Teacher Angst

I'm feeling kind of down about my profession right now. Angsty is a good word for it, I think.

Before I had Keira, I taught 5th grade full-time and always had. I wasn't a great teacher--I'm not even sure I was a good teacher--but I was learning, and trying. I really had no idea what went on in other teachers' classrooms. Teachers are, for the most part, trapped inside our own bubbles...or, as someone in my district once called it, inside our own monkey-houses, where "if you're in there long enough, you don't even notice if it stinks." Whether the teachers around us are heinously bad or ingenius revolutionaries of the craft, we really don't know except by hearsay, because we're all behind our own closed doors at the same time every day. We have nothing to compare ourselves to most of the time, and except for that once every two years when a principal comes in for a scheduled observation, no one is usually around to give us feedback on how we're doing.

Jobsharing, moving to kindergarten (which was half-day, so we helped in other teachers' classrooms and had planning time to roam the campus at will), and having friends with school-aged kids are all new situations that have come about in the past 5 years, and all of them have changed the way I see teachers and the education system. I've gotten to peek into the way other teachers work, and in a lot of ways, that's good news: I've been lucky to have three different jobshare partners, and I've learned really valuable things from all of them. Although I seriously didn't want to teach kindergarten, and hhhhated it at first, it was the only real training I'd ever had in how to teach phonics and reading. I shared classrooms with other, veteran teachers, and got to shoplift borrow a ton of their little tricks and techniques. I got to see guided reading groups in action for the first time (as a student teacher, I'd managed to get three master teachers who didn't do guided reading). I'm always asking my friends' kids about what they're doing at school, hoping to catch wind of something awesome their teachers do that I might be able to use, and hearing my friends' perspective as parents has made me a lot less judgy toward the parents of my own students (although, clearly, all teachers have our HOW HARD IS IT TO GET A KID TO SCHOOL ON TIME ONCE IN A WHILE?! rants on occasion). These are the good things about peering behind the curtain and seeing what goes on in other teachers' classrooms.

But then there are bad things. Things that make me set aside my Righteous Indignation at all the teacher-bashing that goes on these days, and start to see the truth in some of it. Don't get me wrong--I'm good for a No Child Left Behind rant or an "I double-dog dare any of you idiot politicians to manage 30+ kids for 6 hours a day and teach them this mile-long list of standards" speech anytime. I love my job, I wouldn't trade it for anything, and I know it's freaking hard sometimes, for all of us. It's just that I've heard about and seen some seriously saddening, maddening things in the past few years, and especially in the past couple of weeks. Things like...

• "Oh, no one really does reading groups anymore. Kids take a test on the computer and get their reading level, and then they just read independently and take quizzes online. They pretty much already know how to read, anyway."


• "Can you help me figure out how to teach my son how to read? He's in first grade but neither of his first two teachers have really taught reading--it's all worksheets and computerized quizzes. They don't have guided reading groups or anything, and I don't even know what level he's at or what I can do from home to help teach him."


• "The district does not want teachers doing novel studies [in upper grades]. The adopted reading textbooks have stories that are carefully selected to teach the standards, and the accompanying worksheets target those standards specifically. There is no time or reason to do whole-class novel studies or literature circles." (That's a paraphrase, but almost verbatim, from a district-level employee.)

In so many classrooms now, it seems like reading is all about filling in the blanks and bubbles, and occasionally making a cute cut-and-paste project or watching the movie that goes with the book. As far as I know, our district is no longer training teachers on how to take running records or on guided reading strategies--in fact,they've pretty much given teachers permission to drop that stuff altogether, and suggest that following the script in the teacher's manual and assigning the worksheets that go with each story is all we need to do to teach kids how to read. And how's that working out for ya, you might ask? Not. Very. Well.

After all the things I've seen and heard about in the past few years, I no longer wonder why so many of my 5th graders were at a 2nd grade reading level. We've basically stopped teaching kids how to read in favor of a) teaching them how to pass tests, b) doing what's cute instead of what's relevant (this is HUGE in primary grades...or am I just bitter because I don't really "do" cute?), and c) doing what's easiest for us instead of what's effective.

It's really bumming me out.

When the research says that kids who have ineffective teachers take 3 years or more to recover--and that kids who get two or three ineffective teachers in a row are statistically likely to NEVER recover--hearing that a friend's child has started school with two consecutive teachers who don't teach reading is enough to make me feel physically ill. Why is this OK?! To me, it's like those pharmacists who don't want to fill birth control prescriptions. Guess what--it's part of your job. Do it, or get a different job. And what is a parent supposed to do if their child's teacher is unable to, or chooses not to, teach effectively? Sure, parents are kids' first teachers, but if they wanted to be professional educators, they'd have gotten credentials and joined our ranks--instead, now they're nurses and accountants and stay-at-home moms who are finding out that sending their kids to public school doesn't mean they're going to learn, and that they'd better figure out how to fill that gap themselves, quick.

Hence, my angst.

I really should worry about my own classroom, do the best *I* can--and hey, I'm not perfect by ANY stretch--and just focus on being inspired by the really awesome teachers I know. There are tons of them, by the way, and I'd love to someday even be in the same league as they are. For every negative comment above, I could show you a teacher whose talent and expertise make me proud to share the same campus with them, and who disproves all of the negative press teachers have been getting lately--and then some.

But lately I'm losing sleep, literally, over how many kids aren't learning...not because they don't have enough support at home, or aren't motivated, or because class sizes are too high, or because there are too many standards, or because they're learning the language, or because they have special needs (these are some of the many real reasons why SOME kids struggle, of course)...but because their teachers aren't teaching. And whether that's because those teachers feel powerless to resist what's being handed down from the "powers that be," or because they're good teachers who just haven't been trained on how to do what's effective, or because they've simply lost sight of what their responsibilities are, or don't care as long as they're guaranteed a paycheck every month until they retire, the end result is the same: the kids pay the consequences.

I'm going to wallow in this angst for a few days, and then I'm going to decide what, if anything, to do about it. (It will, no doubt, involve a lot of reading and writing, so it's a good thing my teachers chose to, and were allowed to, teach me how to do those things!)