To Whom It May
Concern in the District Where I Work,
I am a teacher in your district, and have
been for over a decade now. In that time I have seen some pretty interesting
things happen and the vast majority of them have served to lower teacher morale
and hurt student achievement. Now, all of what is to follow in this friendly
tsk-tsk letter is merely the point of view from a humble teacher in the
trenches.
Imagine putting a rat in a maze. The
object, of course, is to get the cheese at the end. To spice things up, the
master of the maze puts in several obstacles for the rat to conquer, such as
objects to eat, jump over, maybe push through. Or, the rat is injected with a substance
to see if the rat is faster, slower, or dead. An even more extreme experiment
is to remove the cheese so that when the rat makes it to the end, there is no
prize. The master of the maze, be it a curious or perhaps cruel scientist or a
kid toying with his pet for idle amusement, HAS NO IDEA WHAT WILL HAPPEN. Dear
higher administration officials in charge of our professional lives, you
monitor us rats daily and continuously put these obstacles in our way and you
HAVE NO IDEA WHAT WILL HAPPEN. At least I hope you don’t, it would be an
ego-shattering disaster for us if we knew you had planned our failure as
educators.
Let me move immediately to this year’s
obstacle: Infinite Campus. I do understand that SASI was an old, defunct
attendance system that needed replacing. What you did instead was purchase a
whole new system encompassing attendance, grading, progress reports, and report
cards. Our training on this has been as-needed and there have been many
glitches impeding our responsibilities. What amused some of us further was a
mid-May introduction to IC last spring, a time when we are all exhausted and
incapable of accepting input from anyone. What used to take a few simple steps
in attendance and entering grades has turned into a mega-step procedure for
each of those tasks, not to mention printing progress reports and report cards.
I often feel like I am assembling a new computer desk in my home, constantly
checking the instructions to make sure I was not getting ahead of myself.
Oh yes,
that brings me to the next matter of computers. I look enviously at Title I
schools, who are able to afford through Federal money high tech devices like
iPads and new laptops. My school is not Title I and the computers are barely
tolerant of Windows 7. The machine I use in the classroom still works on XP and
some days it is slow to put it nicely. In this day and age simple PCs to
perform basic tasks (meaning below the gamers’ standards) are quite reasonable
in price. With assessments requiring good video and sound being hurled at us,
newer machines, or at least newer motherboards and processors inside the old
cases, are necessary.
On that note, let us look at the people in
charge of maintaining the computers and servers. The district administration
has stripped schools of full-time tech gurus and made these hard-working people
split time between schools. I hear that it will be even less than that next
year. If the system crashes, who will pick up the pieces? There are too many
schools in the district for a small elite squad to handle. No, at this stage in
the technology-dependent game, full-time techs are needed everywhere.
Next up is the Common Core, or whatever new
label is being stamped on it to unsuccessfully convince us think it changed. In
this area, I will lean back and relax a bit, because the reading and language
arts standards for my grade level make good sense. The math goes a bit
overboard, and the science is a bit too detailed. The students in the grade
level I teach is in need of lots and lots of practice in their mathematical
operations. Neither Envisions nor Engage New York provide the necessary
practice. Some teachers say that Engage New York is wonderful in the area of
reading. I may try it next year. My point here is that a reasonable curriculum
in all areas, spelled out in good plain common-sense fashion, is needed, along
with a similar pacing schedule for all subject areas. A team of teachers should
get paid to take a year to hammer this out, not a group who has long since stopped
knowing what happens in a classroom.
My dear administrators, teaching young
minds requires mindful lesson planning, endless copying, a knowledge of each
student’s strengths and weaknesses, and constant classroom management, not to
mention grading in the off hours, and dealing with irate/inept parents who
often are the reason their kids come to school with low achievement and bad
attitude. All of these factors require support, not more requirements,
programs, and watchdogs. At the current rate, the rat will limp to the end of
the maze and see no cheese. What is the cheese? To me, the cheese is student
achievement and a sense of accomplishment for the teachers.
I attended public school on the other side
of the nation in the 1970s-80s. My teachers were good educators, and all had
personality quirks. I did not like all of my teachers, but I came from each of
them with lifelong knowledge. None of them were observed frequently by their
supervisors, the classrooms had bright sunshine filling us with good energy and
vitamin D, we ate a decent lunch cooked fresh, and we all had time to exercise
twice daily, at least until the end of the sixth grade. The result? Most of us
got a good education from mostly genuinely happy teachers, graduated and went on
to college or trade school and are living good lives today. The kids we are
teaching get little sunshine and exercise, are subjected to low quality food
that for some reason costs money, and they are likely to live with their
parents after high school, if they even finish. The world is not ready for them
and they are not ready for the world.
To conclude, I hope you take my words with
an open mind. Our district is not alone, it is just the district I work for.
Other schools in the nation face similar problems. If the rats feel encouraged
with minimal obstacles, the cheese will be taken happily and the rat will look
forward to another maze.
Sincerely,
A frustrated and
bemused teacher
