Category: Teaching

Yesterday was English/Language Arts Testing Day for Texas high school students. The other tests occur in April, but ELA is sooner so that the essays can be graded.

Watching the kids test – and as per regulations unable to read, write, or do anything other than stare at a room full of miserable kids for three hours – I had plenty of time for thinking about standardized high stakes testing. It ain’t good.

I’ve seen too many very bright, literate kids struggle mightily with these tests because their thinking is not standard or their writing is not formulaic. I’ve seen kids who are clearly bound for advanced university work risk graduation because they get caught up on one particular subject. The greatest injustice I’ve seen is reflected in the eyes of Hispanic kids, new to the US, who must, if they are to graduate, pass the test in a new language. I’ve had brilliant students fail math, science, writing, the whole shebang, because they are not yet brilliant in English.

Of course, kids who haven’t opened a book since first grade or done a shred of homework (and have still somehow made it to eleventh grade) will usually fail and rightly so. Sadly, these kids have made choices and have been enabled by a system that passes them along out of fear of parents (who can’t officially be blamed) and politicians (who pass out blame so officially) who make it the teachers’ fault, the schools’ fault. The result is that districts work ever harder to focus on these few days of testing, these meaningless snapshots that tell us so little that we didn’t already know.

Where does that leave us? Students learn nothing from standardized testing. Those who excel in school, who love learning, have it beaten out of them by a yearlong time suck. Those who do poorly in school have all their negative impressions about the purpose of school reinforced by the test that ultimately just verifies what their professional teachers already knew after the first round of assignments came in. Schools are rated and ranked based on their collective performance on these tests that cater to mediocrity, standardized thinking, formulaic writing and rote memorization. It leaves us with the mistaken belief that we are improving our schools when in fact we are discouraging the very thing we should be fostering: love of learning.

Learning should be fun, exciting, and leave a person filled with wonder when looking out at the natural world or the works and story of humanity. We should be teaching kids to ask questions rather than spit out answers. Slavish devotion to test data kills all that. Schools adjust their curricula to match the test, which, let’s remember, is a minimum skills test. What happens when the mandated focus of public schools is minimum skills, when you shoot for a target so low? Sadly, you hit it. Every single time.

This post started as a response to a comment posted by Joey in which she asks the following about teaching:

How have you found the experience to be? Affirming, dissatisfying, surprising?

The first question could easily be answered with a snappy ‘all of the above’ but with a decided preference for written response over multiple choice, I found myself wanting to elaborate since the experience of recently leaving and then even more recently coming back has caused me to spend a great deal of time thinking about teaching and jobs in general, which is why this response to a comment became a post.

So, here goes. I left teaching at the end of last school year for a variety of reasons, but recently returned (see this post) to the profession. The experience of teaching is a slightly different thing than the experience of being a teacher. I’ll try to elaborate.

I’ve found the experience of teaching to be a fun, engaging, challenging and worthwhile profession. I’m the sort who needs to like what I do. I have to feel that it’s important in some way. It has to challenge me creatively and intellectually. It can’t be boring. Teaching nicely fills all of these ‘what I want in a job’ requirements. It is, of course, not all poetry projects and great literature. It is hard, exhausting work in often poor conditions with occasionally hostile students. The pay and benefits are, shall we say, below market. It’s a tradeoff.

Having said that, my experiences have varied greatly, each coming with a different degree of satisfaction. I’ve taught undergrads while in grad school (somewhat satisfying), and I’ve taught child stars as a studio teacher on the set of The Big Green (where I learned how easily kids can be spoiled when there are 200 overpaid adults whose jobs hang on the good graces those children). I’ve also taught middle school and high school age kids in regular public schools. I find I’m happiest and most effective at the upper high school level. I can generally be myself, have fun at work, and I continue to learn new things on an almost daily basis. Overall, the experience has been mostly good.

I would say that teaching is definitely affirming. It’s a profession in which you are directly involved in trying to help people grow. You push them, challenge them, correct them, make them laugh, make them angry, make them think. Sometimes it even works and you get to see the light bulbs blink on above their heads. That’s pretty cool. No teacher reaches every student, but most do more good than harm with the majority of their students and even manage to inspire a few. At the end of the year, I usually feel good about things.

Teaching can also be terribly dissatisfying. It’s one of few professions that is also essentially a dead-end job. My first job after graduate school was unloading trucks at a warehouse. Some days that seems very appealing. If you have an unsupportive administration, a school in which the culture revolves around testing or parents who’ve largely abdicated their responsibilities, it can be miserable. I’ve been lucky on most of these counts.

The thing is, though, that the dissatisfying elements are mostly part of the job of being a teacher whereas the affirming aspects are centered on the act of teaching. You have to find a school where the balance between working with kids in the classroom and dealing with all the extraneous stuff leans toward the affirming side of the equation. I left because the balance was shifting too heavily towards dissatisfaction.

What surprised me was how much I missed it. There are other surprises, too: how funny kids are, how much I learn from them, how the kids that you ride and discipline and generally have to be the bad guy with are almost always the ones that show up a year or two later to thank you for being their favorite teacher.

In my current position, I’m surprised by how much my kids – who’ve all been kicked out of regular public schools – want to learn and want to succeed. I’ve never had so many students with such high ambitions. That surprises me.

Mainly I’m surprised at how good it feels to have come back.

In my middle school teaching days, I once taught this fun book called Holes by Louis Sachar. It’s about kids at a camp for “bad boys” who are required to dig holes all day. There seems to be no purpose for the digging except that as Mr. Sir says, it builds character and turns bad boys into good boys. The book is quite good, a sort of Catch-22 for young readers that manages to be both wickedly sarcastic and warmhearted at the same time. Even kids who hate reading will read Holes.

I couldn’t help but think about it the other day when I accompanied some of my students to a local park where they are working on a tree planting project. Most of my students aren’t really “bad kids,” they’re just the round pegs that don’t fit into the square holes of the public school system. They’re smart, curious, friendly, and want nothing more than to succeed and avoid the mistakes they made that landed them where they are. Nevertheless, the first step in planting trees is digging holes.

Initially, they seemed reluctant to really throw themselves into the hole-digging, not for lack of enthusiasm, but out of concern that they would dirty their uniforms and get their boots muddy, which could cause them to fail an inspection and incur the wrath of their drill instructors. We assured them that the drills knew what they were up to and as their holes got deeper (and to avoid being outdone by us teachers), they proceeded to throw themselves into the task. Soon we had a bunch of holes and the kids planted peach and plum trees under the guidance of a master gardener.

For my part, I enjoyed digging the holes (there’s nothing like swinging a pickax to break rock) and to my surprise, so did the kids. One said to me that she liked knowing that her work would help something grow. Another said he liked digging holes because it was tiring and it made him happy to think that a tall tree would someday grow and bear fruit because of something he did.

It was a beautiful day and we all got away from the facility for a few hours to enjoy some time with nature. Fortunately there’s still much planting to do in the coming weeks. I still don’t know if digging holes will turn “bad kids” into “good kids,” but it does give them a chance to feel that they are doing something to make the world a better place. Most of my students need that.

(I also learned from the gardener in charge of the project that the young tree in my backyard will never grow until I make some changes in how it’s staked and mulched.)

I received an unusual compliment the other day.

Since I’m now working in a correctional facility, I had to be fingerprinted. When the woman collecting my prints was finished, she looked over the paper and then stated that I have ‘beautiful fingerprints.’

“Really?” I asked, looking at the tips of my blackened fingers.

She nodded. “Yeah. You should never commit a crime. They’ll know you right off. ‘Hey, guys, it’s James.'”

So that’s me: “a forensic scientist’s dream.”

I went back into teaching today.

Towards the end of last school year, I decided to leave the district I’d been with for the previous six years mainly because of a commute that due to a move had grown considerably longer than when I had started. Once the decision to leave that district was made, I decided to leave the profession altogether. There were a number of reasons, but mainly I was feeling burned out. Besides, I had never intended to teach forever. Teaching was my second career. After growing tired of the ups and downs of freelancing in the film business, I had wanted to do something ‘useful for a while’ as I told people who thought I’d lost my mind back when I was working through an alternative certification program.

Last summer, I decided that since I was going to be looking for another job why not look outside of public education? I spent the summer interviewing and searching and finally found a job as a project manager at a small company. It sounded exciting – a combination of marketing, IT and communications. The job was okay, but it didn’t leave me feeling fulfilled. The commute was horrendous, I got home very late each evening and while there was no grading to do, I had little time for writing, a problem that was growing increasingly difficult since there is another novel just bursting to be written. So back I went to the calculus of career in which I always conclude that what I do all day must be personally fulfilling and give me time to write.

The thing about teaching is that I know I’m really good at it. I can reach the kids who hate school (just as I hated it until I got to college) and I can push them past the level of ‘minimum skills’ that Texas requires, showing them that they can read and write and – most importantly – think better than they ever thought they could. Not teaching felt like I was wasting part of myself.

A few weeks ago, I started looking and found a mid-year opening at an alternative school. It’s a boot camp environment for kids who are on their last chance. In some cases the next step could be prison. This is exciting to me. When I got the job last week, I happily packed up my office and quit. Today was my first day at my new school. I loved it. It felt right. When I resigned from my old teaching position everyone tried to convince me that teaching was my calling and that I shouldn’t leave the profession.

I’m glad I did, but I’m thrilled to be back where I think I probably belong. I’ve had many jobs, a few professions and careers, but only teaching has ever made me want to get up and go to work for someone else.