Semester Zero
crossposted at bark, bugs, leaves, and lizards
Teaching is fun and joyous but also hard as fucking hell, especially if you give a quarter of a shit, at whatever level you teach. You feel crazy, torn between your instinct and drive to care, push, cajole and scaffold and the occasional need, depending on your circumstances, to distance, withdraw, erect taller boundaries, or just stop for a while. I now think that all teachers, K-16, can benefit from occasional breaks and always honest but constructive evaluation. Sometimes, a teacher should be told, We appreciate all your service, your dedication and your experience but we’d like to place you outside of the classroom for a year/2/for the foreseeable future and ask you to serve and offer your gifts and experience in a different capacity. People outside of the classroom, from bus drivers to parents to school board members, wring their hands over “bad teachers” who “they” “can’t get out of the classroom” because of “unions” instead of worrying themselves with the real issue, concern and need—supporting effective, good and downright talented teachers and stopping the exodus from education. Because it is often the good teachers who leave. And what the public calls a “bad” teacher ranges from one who didn’t pass so-and-so’s child to one who teaches logic and argument rather than creationism.
The Bad Teacher Protected By Unions is more conservative myth than reality, like “widespread” voter fraud. The real problem is keeping who you have. And doing so with repsect, support and carrots rather than contempt, projection and beating sticks.
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I’ve had so far this year at the college level:
- a question offered for discussion on race—”What does ‘establishment’ mean?”
- a student who took 6 weeks to “understand” his university email account
- the same student asked “What’s a ‘fallacious’?” meaning “What does ‘fallacy’ mean?” even though we’ve dealt with the concepts of appeals and fallacies for almost 2 weeks now AND the class had a quiz on the material
- students who pout and challenge the department and university grading scales with “Why you got it so hard?”
- students who “don’t understand” their grades even though the online gradebook shows a string of zeros under assignments ranging from 10 to 100 points
- a flyer, from a university office with staff, some, not all, paid better than I, with five obvious typos and errors (at a quick glance) like “student’s” for “students” and “elvaluation” for “evaluation”
- exactly 6 passing grades at midterms out of all my classes
- a class clown who talks to me like he’s P. Diddy and I’m some video ho—he’s one more crack, comment, sigh, whine, failure away from me grabbing his collar or ear and “escorting” him from my classroom. Permanently.
- administrators and staff who not only have no idea what goes on in the classroom but have no idea that what happens in the classroom matters at a university and tell students flat-out that ____ is more important than classes
One of these weeks, my blog will be back up and running. Be forewarned.
photo courtesy of Claudecf, used under this Creative Commons license
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Wow, if I didn’t know better I’d swear that you were talking about the students at the small private university where I work. I’m a librarian, so I’m faculty but I don’t teach in classes unless I’m called in to do a session on library resources, but I do get to work with these students one-on-one in the library. I never thought that I would have to spend so much time on citations, at times I have to really get basic: “The title of a journal is the journal’s name.” I have college students who shove assignments in my face saying “I need this.” It bugs me because I think a college student should be able to read, evaluate and explain an assignment. Some are seriously lazy but some are just not capable. It’s really sad.
I’ve heard of things like:
-”we don’t fail children anymore…it’s bad for their morale” (WTF?!?)
-a week without homework
-a gr. 5 social studies test with glaring spelling mistakes that were not corrected or even marked by the teacher
-a gr.5 teacher who looked and acted as if she was a gr. 8 student and didn’t stop texting her friends on her BlackBerry during a science filed trip (and certainly wasn’t watching the kids)
Respect for teachers is almost non-existent, but the kids expect you to say “how high” every time they say jump.
Teachers (and many parents) are so busy being afraid of their children, afraid to say “no”, afraid to instill discipline (and no, that doesn’t have to mean physically, but sometimes a sharp smack in the ass will get the attention of a histrionic child)…that they end up not doing anything…and wonder why their kids become ignorant, violent addicts who prey on the rest of society.
Of course a stagnant school system doesn’t help and neither do cuts to programs that engage kids mentally & emotionally (art, music, sports even).
“Loyalty to petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human soul” (Mark Twain)
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” (Ray Bradbury)
Kristin, do we work at the same place? Sounds familiar. I also encounter questions so remedial, I have no idea how to begin to answer.
Capt., I agree that there seems to be more disrespect for teachers and some lackadaisical parenting out there. It’s not just the kids, though. Parents can also be disrespectful, abusive, bewilderingly uncooperative or simply incapable. Or uninterested.
At my level, though, the students do not really have to be there. They have more choices than they think they do. And they will never get what they came for—a simple piece of paper ‘earned’ by marking their time. Some have never been challenged before, have been cheated with pampering (which can be well-meaning yet misguided or just lazy) and are simply unprepared for the conceptual leap that they are responsible for the grades they get and the work they do (or do not) submit and, starting yesterday, the rest of their lives. I really have students who don’t seem to understand that a 0 means no points and that the work we do is not busywork to keep them off the streets a few hours a day. Add to that their shock when I know about NCLB, recycling, teen pregnancy, SFMPOP and all the other things you can get pretty easily from an NPR news broadcast, much less reading. It makes me wonder where they thought they were going.