By Travis
It's final’s week. Students have worked hard all semester and we are deep into final exams. There is a silence that has fallen over the school like late winter snow.
I hear the clickty clack, tippity tap of words being created, one letter at a time, as my students demonstrate their understanding of literature elements. It is a pleasant sound. Meditative.
Between exams, the sounds are less than peaceful. All I hear are swear words and derogatory remarks in the hall. Not PG-13 swearing, stuff that parents would laugh off. I’m talking the 7 Dirty Words, and then some. I am unsure why there has been a spike in swearing, but it is #!$*@ annoying.
Sorry for that. Truly. The word just slipped out.
When we think of schools, we picture classrooms. Most of us do. The reason why we picture a classroom is because the learning takes place there and it is in the classroom that we form memories over our childhood. I bet the image of your classroom was colorful and happy. You may have even seen smiles on faces, but not noticed the smiles until I mentioned it.
This is my warm-and-fuzzy image of school. The reality of school is filled with attendance, high-stakes testing, emails and phone calls to parents, discipline, students with varying degrees of readiness, students who have not eaten, meetings, evaluations, after school duties, filing, filling out papers in triplicate, and one more thing … what was it? Oh, yeah—teaching.
Mark wrote last week, asking the question—How is it decided who deserves [the teacher’s] time and energy? In essence, he was asking, do the failing students who are not trying deserve to be encouraged to the point of taking time away from those students who come to class to learn?
At the end of the day, I often wonder what my role is at school? My job description implies that I am teaching students, but there are so many constraints that go on during the day which have little to do with learning, and much to do with socializing young people. The trouble is that there is not enough time (or support) to teach young people how to behave AND teach them how to enjoy the subtle and beautiful themes in a novel.
I am not opposed to teaching young people how to politely interact with the world. I do that with my own children, and like my own children, I care about my students. However, this leaves little time for academics, and as of today, there is not a state test for behavior so behavior will not get the same funding, support, or focus, and although social behavior is important, does it deserve more of my instructional time than the academics for which my class was created?
Behavior, in my view, should be taught at home. Good behavior, in my view, is then demonstrated at school. I want to get back into teaching, and find myself asking, HOW?
…by that I mean that perhaps kids know what not to say in earshot.
I tend to pick and choose which words I respond to when I hear kids dropping bombs in the hallway (my classroom is a different story altogether…), perhaps that makes me part of the problem, but there are simply some battles too huge to take on.
It probably also helps that I’m in a small enough school, and have been in the building since it opened ten years ago…
Finding a way to make instruction the primary activity in my professional day has been the biggest challenge for me over the last three years. You touched on a key factor in that challenge-the need to socialize students- that I feel gets discussed but never meaningfully addressed. By that I mean we all, teachers and administrators, talk about it. Ad nauseum at times. But we can’t seem to get to Doing something about it. Mostly because we can’t legislate how other people parent. Your frustration with students choosing not to be educated really resonates with where I find myself right now. This post speaks to the other equally frustrating issue in teaching: parents choosing not to parent (i.e. socialize children before and throughout their schooling). I think it was Mark who pointed out (or stated to the effect) the only people he is responsible for parenting are those children who share his last name.