I’m a teacher. I know what that means. I know what’s required of me as a teacher, and I know how to achieve those demands. I know my responsibilities to my students, their families, my colleagues, and my supervisors. I know how to help kids understand complex ideas. I know how to challenge them to approach problems from multiple perspectives. I know how to encourage them to do their best and strive to do better.
I also know how to develop curriculum, design lessons, assess achievement, improve accountability, and instill excitement. I know how to calm fears, increase independence, and promote collaboration. I’m not bragging, most of my colleagues know these things too. It might be news to you that we do all of these things and more.
While visiting with a friend today, I learned that many people don’t realize teachers usually create our own curriculum and assessments. She sheepishly admitted that she thought teachers were simply handed a curriculum and materials at the beginning of the year and their job was to just follow along. She went on to tell me that volunteering in her son’s classroom opened her eyes to the reality of modern teaching. She now spreads the word to others when she comes across those misconceptions.
To clarify, yes, there are teacher’s manuals for many subject areas, but I don’t know any teachers who rely solely on those to teach their students. They simply don’t meet our students’ needs or properly align with our grade level standards. Some of them assume that we have far more time to teach particular concepts than we do. Others only skim the surface of topics, leaving students without the deep understanding necessary for further learning. At times, the text book publishers assume our students have more previous knowledge than they do, and other times they skip important concepts completely. And let’s face it, text books are often boring. Today’s students require more novelty and active engagement. The teacher’s guides don’t provide that, the teachers do.
Of course that’s not all it means to be a teacher. It also means you laugh with your students, you receive countless crayon pictures, and you know when a kid REALLY needs to go to the bathroom. It means you grade papers, complete report cards, identify and secure services for students with learning disabilities, conduct parent-teacher conferences, attend staff meetings, make copies, organize and chaperone field trips, participate in professional development, read professional journals, pin countless teaching ideas on Pinterest, scan hundreds of files on Teachers Pay Teachers, put up bulletin boards, pass out thousands of papers, and share tales with friends and families until they dread spending time with us.
Unfortunately there are some aspects to teaching that are far less pleasant. We have to cope with student misbehavior, we have to endure countless interruptions to instruction, we have to report suspected abuse or neglect, and we have to mediate conflicts between our students. We have to assist students coping with stressful situations, and we sometimes become targets. There are those who, in their attempts to advocate for their children, either intentionally or unintentionally undermine our efforts to educate those children. Adults who excuse bad behavior, don’t require effort, or bad-mouth teachers end up doing students a disservice. It is difficult for students to develop a sense of responsibility and respect when it isn’t required of them or modeled for them at home.
Recently I read an article about the suicide of an ivy league college student. On the outside it appeared that everything was going fine for her, but she was struggling. The article went on to state that suicide rates among college students are on the rise, and it speculated that one of the main causes was the lack of problem solving skills that many young people have as a result of parents micro-managing their lives. All too often parents are quick to fire off an irate e-mail if a child loses recess as a result of wasting time in class, or they demand make-up work for assignments that a child has chosen not to complete. They rush to school with forgotten lunches and library books and instruments rather than allowing their children to experience the natural consequences of those common oversights.
I submit that not allowing kids to fail once in a while is a huge mistake. We grow by learning from our mistakes, not by having others bail us out when we make them. It’s our duty to raise responsible, independent kids who are hard-working problem solvers, not dependent kids with a sense of entitlement. Those kids may be smart and funny and wonderful, but sadly they don’t tend to be very resilient, a quality that success in life demands. Let them have small failures in elementary school, when it doesn’t “count” so much, rather than allowing them to rely on adults to get them out of situations as they get older. Kids whose parents don’t hold them accountable have a difficult time learning accountability, and that makes them poor candidates for employment, not to mention people with whom you might not want to enter into a long-term relationship.
The good news is that those situations are the exception rather than the rule, but they happen often enough that teachers often feel as if they’re walking on eggshells. Rather than taking the time to find out what really happened, many parents simply take their child’s word as gospel when they have some complaint about school, and go on a tirade directed toward the teacher. Rarely are school situations as dire as parents make them out to be, and usually a calm conversation can clarify a situation and provide a satisfactory result. Jumping to conclusions and becoming hostile is simply not the way to go.
Parents, please remember, we have the same goal. We became teachers because we want to help students learn. We want to instill a sense of wonder at the world, as well as develop the skills necessary to make sense of it. Don’t forget, it is in the teacher’s best interest that your child is successful in our classroom. We want your child to be happy, engaged, and learning. We don’t want your child to feel stressed out, unsuccessful, or unappreciated. We want each student to feel safe, valued, and smart. Teachers aren’t out to “get” kids, they’re out to educate and empower them.
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