Imagine a child who is regularly beaten with a hose.
Imagine a child who is locked in an apartment alone all afternoon.
Imagine a child whose last meal was rice for supper, a child who has not seen her mother in a year, who never met his father, who saw her brother shot, who goes outside and fights all the other beaten children.
Imagine a boy or girl who is all these children.
Then imagine that you are a teacher, and three or four of your eighteen students are these children. They hide under tables, they knock over desks, they curl into sad balls in the corner. They scream and swear and cry, bite and punch and kick.
You handle their behavior and its effect on all the others, and you teach most of the children to behave themselves in the classroom, to read, write and do simple arithmetic. You spend hours of classroom time testing and testing and testing them. You adopt curriculum changes nobody consulted you about. On weekends you grade papers, fill out forms, write reports.
Your reward? You are blamed for all the problems in the schools. Your salary is tied to the academic success of all the children. You are told there is no money for glue, paper, and scissors, so you send home weekly newsletters that half the parents don’t read, and beg for donated supplies. When you don’t get them, you buy them yourself. Every year you are fired in April, and probably re-hired in July, depending on the budget. You hear people joke that those who can’t do, teach.
Imagine if it were otherwise. No merit pay based on week-long tests of little children. No special awards for Best Teacher, but good teachers rewarded for helping those who struggle, and irredeemably bad teachers dismissed. Teachers paid as well as the lawyers in the legislature who think they are experts in education, and come up with new policies, new curricula, new standards every few years.
I bought Amanda’s teacher a button that says “Those who can, teach. Those who can’t, make laws about teaching.” I guess that says it all.
(Note: The children described above are not Amanda. I have volunteered at her school for three years, and I've seen and heard a lot.)
Oh, this is so true. For fear of sounding a bit melodramatic – destroy public education and we destroy the country….
At our long gone feminist bookstore in the Chicago suburbs we sold a button that reminded people:
“Those who can teach; those who can’t go into a less significant line of work.”
How sad that we’ve descended to this new reality.
It IS sad. But my step-daughter is very excited to be teaching in a challenging middle school in New Orleans, and my new baby-sitter equally excited to have landed a special ed job in Starke, FL. So some young people go on doing what they’re called to, regardless of the crap that’s thrown, and I say hurray for them!
Re-reading this, I am saddened, and enraged by this national stupidity. Remembering my own education; the teacher who got us class so excited about Hamlet; another who talked about why we make wars; the one who terrified us so deliciously with Poe.
Bright children are called nerds. Intellect is an aberration. Bless the teachers who persist in spite of all, and you for honoring them.
Mithen
Milton – Well, I’ve only been watching teachers K-3, but they’re as determined and creative as the ones you remember.