A Human Experience.......

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of education and learning, and more specifically, I’ve been wondering what has gone wrong. How is it that the joy that I used to feel on a regular basis has been replaced by a creeping feeling of dread? Why am I angry so much of the time, and why have I been just going along as if I have no power or ability to change things? Big questions, deserving big answers. Though I have by no means come to a total understanding of what is going on, here is what I have thus far……

Years ago I taught for a while at a local college, and during my interview the head of the department made a statement that has had a profound effect on all of my subsequent teaching. He told me that, yes, the material is obviously important, but perhaps even more important was that I give my students a positive educational experience. A positive educational experience. I’m coming to realize that this is the source of my anger and frustration….it feels like   the possibility  of creating and sharing a positive educational experience with my students is slowly being sucked away, and is being replaced by a mechanized process over which I have less and less control. Of course, it’s not always easy to quantify a positive educational experience, or a positive learning environment. When I sit and listen to students' problems with relationships, or family, or their feelings of inadequacy, or their fears about the future, their triumphs on the athletic field or in academic competitions, what they’ve learned in their vocational program, or when we just talk as two human beings sharing some time as we make our way through life on this planet, how do you quantify that? Where do you put that on your data wall? You’ll never convince me that I’m being ineffective because I’m "taking valuable time from test preparation" to just be human, because education involves more than simply mastering the material, and a positive learning environment is more than just being sure that we’ve covered everything we’re supposed to in just the right way. But of course, if you’ve never actually taught in a classroom you wouldn’t know that. If you’ve never felt those moments of joy and learning that have little to do with “the curriculum” you would have no idea what teaching is really about. If all you know are statistics and studies and theories of education it becomes easy to find “the solution.” But the solution to what? What is the problem you’re trying to fix? Can you not grasp that every student is not going to college, and some will never be able to or need to suss out the finer points of rhetoric contained in a piece of writing from the 18^th century? I teach at a Career Center. Some of my students are going into college in the medical field or computer programming. But others are going to be the carpenters that build your house, the welders that weld the pipes that bring the natural gas that you burn every day, the cosmetologists that do your hair, and the electricians that allow you to read this right now. Why do they have to be college bound to “pass the test?” What would happen if the PARCC exams measured their skills? Who then would be found to be inadequate? Don’t get me wrong, I’m an English teacher, and I take academics very seriously, but every student is not the same. Different students need different things. What is so hard to understand about that? When one of my students comes to your house to fix your wiring, will you ask him or her what they think of Chaucer? I don’t think so. So why am I forced to make their lives miserable and destroy the possibility of creating a positive learning environment for them by teaching them things that turn them off and testing them on things that THEY WILL NEVER NEED? Who am I responsible to? The students who sit in front of me every day with all of their individual needs, or some billionaire theorists who have never met them and have never experienced any reality but their own privileged upbringing? Ultimately, teaching is a human experience, and that is what’s being lost. I know that teachers everywhere are having similar thoughts. A little investigating online will connect you with thousands of them.  It’s time for us all to stand up for what we know to be right.  If we do not, the profession that we love will be slowly strangled to death right before our very eyes. It’s happening right now. Make no mistake, this is not just another educational fad coming down the pike that we can wait out. They smell money. And they mean to have it.