Teacher World

True confession: I don’t love teaching as much as I did when I first started in this profession. It pains me to admit this, but I don’t think I am alone. In conversations with other teachers, I am hearing the same complaints. Teachers are increasingly overwhelmed, overworked, and unappreciated.

Why are we overwhelmed? Because instead of being able to teach children to love learning, we are now in the business of teaching them how to take tests. Those of you who have moved to standards-based report cards know what I am talking about. In our district, we have created three formative assessments for each standard we cover in a trimester. We are required to administer these tests at the beginning, sometime during, and at the end of the trimester for each standard. The goal is to show improvement towards mastering each concept. After each test, we intervene with those who are not grasping the concept in a variety of ways before testing again. This is all above and beyond the normal testing that has always occurred in a classroom.  Is this what I signed up for when I became a teacher? Is this how you pictured yourself making a difference in your students’ lives? Is this really the way to get children excited about learning?

I am in my thirtieth year of teaching, and most people probably think that means I am coasting along doing less than I did when I started out. But I am working harder and longer hours with each passing year because so much more is demanded of teachers than ever before. Now, I don’t mind working harder if I feel I am working smarter. But I contend that we are losing sight of simple truths. Like the fact that repetitive testing is turning our kids off. And that teachers need to believe in and love what they are doing in order to be effective in the classroom. And that I can assess a student’s progress in a variety of ways, and testing is just one way. And that working harder doesn’t always mean working better.

And I feel unappreciated. No one will ever realize the additional hours I put in to try to meet my districts’ and state’s expectation that somehow I can get every student in my classroom to pass a test that has no real significance to them. We have even heard students voice the opinion (that they obviously have heard at home) that the tests are really to see how well the teacher is doing, not how well they are doing. When my students do score well, does anyone congratulate me on a job well done?

Again, I am working harder, enjoying it less, and not even recognized for the extra efforts I make. So, sadly, I find myself thinking more and more of retirement because my job is gradually become more work than it is a labor of love.

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As I work to prepare for the upcoming school year, I always write up the first two weeks of lessons plans. Yet even as I write them into my lesson plan book, I know that everything I write is subject to change as there will be countless interruptions to our normal schedule from handbook assemblies to picture day to ear and eye checks, It is one of those annoying issues we complain about every year to no avail. We have even suggested that they bundle all of these interruptions into one day and be done with it. Obviously, this suggestion has not taken root.

But as difficult as these countless interruptions are, at least they are at the beginning of the year. Unfortunately, we find ourselves complaining about the many interruptions that occur throughout the year, especially the ones that inconveniently get scheduled in the weeks prior to state assessment tests. This is a time that should be adamantly reserved for the most intensive review and preparation. It is not a time for programs and assemblies, follow-up eye and ear exams, etc. that could be scheduled at other times. Our principal has developed better hearing over the years and cut down on many of these interruptions, but many still remain.

What gets me is this: all year long we have meetings about how to improve our test scores, spend hours poring over last year’s test results to target weak areas, provide intervention for those students who did not pass tests the year before, create pre-assessments and short-cycled assessments to track our students’ progress, work through test prep materials to familiarize students with test format, and create various review activities to increase learning. We are inundated with the message that it is critical that our students pass these tests. There is absolutely no doubt, as far as teachers are concerned, with the necessity to get students in their classroom to do their very best.

Then here is the big question: if this is our school systems’ goal, if this is as important as we have been repeatedly drilled that it is, then why isn’t every attempt being made to limit interruptions which distract our students and derail our lessons? Come on, principals, if high performance on state achievement test is so important to our schools then please help us to make it the priority you want it to be!

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On Monday mornings in my classroom we spend the first few minutes reconnecting after the weekend by sharing something exciting we did over the weekend. One memorable morning this past spring, we were making our merry way around the room sharing our happy tales until I reached one young man, I will call Tim, who had been absent on Friday. Thoroughly expecting to be told that Tim spent most of the weekend in bed, I inquired, “So, Ted, I know you were sick so I assume you didn’t do much this weekend, right?”

To my utmost surprise, Tim boldly proclaimed, “I wasn’t sick on Friday.” Okay, so now I expected to hear that perhaps he had a doctor’s appointment or a family obligation, so I asked him if either of these two possibilities was true. He very patiently replied, “No.”

Now I was stumped. So I pursued the matter a little deeper by asking why he had stayed home then on Friday. Now get ready…His exact words were, “I had to stay home and help my mother set up the pool.” This happens to be a student who has struggled academically all year and whose mother I had been in regular contact with for support, so it took awhile for this proclamation to sink in fully, not just for me, but for the rest of the class as well. When I trusted myself to speak, I asked if he had begged to stay home to help. Tim retold the story that his mother came to his bedroom door in the morning and asked him if he would like to stay home and help her with the pool. Again, I had to take some time removing the shocked look from my face as I asked if this pool work could not have waited until he got home from school or over the weekend. He just smiled and shrugged. At this point I questioned whether setting up the home pool qualified as an excused absence. The only thing that saved me from a complete melt down was the fact that I was not the only one in that room that was amazed at the craziness of this situation.

I tell this story because it is indicative of a serious problem we face in education today. So many activities are becoming more important to parents and their children than school: sports, movies, computer games, vacations, concerts, and now I have to add pools to this list. For those of us in the business of educating and trying to get students to pass state tests, it is frustrating to say the least. I’m sorry, but when parents believe that setting up a pool is more important than getting their children to school, our schools and our students take a real dive.

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Preparing for and awaiting the results of State Achievement Tests are a lot like the processes of pregnancy and childbirth. It starts, just like pregnancy, with the anticipation and the preparations that must be made for the imminent arrival. Instead of getting our houses ready, teachers spend months getting our students’ minds ready for the plethora of information they are required to glean before the tests are administered. In your homes, this sometimes requires renovations and additions to make room for your little one. Those of us who work with children’s minds spend a lot of time doing the same thing. We often have to rip out and remove information or thought processes that will get in the way of the new information or processes they will need to be successful. As you parents tear down walls, we tear down bad habits and lazy attitudes. As you slap up wallpaper and paint, we slap up skills that will increase their arsenal of knowledge. This stage of pregnancy is a busy yet exciting time, and the same can be said of this stage of test preparation.

The final weeks of test prep are very similar to the final weeks of pregnancy. Like expectant mothers, we are tired and just want to see the fruits of our labors. Just as expectant mothers spend more time in their doctor’s office trying to predict how soon they will deliver their little bundle of joy, teachers fervently administer sample tests to predict if their students are ready to deliver as well. We, too, find it more difficult to sleep and find it harder to stay patient in the morning.

Finally, the long awaited labor pains begin. We watch in silent submission as it is finally and irrevocably out of our hands. Like mothers who simply have to trust in the capable hands of their obstetrician, we must trust in the hopefully capable heads of our students and the myriad bits of information we have painstakingly planted in their brains.

Here is where the analogy falls apart. Most parents are rewarded within a day (or for some poor souls a little longer) with a beautiful, healthy baby. They are able to find out the baby’s sex immediately (if they didn’t already know) and can count all the little fingers and toes. Teachers, on the other hand, are not done agonizing until weeks later when their delivery final arrives; the official test scores. The counting we do is a little different; it’s more about how many passed, who didn’t pass, and how close they were to passing, which standards need more focus, which skills need more practice. And if we are very fortunate, it’s time for a Congratulations sign on our front lawn and a good cigar.

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I am what is kindly referred to as a veteran teacher. With twenty-nine years under my belt, I find myself nostalgically reminiscing about “the good, old days” of teaching, when my profession was revered, administrators could be fearless, and teachers still possessed a precious gift; to teach children to better understand the world around them rather than to better understand how to pass their state tests. 

When did teachers slip from favor? When did we become the cause of education’s woes? Is it possible that we are the easy targets on which to pin the blame of education’s failures? What about society’s failures and the ripple effect it has in the classroom? Teachers are not only disseminators of information. We are counselors, mediators, and often, we are parents. We deal with parents who refuse to make their children accountable for what they do. We deal with children who are trying to cope with situations in their homes making it difficult to concentrate or care about what is happening in the classroom. We dedicate hours beyond the work day grading and planning. We spend hundreds of dollars out of our already small paychecks on educational materials, teacher development, and reward items for our students. Yet, in spite of our best efforts, we continue to lose society’s respect.

We live in a sue-crazy and “I’ve-got-an-advocate” crazy world, and the repercussions of this are also being felt in our schools. Many administrators are understandably reticent to be too harsh when disciplining students. Unfortunately, this creates a degree of chaos, as students begin to realize that threats are often just that; threats. Maintaining control as the year progresses becomes a constant challenge often left solely to the teachers to sort out on their own.

But, what I mourn the most is the ability to teach deeply and creatively. Let me give you an example. To prepare my fifth-graders for their Social Studies Ohio Achievement Test, I must teach the following by April: regions and geography of the U.S., U.S. history from the arrival of Native Americans to the expansion and industrialization of our country, government, citizen’s rights and responsibilities, economics, cultural differences and their impact on our society, and problem solving. In addition, I am expected to review Ohio history and hope that through ESP I am able to choose those specific concepts that might be tested from the myriad of items they learned the year before. There is no time to delve deeply or explore interesting events in great detail. I am sincerely sorry for new teachers who have only known this era of test-taking. It is robbing us of the pure joy of teaching and communicating that joy to our students.

So, here I am, a veteran teacher, who, in spite of it all, still loves teaching. But a big part of me is in mourning for “the good old days”.

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