Wednesdays

My week goes downhill faster than the Texas Giant after Wednesday. I know that I don't have a corporate job, and that people look at teachers as the bottom feeders of the professional pond. "You get summers off and a vacation at Christmas," is usually the rote response to any complaint about my job. Yea, that's because if I were to work two weeks longer in the winter that I would kill myself for feeling like a failure or kill a child because they were acting like one. But I digress. 

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I get to work at 7:30, (which means I leave home at 7 am or earlier), get situated, clean my room and then get ready for my first class when the bell rings at 8 am. Cut to 2:15 when I have my "planning period". I (and the other grade level teachers I work with) even eat lunch with the kids. We are so short help that this generally means that instead of eating, or while choking down a sandwich in 30 minutes, we're supervising rowdy hellions and doing crowd control; making sure the kids don't riot in front of the chicken strips. Then after a small break, when I get to breathe and pee, we tutor from 3 until 5. Awesome!! In case you have trouble doing the math this means that I have children for over 9 hours. Children whose parents haven't taught them how to behave and children I can't hit, because they're not biologically related to me.  I wish I had the sit at my desk kind of job.  We don't have to do this (tutoring) Thursday or Friday because our time after school is filled on these two days with 45 minutes of asinine information presented in some Kumbiya meeting that takes 45 minutes of guaranteed planning time instead of being sent out in a memo or  an email. But at least it's not 10 hours of kids, kids, kids!

You hear so much (too much) today about how education is broken. This is my third year in a classroom (in a Title I school) and I can assure you that education is broken, but it's a symptom of a greater problem rather than the root problem. Somewhere along the way US society has lowered its expectations. You no longer have to work for the American dream and the mediocre has become exceptional. This is even true in Higher Education, according to the NY Times. Don't act surprised or play crazy. We knew it was the end during the Election of 2000 when President Bush was campaigning that his education initiative would include character education. This is teaching students how to be good people. Example:

My every morning goes something like this post-bell ring: 

-Please here are the morning announcements

-Hello Principal Satan's Wife, Faculty, Staff, and Students; please stand for the Pledge, Texas Pledge... (are you bored already?).

Then after all that and the pure asinine bullshit that we have to pay attention to you hear:

-This weeks Character Counts trait is honesty. Honesty is not stealing from anyone and telling the truth

- "I'd like to remind the teachers that our goal here is quality bell to bell instruction."  Holy shit! I'm glad she cleared that up! However this begs the question of any reasonable educator as to when the children are actually supposed to "show what they know."

I mean are you effing kidding me?!?!?! When did school start having to explicitly teach values, instead of reinforcing what was learned at home? Maybe when people stopped spanking their kids because it became child abuse. Maybe teachers had to add character to the list of Required Teachings when students started assaulting them in the classroom or we started not being able to keep those students who didn't know how to behave out of the classroom. I know that the Constitution says that "All men are created equal," but that means that they have equal access if they work in the context of society, i.e., if they follow the laws and rules set forth by that society.

 Instead what we have in the US today is NCLB. This bill created in 2002 has mutilated the nation's already haggard educational system. Teachers no longer have power. Today it is the word of the student (whether they are here legally or not) is God. In addition to keeping the schedule above teachers now have to find time to document, write notes, specific quotes and exact information into a spiral that could save your job once you get called into the Principal's Office. This could be extreme at my school, which is medieval in its operation, my despotic Principal's own fiefdom.  There is no way to measure accountability nationwide other than a standardized test. If a school doesn't produce it's numbers it looses some of its Federal Education budget, ostensibly because the school failed to educate its students. What this fails to take into account is where that child was at the beginning of the year (at or below grade level) and what happens in the home. Even though all research points to the fact that education must be valued in the home to be valuable to the student, we keep seeing this responsibility taken off the parents and placed upon the already heavy shoulders of the educators. 

Another thing I've noticed is that when there is no distinction between the lunch that students must pay for and the one that students get for free, there is no want to do better. Why learn to read when someone else pays to feed your child?

Before NCLB schools were generally held accountable by their community, by interaction (cooperation) between teachers and the parents of the children sitting in their classrooms. In many cases this created disparate standards in schools. You have higher standards (and test scores) in white-bread, suburban communities like Round Rock, TX than you do in poorer, darker (yes I said it) New Orleans, LA. Many critics and conspiracy theorists used this evidence to say that minority students were being purposefully undereducated to create a permanent working class beholden to The Man. Never mind that these children in New Orleans (or many other poor areas, even white rural ones) came from less-than-literate families, who didn't value education in the first place because doing well in school didn't put food on the table immediately. It's hard to be poor. I come from poor stock who realized that being educated was the best way out of poverty for good. 

The hope was that the creation of federal legislation would increase accountability while also making standards uniform, thus erasing disparity. It was also thought that those students who had been previously excluded from the general classroom environment (the special ed., kids and chronic, emotionally disturbed behavior problems) would now be included and want to work to attain what the other students worked hard for. This has not been the case. Now these gen-ed kids see those inclusion children getting help, which has in turn created wide spread learned helplessness. 

Obviously the authors of this bill didn't take into account that even in the pre-NCLB classroom there were already 20 or more children on different learning levels with different learning styles. Teachers were already overwhelmed. The boys in DC also neglected to realize that the students who had been taken out of the classroom had been taken out for a reason. The fact that they had been taken out of the general classroom did not mean that they were not getting serviced. They were being serviced by teachers who had been trained to deal with their unique set of issues. 

Is it any surprise that with an uneducated populace we have more people who are not able to afford the American Dream but still feel that they are entitled to it. Is it any reason that the country is in post-sub prime mess because you were lending too much money to people who were never equipped to spend it in the first place? Even in the fall out we have people who want a bailout for something they didn't rightfully earn because they failed to work for it, and it started in school. 

Even media has jumped on the bandwagon. While there is much to change and much to work on, we must start at the root of the problem. There is no shortage of dedicated educators or idealistic dreamers who want to become one. There are those that are disenchanted, fighting in the trenches, trying to do their job even while working for a system they do not like or respect. Maybe education in the US would see a turn around if we got back to basics: teaching values like honesty and hard work at home. Reading to your children before bed time so that they know about words and how to use their imagination. Going to the book store as a reward instead of a heading to GameStop. Maybe once we see education (true thinking) and not just getting an A being valued in homes across America will we see the US regain her footing as a superpower with an educated population.