The Failure Of An Excellent Teacher

My wife and I took some time off this weekend, playing hooky from her schoolwork. It was something she really needed to do, sort of as a retreat from the insanity of her job.

She is exemplary in many ways, getting her doctorate in education from a prestigious college, and attending there because of her previous impeccable work in a masters program. Summa Cum Laude all the way through. I am not bragging on her, I am just giving you background information about her as a teacher.

She is in her second year teaching high school English at a private school here in town. She puts in a solid eighty hours, seven days a week on her job, and she loves her students.

A small school like this survives by economics. They need parents to enroll their kids in their classes and pay their tuition. Its the school’s income, their lifeblood. The state requires the school to meet minimal academic standards for the student’s good, which means that the students pass the yearly state exams. However, the students don’t really wish to do any work, or learn anything. They just like hangin with their buds, and being kids. Parents don’t want anyone to rock their boat by sending kids home with failing grades, which then requires a mandatory parent/teacher meeting.

This is about how most private schools operate here, but they have a secret weapon to succeed: Workbooks. Studies consist of mostly workbooks, for there is little homework for the kids, and good grades are easy to get. Nor do the teachers have to be able to write a curriculum, since most of them cannot.

The only thing wrong with this is that students learn little or nothing from this kind of teaching.

Therefore, my wife writes her own curriculum, and gives both homework and tests that are comparable to our public school system. Things like this are a big deal to my wife, who works very hard to make learning something that matters to her kids.

Her students for the most part hate her classes. Although they love her as a teacher.

My wife, like many other teachers in private education, has been under tremendous pressure to conform, even though such a thing goes against everything in her, and against her love and concern for her students. She considers that her teaching is her ministry to these young people.

The staff has complained about her because she is a troublemaker, going against the mandated dumbing down of the curriculum by not using their workbooks. After all, the students get ‘A’s in all their other classes. 

The students complain to their parents about all the reading and homework that is required from her class, especially since nobody else gives them homework.

The parents threaten to pull their kids from school and take them somewhere else because of all the trouble. They are all too busy to be bothered with this.

In my wife’s class this past week, some of her Seniors didn’t complete their weekly assignments, so they got an ‘F’ for the week, which disqualified them for playing in the homecoming game. However, the Principal and some parents already knew about the grades she was going to give those Seniors. But because those Seniors participation was vital to the school team winning the homecoming game, they applied pressure to my wife to change the grades, ‘just this once.’

So she did.

I cannot tell you how deeply this affects her. She spends hours writing her curriculum, and more hours grading the student’s papers, leaving them handwritten notes to help them learn what she is teaching them. Most of all, she sees down the road for her students, and she knows that they are making decisions now that will affect their whole lives in a dramatic fashion. One of the facts of life young people need to learn is that doing things the easy way will never get them anywhere they want to be. So many of them will not prosper, nor will they become what they could have, and should have, become in life, because they took the easy way out.

My wife has also learned another fact of life. These kinds of schools love to hire motivated new teachers. Ones who pour their heart and soul into teaching, and who will motivate kids to make something with their lives. But, as you can see, the system is geared to failing them, unless they conform to the school’s own method of teaching. Most new teachers leave after a year or two. The ones who stay give up teaching a real curriculum and start using the workbooks.

So this week she gave in to the system. At the same time she decided this is her last year there, but no one there knows it yet.

She has already accepted a great teaching position at the community college up the hill. For her, it means more pay, less hours, a system that is less oppressive of its students, and perhaps a chance to save her sanity. She is right to be tired of always being the bad guy to her students, and always being in trouble with the faculty. She is heartsick over the destruction of learning that takes place there, and the fact that many kids who graduate from that school typically end up in town flipping burgers, because (surprise!) after attending four years at an easy high school, they couldn’t pass the entrance exams for any college.

One more brick in the wall of our civilization is falling.

My wife has a bit of hope, however. Those few bright kids she has taught, who kept their love of learning, are now going to be her students again at the college. In their eyes, she is indeed a beloved teacher and mentor, as she so well deserves to be.