School Blues

I woke up this morning feeling incredibly grateful that I didn’t have to report back on this first teacher working day of the academic year 2007-2008. Seven weeks is simply not enough time to recover from the intensity of a teaching year. Last year’s issues and problems and challenges are still too fresh in my mind. All that time and energy spent thinking about the specific needs of each individual child. Trying my best to make each lesson interesting and accessible and stimulating to the advanced and the needy kids at the same time. Dealing with challenging behavior - rudeness, arguing - of some while acknowledging and showing appreciation for the ones who are sweet and want to please. The self inflicted pressure to teach everything I feel ten year olds should know about, the worry, the obsession every waking moment. Then the other pressures - from the administration and parents and work colleagues. Meetings, phone calls, explanations for my actions and decisions, nursing hurt feelings from people who ‘don’t get it’! The life of a public school teacher in Santa Barbara is anything but easy. Maybe a lot of it is my personality. Did I take it all too seriously? Would the kids be just as educated if I were more laid back? I found it amazing that when I came out to England I seemed to have mentally left behind the life I’d lived. Just imagine, all the worries, concerns, preoccupations – things I thought important, things that influenced my state of being – all disappeared into the recesses of my memory once I unpacked my suitcase in London. Why did it have to take geographical separation? Why could I not just shrug it all off when I drove away from campus each day? That certainly would have made my life as a teacher much happier.

I can just imagine the first day back. It always begins with an analysis of the test results. Thanks to G.W. and NCLB we teachers can never again feel like we’ve accomplished anything. All our children are supposed to become advanced/proficient in math and language arts by 2013. First of all this would be impossible in the best of circumstances simply because children aren’t like cookies coming out of the same cookie cutter. Duh! Secondly, take a look at our classroom make up in the public schools. Last year on the first day of school I was given a class list of 31 students. I had 5 GATE kids, a child certified autistic, a few kids on medication with IEP’s, a child who spoke no English, and the rest spanning the academic spectrum from Below Basic to Advanced. I was promised an aide for 10 hours a week, but it was January before we could find someone willing to work for the absurdly low salary. I asked for language services for my non English speaker but was denied this because it was her 2nd year in the country! And so I had to line up volunteers and figure out various ways to attend to the needs of my class.
Anyway, so the first day would be all about how to raise our test scores. We already know we gave it our all last year, and this year we’d have to do the same and more. How to teach better to the test and make school more dull. How to turn our kids into test takers rather than creative thinkers. Stick to the text books, they say, rather than inculcate a love for literature with complex plot structures and beautiful, imaginative writing. I found it impossible to teach any Open Court Unit with enthusiasm because they were all so bloody boring. I can’t teach what I find boring. Period. So I won’t. My students did comparatively well in the STAR tests despite this. Or was it because of it??
So you come back from summer vacation, still recovering from last year, which was only seven weeks ago, and you have to get yourself all enthusiastic about RAISING TEST SCORES. That’s it. The bottom line. A child isn’t this individual with potential waiting to be tapped, a bud awaiting the right conditions to open up and blossom into something to admire, nurture, encourage. Oh no. A child is his/her STAR score and where it puts them - FBB, BB, B, P, or A. Let’s turn our classroom into places where our kids become great test taking robots. That’s presumably what ‘our leaders’ want in the 21st Century. Robots, not thinkers.
No, I’m anything but ready to face a new set of classroom challenges. You teachers out there, I admire you greatly.