September means apples, bulletin boards, foliage, name tags,
a new class and everything else about going back-to-school! After over thirty
years of starting the fall in a classroom, as a student or teacher, I decided
to take a break this year. I taught for thirteen years all over Oregon, and it
was not an easy decision to take a year off from teaching. We moved from Oregon
to Texas and I knew that now was the time to step back. It’s now been two
months since school started for the rest of my world, and I have had time
reflect upon the decision to change careers. I can now articulate the many
things I miss about teaching and the one thing that I do not.
Growing up, I always wanted to be a teacher. There were
moments when I saw myself as a lawyer, a rodeo cowgirl, a photojournalist, a
ballerina, a public speaker, and of course, a queen. I loved helping others,
loved teaching others! I read books to younger kids, made my own neighborhood
newspaper, created worksheets for my brother to complete and just knew I wanted
to be a teacher!
Reading books with kids; discussing the literature, really
listening to children’s connections to the story, are some of the best times
one can have as a teacher. I learned so much about the power of great books,
the right books and the deep connections to literature by what my students have
said over the years.
A fifth grade student in my class was reading “Hatchet” by
Gary Paulsen as part of a book club in my classroom. We were sitting as a small
group discussing the book one day in class. This child told the group that he
really connected with the main character, Brian, and his anger. Brian had a lot
of anger at his parents for divorcing. My student went on to tell the group
that he was relieved at Brian’s anger, it made him feel like he wasn’t the only
one who felt this way at his parents’ divorce. He said that he had felt like he
was the only one with parents who were no longer together, until he read about
Brian and his intense feelings. This was an incredibly important turning point
for this student, he was able to talk to his parents about his feelings after
reading just a few chapters of this book.
In another book club, one of the small groups was reading a
collection of short stories about children who survived the Holocaust. At the
end of the book, I gave the kids a choice of final projects. One sixth-grade
student chose to write a letter to Hitler, and then read it aloud to the class.
He read this letter, equating Hitler and several other infamous war criminals
(Bin Laden, Hussein) as playground bullies. He informed these ‘bullies’ that
the only reason they were allowed to rise in power was because there were too
many bystanders. He reassured these terrible men in history that he never be a
bystander, he would stand up. This sixth grade student delivered an amazing
speech that not only took the power away from these historical figures, but
made a call to action of his classmates. He told a class of twenty-six children
that we would have another Holocaust, another war, another 9/11,unless we all
stood up and stopped letting bullies get away with treating people poorly. He
then looked right at me and thanked for introducing him to his favorite book. The
room was silent, the children knew the gravity in which he had spoke. They
didn’t clap. They thanked him.
Those are just two stories of the hundreds, thousands of
life-changing moments that my students gave me. I have tears in my eyes just
writing about these kids. Every child teaches you something, about the world,
about yourself, about the future. Good teachers learn from this and continue to
make positive changes in their little world, which then has ripple effects into
the community and world at large.
So why did I leave? Clearly, it means a lot to me to be a
teacher. People assume that maybe the kids were too much, or the parents were a
lot, or the pay was too low, or any number of reasons that have been
trivialized on memes and complained about on Facebook. Taking a hiatus from
teaching didn’t have anything to do with any of those reasons.
Children are the best part of teaching; they are hilarious,
spirited, adventuresome, silly, loving and grateful! Teaching a child something
and when you see them put it all together to take ownership of the learning, is
incredible. It’s more than just seeing they understand how to add fractions,
it’s witnessing the confidence they gain from knowing they CAN do it. They
learn something about themselves, that is what’s important.
The parents in my classes have been very supportive. In my
experience, I have seen that all parents love their children. They demonstrate
this in different ways, and giving them the room to be able to do that is
important as a teacher. Parents need to know that you care about their child as
an individual, a learner and the little person that they are becoming. At one
of my schools, I would get a lot of new students into class because the
population at my school was quite transient. One day, I was told that I was
getting a new student about ten minutes before he arrived. His mom and baby
brother walked him to my class, which was already in session. He was very shy
and clearly didn’t want his mom to leave. I made a spot for her and the baby at
one of my tables in the back of the room. She seemed as unwilling to leave as
her son was to have her leave. When it was snack time, I was chatting with my
new student and his mother. I reassured her what our schedule was and what time
she could pick up her son. At the end of the school day, she told me that two
weeks ago, her newborn baby had died and that they had had to move to over 500
miles away for her husband’s job. I was blown away. I thought she was a
helicopter parent who just needed to be around her child too much. I told her
that she could stay as long as she wanted, and for two weeks, she did stay at
school all day every day. But after two months, her son was coming to school by
himself and happily running around with new friends at recess. Working with
caring parents like her make teaching wonderful.
The solitary reason that I chose to leave teaching has to do
with the politicized environment of education. People may wonder what politics
have to do with teaching, and the answer is everything. When policies are made,
the impacts come into our lives and change them drastically. Over the past few
years, there has been widespread “educational reform.” These reforms have
increased the importance of spreadsheets, columns of data, evaluations by inexperienced
observers, and the accounting of data in every teacher’s life. The focus has
gone away from people; students, parents, teachers, staff, volunteers, and onto
data. The most important elements of teaching cannot be quantified onto a
spreadsheet and put into a power point. When data is given importance above all
else, time and resources are directed as such.
It has been years, YEARS, since I was in a building
in-service that was about connecting with kids, communicating with parents,
designing meaningful anti-bullying lessons, incorporating literature into math
lessons or any topic other than data collection, data presentation, data
comparison, state testing and teacher evaluations.
About five years ago I gave a presentation at a staff
meeting dealing with recognizing childhood hunger in the classroom. Oregon
leads the nation in childhood hunger, with about 30% of children living with
food instability; they don’t know when, if or what they will eat. I was
teaching in a county with 25% of our children living with childhood hunger. I
worked with our principal at the time and specialists to design and present
this information so teachers and staff could recognize the symptoms and help
our students. I have offered to give this presentation every year since then (with
different principals and different schools), and I have consistently been told
no, there is not enough time. Not enough time. For one-third of our children.
There is not a place in my heart in which this is acceptable.
We are in a people business, not a numbers business. It is
not that teachers do not value data and information systems. We absolutely do,
so that we can know where each child is in their mastery of the concepts that
we have taught. Record keeping, evaluation of scores, and calibration of lessons
based on the data are important parts of being a teacher. Data is just not the
entirety of what it means to be a teacher. Teaching and learning are about more
than test scores. There are so many more verbs that describe good teachers
other than data collection. However, this piece of our profession is now
emphasized above all other traits and qualities. It is more important to value
the child, work with the family and teach at a pace that makes sense for the
learners than it is for teachers to know yet another way to compare data on
spreadsheets. Current teachers are doing all of this and it is too much, and
too unnecessary. The only educational reform that should be considered should
be designed by experts; our experienced teachers, parents, community leaders
and students.
Now, as I wind down here, I just want to share another
story. I had a student who came new to my classroom. He was quite shy, hardly
made eye contact, had a heavy speech issue, and wore ill-fitting clothes. He
was new to our district as well, and his records had not yet arrived from his
previous school so I didn’t know anything about his background.
We were just beginning a writing unit when this child
arrived. He put his head down on his desk and refused to even pick up his
pencil. He was pretty withdrawn in general and wasn’t making any social or
educational progress. Writing was the hardest time for him. I had hardly seen
his handwriting because he refused to participate. One day I saw he was playing
with something in his pocket. I walked over and sat on the floor near him.
After a few minutes, he asked me what I was doing, so I said that his desk
looked like a creative spot so I wanted to work there, if it was alright with
him. He didn’t say anything, so I stayed there and corrected papers while the
rest of the class was free writing for about ten minutes. I did this each day
for about a week. He kept playing with something in his pocket. One day, he
asked if I wanted to see it. It was a small Lego structure. We had a sweet
little conversation about it and he told me how he built it. I told him that
sounded like a neat story, and asked if I could write it down in his journal.
Later that day, we were at the library and he was looking at a Lego book. I was
so excited that I found an “in” with this student! After school, I procured a
couple boxes of Legos and brought them to school the next day. At writing time,
I asked him if he could build me something. He built a duck pond with a school
and children playing. I wrote down his whole story as he dictated it to me. As
we progressed, he opened up to me and then to the other kids. Legos became a
very cool thing in our classroom. It became something that the kids could play
with during lunch and I put the new student in charge of the Legos. He started
writing in his journal every day during writing time, he would build his story
first and then write it down. He began writing all the time, he carried his
journal with him so he could jot down his building ideas. Other kids started
asking him about his stories, he became being known as a writer and kids from
other classes would go up to him at recess and ask to hear his creative
stories. It was incredible, so amazing to see the change in the child over the
time of a few weeks. He was happy, smiling, the opposite of the child who had
arrived in my room just a short time ago.
I eventually received his records, this child had been
diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after witnessing extreme violence
committed against a family member. Drugs, jail, domestic violence; this child
had seen it all by the age of ten.
Our school helped this child; we worked together, we bought
him Legos, we brought more Lego books into our library, said good morning, got
him a warm coat and cared about him. Every single adult at that school knew who
he was and the growth he made. Our school secretary brought in another box of
Legos that her sons had outgrown. A male teachers’ aid at the school dropped by
and would show this student ways to build with Legos. The school resource
officer arranged additional resources for his family. The school community came
together and advocated for this little guy and it worked.
And not one spreadsheet was made. This was not included on
one formal evaluation. No one got paid more. It wasn’t reflected on a state
test.
Helping a child, all children, should be the overriding goal
of education. Sadly, that is not what is happening right now. Teachers like me
and many others are leaving the profession. I’m not a unique teacher or a
special teacher. Every school I have taught in has been filled with teachers
taking extra efforts to advocate and support their students. We cannot endorse
something we don’t agree with by participating in it. Teachers shouldn’t be
leaving the profession because they care too much about children.
What can be done? Speak up. Find an audience that will
listen. Have a conversation with a friend. Talk to the principal of your
school. Volunteer. Write a letter to your local legislator. Post your
opinion as your next status update. Speak up at a staff meeting. Email someone.
Tweet it. Stand up, keep standing up.
