A Teacher's Morning Coffee: It's not my fault, but I'll try to fix it

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

It's not my fault, but I'll try to fix it

One month into the school year and I’m starting to piece together my student puzzle. It was easy for me to believe, and with great intention may I add, every student who passed through my door was eager to learn, eager to advance their academic knowledge, eager to study, and eager to work for good grades. Though now I understand my foolish preconceptions, I was eager to give my students a fresh start, a chance in school that many freshmen or transfer students have not seen before.

I’ve come to note that my students’ apparent eagerness is to talk with peers and celebrate together when the abrasive tone whistles through the hall dismissing class. Likewise, my eagerness changed from discovering greatness in every student to finding ways to captivate their attention long enough to teach information that will be tested upon later.

I imagined 160 students coming into class, pencils ready and sponge-like minds, taking responsibility to learn; after all, they are high school students. Sadly, the majority do not reflect any fervor to learn. Unless I failed to say or do something the first day of school, my students came into my classroom with little intrinsic motivation and that is not my fault.

If it’s not my fault, then where am I to place blame? Family structure? Video games, fast food, empty dinner tables, divorce, lack of discipline, a culture of entitlement? What about our education system?

Pass the test right? I recently spoke with an elementary school teacher (2nd grade) who informed me the repeated misbehaviorers are boys…but who is to blame them? Our system inhibits individual exploratory learning. “Sit still” we say, “Stop hitting him” “Stop touching her” “Stop….stop….stop….” Even by the time they are in 2nd grade, children face eight hours of adult structure. There are too many students, too much material to cover, and too little flexibility allowed to divert from curriculum. Consequently, this teacher says, even second graders are at risk of losing their imaginative minds.

Should we then blame our early childhood educators? Of course not. They too face classes so large with such little funding and prodigious achievement gaps that only through the existing structure can they begin teaching the unmotivated; any other method would result in dropping those who already are on their way to greatness.

Ultimately we blame the system, blame the dearth of importance placed on education, blame our government for demanding so much and giving so little, blame the failure of recognition that keeps the good ones around (it sure isn’t the money), blame the parents who blame us, blame intangible success being measured by a tangible test, blame overcrowded classrooms, blame other teachers…

In the end, blaming gets us nowhere; as fire feeds fire, so does blaming feed our frustration. We all can agree a complete system overhaul is necessary but will not happen in the near future. However, we each can have a classroom overhaul where we remember the true importance of our offering. “It’s not my fault, but I’ll try to fix it” can be our mantra in the classroom; we get to restore eagerness, we get to fix missing motivation. We get to offer a chance for our students to be successful. What we do is far more important than end results; we bring current meaning and a reason for our students to walk through the classroom door. Fear not the test but do fear lack of eagerness. It’s not your fault it’s gone, but somehow we need to bring it back.

Therefore, I implore you to teach in such a way to reach the child, and not the system’s measure of tangible success. In doing so, tangible success will come not through pushing material but through pushing through the walls of lost students. How do we do this? There is not a magic solution, no one way of teaching that reaches all. Each of us is gifted in our own unique way to reach students; we have no choice but to express our own uniqueness in the classroom. Our students’ futures hinge upon our willingness to push past the blame and into a world of understanding, a world of motivating, and a world of giving; that is, after all, why we teach.

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Dear Teacher

Dear Teacher,

Let us open our memory to when we were students seeking our degrees in education. Be it college or grad school, from day one we were taught how to teach. Between demanding methods of teaching, classroom behavior management, curriculum development, and the like, our professors modeled the ideal classroom. We presented lessons to our peers, critiqued deliveries, and role played numerous classroom scenarios until we all had an idea (or at least we thought) of what faced us in our journey ahead.

In the chaos of student teaching, interviewing, graduating, and so on, some of us forgot why we entered education in the first place. We simply did not choose jobs; we chose a vocation that impacts the rest of the word. Our souls have great purpose in what we are doing and there is something within all of us that moved us toward the classroom. Teachers thrive in the classroom, what we have to offer is more than subject material; we long to share ourselves.

Our belief in one student can change the world, yet we were unable to materialize our beliefs in our "how to teach" courses. Believing in students is an understanding of why we chose teaching as our careers. It is difficult to believe any of us chose this vocation without the ambition of changing student lives. Propelling one student beyond the content material is the difference we make as educators. As teachers, we must teach in such as way that our students can reflect upon their education and use us to mark history.

State testing and the bureaucracy that comes with our evaluations, tenure, and outside judgment will continue to haunt us all. Though rarely talked about and certainly not fully developed in our educational training, our desire to reach the adolescent heart is omnipresent. You are not alone in your quest to lead students to a greater peak in their learning, one higher than any state test can measure.

We have chosen an emotional occupation; the days may be long, the journey exhausting, and the victories difficult to see. Throughout this blog we will find meaning in our teaching through why we teach and allow it to transform how we teach our students.

Come on the journey with me to discover why we became educators. There is something deep within calling us to pursue more than the subject we teach. Our hearts long to be part of a story more important than standardized tests and student success hinges upon us being masters of that story. Rarely have we been given a chance to listen to our heart and reflect upon why we teach. Together we will pursue the source of the ever flowing spring of educational desire.

We are in a career in which we receive little monetary compensation. We are frequently berated from lack of tangible success and often blamed for the problems with America’s youth. Yet we are connected emotionally to our occupation. We love it….but sometimes the system kills the passion we had entering education and brings us a new reason to educate, to pass the test.

What happened to our initial motivation? What stole our spirit and how do we get it back? In the end, it is not really about dollars and dimes, what parents think of us, or how well our students remember Romeo and Juliet or the Pythagorean Theorem; it is about giving ourselves to our students. And when we give ourselves, there we will find true joy, there you will find motivation to keep teaching. There you will find the purpose in what we do.