A letter of frustration

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