most days (& lord knows my own posts contribute to this!) so I thought I would post a feel-good post - yes - me! - Squid.
So the gist of this post is that I adore my students - or, at least, most of them. I truly do. They give me fits sometimes, sending me into head-clutching fits of despair, but through it all - I am genuinely very fond of them. Some of them cause me from time to time to ponder nervously the future of the world when it is run by people INCAPABLE of following simple directions or turning assignments in on time . . . but underneath all their slackery they are good-hearted delinquents - so perhaps the world will survive their air-headed slackness. And they are balanced by my wonderful students who put these slackers to shame - students who always go the extra mile towards academic achievement. Please may they be our future leaders!
Curiously - some of my personally favorite students tend to be the ones I give miserable grades to. At this point in the semester they start ducking into corners when they see me coming down the corridor - knowing that they are going to get an earful from me about their latest academic transgression. But they've learned to take my cussing at them as genuine concern and, to their credit, none of the students with whom I have developed a personal rapport has ever been fool enough to think that this meant they were going to receive preferential treatment. And this is to their credit. For the most part - they take responsibility for their abysmally low grades.
There are of course those for whom personal responsibility means nothing & everything is everyone else's fault & how dare I presume to think that I call the shots etc. - but in all honesty - these students are in the minority.
And on a final note - I find it fascinating sometimes to learn about how people 20 years or so younger than myself view the same world that we all inhabit. Their point of view is often fascinating (& scary!) but always important to consider. I consider myself privileged to be able to converse on a daily basis with our future. And hopefully they learn a bit from we old fogies as well. (I remember in a class discussion once about a piece of literature that contained sex one of my students making a comment about people over 40 not being interested in sex anymore - it was SO HARD to keep a straight face!) Yes their view of the universe is staggering sometimes.
Mine is such a terrific profession.
One of the things that really gets to me about teaching is how you spend hours a week with these kids for 10 months, but the next year when you walk by them in the all and say hello they pretend that they never saw you before in their lives. What's with that? Is it so uncool to acknowledge a teacher? Or is it that they perceive that you gave them the low grade instead of that they got what they earned? Kids. I guess in a generation they'll be in our seats, wondering about the next generation.
ReplyDeleteYours is an exhilarating, scary profession - one I'm not sure I would last a week at. But I'm glad to know there are teachers who still want to put in that effort because once upon a time we were those air headed teens...
ReplyDeleteThe teachers who had the most influence in my life were the ones that treated me as if I were already an adult and they took the time to point out my positive attributes and encouraged me.
To this day, I believe in treating people as if they are already showing the best of themselves - which is a stretch when I'm at the jail - but, who knows, maybe one or two will take that away with them and actually live UP to their true potential.
Laura - I do get that response from some students that I only have in class for a semester who are not majors in my dept. And it is strange sometimes. Most of the delinquents & academic stars I am fond of are majors in my dept. so they turn up in my classes frequently like bad pennies or shiny dimes, respectively.
ReplyDeleteRocky - a nice sentiment - "treating people as if they are already showing the best of themselves" - I must keep that in mind. Thanks.
The longing for dignity and respect young people have is often ignored and so they too often seek it elsewhere and of the wrong people. I appreciated being called "Mister" by teachers, even when it was said in a pointed way.
ReplyDeleteOne shouldn't completely despair of ever being appreciated by the airheads, although the appreciation often comes posthumously. It took this old hoodlum many, many years to appreciate certain teachers -- too many years to allow me to express it.
Thank you very much Miss Behrens, wherever you are.
Squid: “I consider myself privileged to be able to converse on a daily basis with our future. And hopefully they learn a bit from we old fogies as well.”
ReplyDeleteThank you for your thoughtful and charming post. Of course, one does not necessarily need to be a teacher to converse with our future. As parents, we converse with young people all the time … our own children, their circle of friends, and later … their children.
But our self-perception as links in a chain is latent at best and all too often buried beneath the problems of everyday living. One does not fully internalize pending mortality until our own clocks start to wind down, and there is leisure time to think about and accept it.
Even still, I know too many retired folk who are little more than bivalves … tightly shut and inordinately preoccupied. For them, children belong to someone else and are not part of their lives. How regrettable! I just wish more folks recognized the importance of how we prepare our children, not just our own, but all children who will inherit the world we leave behind.
Here is Kristof's NYT Op Ed on reforming education. What do you think?
ReplyDelete"For them, children belong to someone else and are not part of their lives"
ReplyDeleteSince my children are middle aged, I don't come in contact with other people's kids very often. I hope that if I did, I wouldn't be so disillusioned with how profoundly and contentedly ignorant they seem to be on most matters. I know it's a false impression.
I belong to a national organization that teaches water safety and safe boating. We used to teach classes at the local schools, but we went through an episode of paranoia in Florida that nearly prevented access to a school building without all kinds of background tests -- at our expense -- and so we don't any more. I'd like to help form an amateur radio club at a local school, to get kids interested in electronics and engineering, but the obstacles seem too great and teachers don't seem to have the time to do such things.
About ten years ago I saved the life of a neighbor's two year old who was standing in the street in front of oncoming traffic throwing some sort of tantrum. I picked him up and carried him to the sidewalk. His mother was extremely upset that I had touched her darling.
There are many legal and phobic factors today that make it difficult to deal with kids as a mentor unless you're a teacher. It's not impossible, but it's difficult. It's too bad.
In response to Octo's mention of the NYT column --
ReplyDeleteI've seen a couple of Michelle Ree's interviews, with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the public primary and secondary ed systems aren't anywhere near as good as they ought to be. On the other hand, teachers have long been a favorite right-wing target, so I am always skeptical of anyone who takes up the line that teachers have too much security and tries to make it the centerpiece of "reform." Of course, those who want to practice repressive right-wing politics (not that I place Ree among them) find teacher-bashing attractive. The best thing, from such a standpoint, is to keep the citizenry somewhere around the level of semi-literate peasants – adults at the mercy of their anxieties and passions, and therefore quite helpless at self-governance.
I think the main problem with public education is rather simple: we don't sufficiently value or fund learning, so we place too many kids in each classroom.
While there's a place for large classes at the college level, if a primary or secondary school instructor has 25 or 30 children in the classroom, he or she isn't going to be able to do much more than keep order, at best. It's a matter of a limited amount of energy being expended to accomplish the most immediately necessary tasks. Reduce class size to perhaps ten or twelve students, provide clean, modern facilities and good textbooks, and don't allow serious disciplinary problems to damage well-behaved kids' experience. Then teachers should have a fair chance to treat kids like individuals and help them learn; if they can't do it under good conditions, at that point they should indeed be given their pink slips or retrained so that they can do their jobs well.
Bloggingdino: “we don't sufficiently value or fund learning”
ReplyDeleteAgreed, but we do have Joe the Plumber to do our thinking and funding for us and reset our education meters to “low expectations.”
Some of my forbearers were teachers and academics, and there was never a question in my family about the value of education. What I hoped to find in the cited article was a description of what constitutes a “great teacher.” Why do media accounts always avoid this discussion? Does a “great teacher” have properties that can be identified, quantified, and passed to others? The reporter didn't tell us.
I benefited from a style of pedagogy that has long since fallen out of favor. One of my grade school teachers worked well into her 70s. She taught my father; she taught by repetition and rote. She drilled adjectives and adverbs into us, taught regular and irregular verbs, tense, punctuation, and sentence diagrams … until we knew these in our sleep. Geography, history, and math were similarly drummed into us. They were strict disciplinarians; yet we respected them.
Grade school served me well … perhaps better than the exclusive prep school and prestigious universities I attended later.
Under Rocky’s post, LETS HAVE A REVOLUTION, I shared these experiences:
“One day, my history teacher asked how many students would be interested in staying after class to learn Classical Greek. With a show of hands, four students volunteered ...
These days, liability concerns, administrative red tape, and budgetary constraints would kill those simple acts of kindness … ”
What my grade school teachers did for us during my childhood would be impossible today, which confirms Captain Fogg’s impressions:
“There are many legal and phobic factors today that make it difficult to deal with kids as a mentor [sic] … ”
Indeed! During my undergraduate years, I drove inner-city kids in my broken down VW to the zoo every Sunday afternoon; but what was possible forty years ago is no longer possible today. These days, it seems, every conceivable constraint leaves us paralyzed. Have we become adverse to initiative and risk taking? Is our situation intractable, or has the politics of our situation become intractable?
Here I am showing my age ... rambling too much.
Hi Folks - I am so very sorry to have deserted a comment thread on my own post. I did not mean to disappear mid-conversation. Life has gotten the best of me lately. No offense intended. I'll be back in about a week.
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