[Nov. 19th, 2006|11:42 pm]

Being a teacher has some unexpected side effects. For example, I'm now starting to understand my own teachers better. Sometimes I even sympathize with them, the same way I would sympathize with real human beings. It's a little scary.



Back when I was in school, I wanted to a) learn things, and b) enjoy myself. My teachers all seemed bent on thwarting these goals. Every so often, they would let a fact slip by mistake, but mostly they wanted me to fill out endless identical worksheets on things I had learned years before, or color in workbook pictures, or play dumb games that somehow managed to be neither fun nor educational. By third or fourth grade, I figured out that school was basically lost time and that if I wanted to learn anything I would have to take care of it at home. This worked until about high school, when my teachers decided to supplement the lost time of school with the additional lost time of homework. What I remember most were the endless projects, project being a euphemism for "take this subject you already understand, a few sheets of construction paper, scissors, and a computer program such as PowerPoint, and combine them in whatever random way you want as long as it takes a minimum of six hours of time". I was rarely willing to give it above three, which is why I went through high school with mostly Bs and Cs. All those lost hours also caused me to mostly give up on any real attempt to educate myself until college or so. I hate to sound like I am ranting, but this is the sort of thing that makes me so confused and distressed to be sympathizing with my teachers nowadays.



See, when I was in school, I thought my teachers shared my two goals. To some extent they did; I'm sure they wanted their students to learn things, and I'm sure they wanted them to have fun. But as a teacher I have discovered I also have supplementary goals - such as c) not getting in trouble, and d) not getting fired. And for me, at least, these have been partially or completely superseding the originals.



My students have a certain number of English words they're supposed to learn by the end of a lesson - typically eight - along with some accompanying grammar. When my kids get out of a lesson, they had better know those eight words; otherwise, their parents, or the other teachers, or the NOVA management will hear about it and ask me what's up.



So far, so good. I think of myself as a decent teacher, and eight words isn't by any means ovewhelming. The problem is that some kids are idiots. I'll say something like "Trees are in a forest," and then ask the four kids in the class "What's in a forest?" and three of the four will shout "Trees!". The other one, who has been spending the last few minutes trying to chew on his book, will just stand there with a confused look on his face as if I just asked him to calculate the cube root of a ten digit number in his head. And you know what? Nobody - no parents, no other teachers, no management - ever asks me if I've taught those other three kids to the top of their potential. They ask me whether every single kid in that class knows what a forest is made of. And if that last kid doesn't...well, then I'm the one who gets a black mark on his record.



So I get desperate. NOVA has mandatory lesson plans for each class, so I go through all the activities on there. First, everybody has to color a picture of a forest, and I make sure there are a proper number of trees in the pictures. Then we play the Shouting Game, where I hold up a picture of a forest and the first person to shout "Trees!" gets a point. And then, God help me, we all link hands and sing the Forest Song. "Forrrrrrest, Forrrrrrest. Trees! Trees! Trees! Forrrrrrest, Forrrrrrest. Trees! Trees! Trees!" By this point, I don't think anyone actually expects it to help. I'm doing it because there's going to come some point where that fourth kid comes across the word forest and doesn't know what it means. Then his mother's going to complain to NOVA, and NOVA's going to complain to me, and they'll ask if I sung the Forest Song with him, and if I say no, then of course it's my fault, but if I say yes, then they'll just nod their heads sagely and say "Ah, yes, you did everything you could."



And another thing. In fourth grade, I studied the California Gold Rush. My teacher (who was really great, despite this incident) spent days and days building up this really complex week-long game where we would divide into teams and pretend to be miners and then answer questions about the Gold Rush to earn gold nuggets and there were all these other little things that made it more interesting than it probably sounds, especially for a fourth-grader. Right when we were about to begin, he mentioned "Oh, and Scott, you can't participate, because you always get everything right so it wouldn't be fun for anyone else. Go sit out in the hall and read a book or something." So of course, being a fourth grader, I went home and cried, and my mom, being my mom and therefore wonderful, went and complained, and I don't remember what happened next but that's not the point. The point is that I was ENRAGED about this.



And yesterday, without even thinking about it at the time, I did the exact same thing. This kid Yamato (about whom I could tell all SORTS of stories, many of them sphinx-related) speaks practically fluent English. These other kids Nori and Take don't understand anything unless I make them do it twenty times. So the lesson plan called for a game, and Nori and Take were finally starting to understand what was going on, so I just said "Yamato, you sit and watch, I want to see if Nori and Take get it." And after about ten minutes of playing this stupid game, Nori and Take did, provisionally, get it, and Yamato sat glaring at me the whole time, even though I tried to include him by having him give the answer when the other two were well and truly stumped. The fact was that as a teacher, I couldn't care less who won at "Flashcard Shout". I just wanted to see if Nori and Take knew the vocabulary. When I had to balance that with Yamato not getting to be in a stupid game where no one won anything anyway, I didn't even think twice about it. From the teacher's point of view that just makes sense.



I've tried to get around these issues. I've tried taking some kids aside and giving them special instruction. But of course, the other kids think this gives them free rein to run about like maniacs. My co-worker told me a horror story about concentrating on one child too long only to look up and see that the rest of the children had gleefully taken the crayons and started coloring all over the wall (in this case, "too long" was thirty seconds). So the only option is to treat the class like a unit, a four-headed hydra. Then I just throw every possible educational method at the hydra in the hopes that one will stick. It doesn't matter whether the class is learning or having fun, it's just a race against the clock; can I get eight words into the head of the stupidest child in the room before the forty minute lesson is over?



I want to just shout "You know what? You don't deserve to know what a forest is! I hope you end up living in some sort of industrialized concrete wasteland where there are no forests at all!" and then move on, but of course that's not an option. And even though my teachers in school had much more leeway than I did - they could make their own lesson plans, their objectives were vaguer, and they had seven hours a day instead of forty minutes a week - it wasn't an option for them either. All they could do was throw these stupid projects at their students and cross their fingers that one of them got through to whoever their stupidest kid was (who ironically never did the homework anyway). And of course they had thirty to forty students to deal with instead of my four to six.



So I officially (mostly) stop blaming my teachers for all my years of childhood misery. Except the few of them who just obviously enjoyed making their classes miserable even when there was no legitimate educational reason to do so. They know who they are.



I need someone to blame, so I think I will blame the entire concept of one-size-fits-all group public education. Not that I have a better idea considering current social and economic realities. But as the Democrats' condemnation of our Iraq policy has shown, attacking something even when you don't have any better ideas is a surefire road to victory and success! And if I ever have kids, and if I have either an improbably large amount of free time or a wife with an improbably large amount of free time, I resolve to home-school them. It's the only humane thing to do.



If you have had any similar (or different) experiences as a teacher (or student) or have any advice, comment and share.