hi. as someone who graduated from public high school within the past 10 years, i can totally relate to this post. my teachers were mostly unstable white women who started to cry when gusts of wind blew their papers around. or else, they were meathead wannabe coaches who liked snapping the cute jock boys with towels during gym class.

as someone mentioned above, the problem isn’t any of those people…the problem is the parents. and the problem with parents these days is they mistakenly believe that public high school is something other than a holding pen where people like philip’s friend and her boss are paid to babysit their kids.

if the state I grew up in didn’t have a post-secondary program that allowed kids with good GPAs to bypass junior and senior year, and take all courses at the university, I probably would have killed myself.

Interesting exchange going. I am a teacher who’s spent most of the last 30 years ‘trying to break into teaching’. Graduated in the first year the US had TOO MANY teachers. There I was – beginning teacher, white, female, and in Elementary Education. Can you say “dime a dozen”? Most of the cities I’ve lived in were home to universities and colleges with education departments. Therefore, it has always been difficult if not impossible to get a teaching job in the conventional sense. I’ve subbed, taught partial terms, and taught pre-school through community college. Closest I got to full time teaching in a public school was as teacher in a maximum security prison for women! Taught grades 3 to 5 there. Loved the job – never had such motivated students before – these ladies could have just done their time sitting on their duffs but chose to go to school. My school district was the whole of the state’s prison population, so there were perhaps 30,000 students. Job conditions were good and the work was inspiring and worthwhile. Gosh – I miss it!

Now I’ve moved back to my hometown area and can’t locate work. Best thing was finding a temp job as a test scorer. Yes, that is right – grading first grader tests from another state’s mandatory standardized tests. No benefits, no connection to my calling and to even get the job, I had to show transcripts and proof that I was or had been a teacher. This company employs 1,000 people during the peak contract seasons! Ah me, I pray I shall be able to teach before I am 60 or older…I will take the rotten pay and rotten conditions. All I ever wanted to do was teach.

After trying to break into teaching for two years in the mid-70’s in a time when High School districts simply were not hiring in California, I left the profession and never looked back.

Tried everything to get in — short and long-term substitute teaching, taking on caseloads of home students, etc. Other teachers actually requested me to take over when they were out because I was known for bringing in my own lesson plans and teaching students something unusual and creative. (”Teaching as a Subversive Activity” was my favorite book at the time.)

Why did I leave? Because the admistration wouldn’t support teachers when students threw a tantrum in class. Decided life was too short.

Sad. I loved teaching… once… long, long ago.

Diane

Patrick: I agree with you. My wife was happiest when she was teaching at a Title I school and me and her family hosted ice cream sundae parties. Most of these kids had never been shown that kind of affection. She was making a difference in their lives and they adored her. It saddened her greatly to know that they weren’t getting anything like that at home—often the exact opposite, made worse because CPS would discount any calls she made with an “it’s not a crime to be poor.”

What is currently frustrating her—and I agree—is that the kids she is teaching now are materially better off and completely unappreciative. Their parents don’t care to get involved (she’s told me stories of parents sending their kids off with a 104 degree fever and expressing frustration with having to come pick up the kid) and the kids are so completely indulged that it makes her sick. One child told her mom that she didn’t like my wife anymore and so the mother asked for a transfer to another class. The mother had never observed my wife’s teaching style—her daughter said that it was too strict—nor did she ever observe the teaching style of the teacher to which the girl was transferred, which she is now complaining is too lax.

She does still accomplish meaningful things with her kids, but it’s less frequent and less awe-inspiring. In fact, it’s disheartening because she loves the profession so much. Call it whining if you want, but it’s a legitimate complaint. I hesitate to suggest that she go back to the Title I school because middle class kids deserve a good education too even though they don’t appreciate it (by and large).

Phil asks — “Are you saing that education is broken ‘cos the parents are broken? And that it’s the teachers’ responsibility to fix the parents?”
Naw, I don’t even know if education is “broken.” I’m saying that the most frustrating problem facing teachers — according to my wife’s pop who has been teaching in a rural high school for 30 years — is that parents do not create an environment where the educational process can work as well as it should. Some of the specifics:
+ Far too many parents don’t care enough to show up at parent-teacher conferences or even reply to phone calls or notes sent home.
+ Far too many parents allow their kids to shirk homework or skip class for dubious reasons.
+ Far too few kids have a safe, quiet place at home to study in the evenings.
+ A growing number parents who actually do communicate with the teachers, do so mainly to argue with the teachers: my kid shouldn’t get so much homework, my kid should have got an A instead of a C, I don’t want my kid to learn this or that (evolution, sex education, skeptical accounts of US history).

Parents are a problem. The teachers obviously can’t fix the parents. What to do? Whining doesn’t seem to help.
-DAF

What’s the problem?

This story is unmotivating.

There are a lot of problems with public schools. The best people,
including teachers, are trying to fix them, and are having success
here and there.

My wife works in the public schools, and will be receiving her masters
degree in education in a couple of weeks. She’s worked in ESL (English
as a Second Language) and still chooses to work in Title I schools
(generally not well off, a lot of parents have many problems of their
own).

Does she get frustrated? She doesn’t show it much. The stories she
tells are about the kids and the conditions under which they struggle
to learn: the worst are dirty, undernourished, unaccepted by their
peers, unsupported by their parents.

Most of the stories she tells are about how well *every* *single*
*one* of them responds to the creative ways she and others reach out
to them. Poetry lessons that get kids who can hardly write creating
the most amazing pieces of work. (I’ve read many… you wouldn’t
believe them.) Science lessons with worms that spark their
imaginations. School nurses who creative games with soap, deoderants,
etc. to get kids to clean themselves up without embarrassing them or
lecturing them or their parents. Teachers who supply parties for the
birthdays of kids whose parents can’t afford it… but they don’t let
on to anyone that the parents did not do so themselves. Teachers who
also show up at the doors of these kids to bring them birthday
presents (because they really know they could use a new shirt!)

I know I don’t have the skills to do what my wife does, and other
people like her. She should be making three times my salary.

You get the idea. Public schools don’t need people like Philip’s
friend, and middle class students certainly don’t need to “learn how
to obey” so called privileged “leaders” like Philip Greenspun.

Do you think that there are people worse off than this writer and
nobody should be allowed to complain if there are people worse off
than them?

I hardly see anything unsurmountable in Philip’s post. She has the
right to complain, but there are far worse problems that better
teachers are overcoming every day. Let’s write about those people and
learn from them.

Do you think that these are actually quite good conditions for
someone to work under. So, once again, no right to complain?

Like I wrote above, I’ve heard far worse that were made better. It
does no good to complain to Philip Greenspun. I call that whining. I’d
rather hear how she made a difference, but I see no evidence she has
the skills for that. Maybe she can teach math to bright kids. Who
couldn’t?

Do you hate the public school system so much that you rejoice in
it’s falling apart? And try to denigrate anyone who complains about
it’s state?

No. Instead I celebrate those who overcome obstacles and make *big*
differences in the individual lives of less fortunate kids.

I am in awe of the people who can and do accomplish meaningful things
in the public schools. I couldn’t. But I can’t indulge whining like
what we’ve seen here.

One another thing I’d like to note: my wife used to work in an inner-city school and there the problems were exactly the reverse.

The parents never expected special favors and were generally supportive of whatever she thought was best for the child. The principal, though, had a lot of issues and drove her batty.

DAF : Are you saing that education is broken ‘cos the parents are broken?

And that it’s the teachers’ responsibility to fix the parents?

Patrick Logan : I don’t understand. I can see you feel upset enough to be sarcastic about this piece, but you aren’t successfully communicating why you’re upset. What’s the problem?

Do you think that there are people worse off than this writer and nobody should be allowed to complain if there are people worse off than them?

Do you think that these are actually quite good conditions for someone
to work under. So, once again, no right to complain?

Do you hate the public school system so much that you rejoice in it’s falling apart? And try to denigrate anyone who complains about it’s state?

Possibly some other reason I wasn’t able to imagine?