This is a good hill to die on. I’m a middle school teacher and explain this concept often to my class. I explain that what I say now is what we know, yet these ideas can and do change, so keep this in mind as you continue your education.
Thank you for your perspective. Sometimes I think, in our data filled world, we overestimate numbers even when disparaging something. Refocusing on the people is an important reminder that numbers matter a little less than we think.
I’m interested in this answer as well, since I have a little who isn’t school aged either. I’m trying to compile perspectives to make this same decision.
Whew! Yes. Education is allergic to disruption because education shouldn’t be treated like a business.
Educational goals are to educate people not make money. Education requires countless failures. Business models are composed to be failure averse or reduce risk.
Education has and will likely continue to be a money and time sink because it is an area that requires constant failure from its participants to grow in knowledge.
Anecdotal, yet lived experience collected from 150+ people across my district and state while at different training and seminar events. I am a teacher with 10 years in elementary, middle school and college classrooms. I have teacher friends from across the district and state I live in who resonate these ideas displayed below.
1. Behavior is a major obstacle for any classroom
2. More Tech and AI tools than I could want
3. Education is controlled by the wider community and home environments
1. Behavior:
From my experiences and in speaking to others, teaching any subject varies not because of the material, but the behavior. When behavior is a problem no teaching, no matter who or what is doing it will get done. Behaviors can range from sleeping in class because dad made you work at his out of home construction company till 2 or 3 am to get a project complete, or it could be your mom is tired of you going to school and instead wants you to “go hit up them streets because that’s where the real motion (money) at.” These two might sound like isolated cases, but they aren’t. There are many kids who live out of cars, sell themselves to get buy and other atrocious life circumstances. Learning usually can’t happen when you’re preoccupied with keeping yourself alive or afloat. Combining AI into the educational landscape can’t and won’t fix this disinterest in learning. You will have to fix home life first.
The problems arise because behaviors, in the classroom, work on a spectrum. They are better some days and others not at all. This is because behavior follows home life. It is usually modeled from home and then is acted out away from home. When Nathan (name changed) see his brother and brothers friends carrying around guns, drugs, insert something other activity not safe for most students, he will naturally mirror the act. When these behaviors present in class, a good teacher can maneuver a class back into an educational focus. But being a good teacher requires many exhausting abilities such as knowing the current generations lingo, figuring out who is a natural leader in class, who are the other kids afraid of or respect, knowing their material and presenting it to the students in a way that fits their life circumstances. Being good at teaching is a multi-headed venture across multiple disciplines. This makes managing behaviors in class a challenging and exhaustive time sink, which tends to be the main issue with teaching being interrupted or difficult in a class. One child from a difficult place can make learning a challenge for a class full of goody-two-shoes. Teachers are unnecessarily pulled away because we have no other recourse but to handle and teach children who need more support than what can be offered in a class. Behavior is one of the main issues that many people overlook.
2. More Tech and AI tools than I could want:
When I sign into my Microsoft portal I am presented with more 3rd party teaching tools than I could ever want. I use none of them because they are yet another tool to learn and be trained on, they help mostly in presenting educational material, but have nothing to do with the flow and behavior management of class, they have their own technical problems that I don’t have time to deal with because behind my back Timothy has begun passing his shoe around the room for others to sniff, and the applications are gamified learning that trivializes or simplifies the educational materials. There are many more reasons I and most of the teachers I know and have met don’t use these systems. Work with teachers to learn how much teaching environments vary and how we can implement tech tools into that classroom in a way that prioritizes education. But know many teacher’s priorities will not be for VC attention, but because we want to educate student into society. Listening to us gives you the opportunity to hear and see what educating people is actually like rather than the inert surveys and data points collected on students that are disconnected from their lives experiences. Listening to the people with boots on the classroom means possibly making a system that actually does something for classes than just become another novelty the principal and the district can feel good about.
3. Education is controlled by the wider community and home environments:
Diane Ravitch, a leading thinker in the education realm, writes about all the changes she has been a part of and seen occur. In the end, her response to these failed reforms in school is that much of what happens in communities controls what occurs in schools. If you have a society that is splintered into social groups then that will typically be reflected in the classroom. First we must adjust society standards which will then alleviate the malignant issues in our schools.
But as many teachers have said to principles and school officials, “Hey, what do I know, I’m just a teacher.”
Thank you. This is a refreshing take on much of human interaction.
As a teacher in middle school I see this demonstrated throughout my classes. I have even started collecting data points on how many times a week a topic or topic adjacent to another topic crops up as discussions in my class. There are almost always heated discussions, but in the end we typically come to an understanding about facts or how we can’t truly know fully situations. There are of course some holds outs, but for the majority we find understanding or compromise.
I’ll agree with this. Study language and lingual theory. Much of language is metaphor we apply to different lens.
Language is mainly a process of trial and error. We continue saying something, refining that saying through different word usage until we come up with a term that fits our lens correctly.
Words don’t have rules. Humanity makes those rules and then applies them.
The commenter below, mentioning “truth-seeking” would need to define what they mean by truth. Is this capital T truth that applies to everyone or lowercase truth that applies to the specific and differing lenses we use?
Absolutely this. As a middle school teacher of many years I feel like I have some knowledge on this subject.
Almost all children want to spend time with an adult. In my classroom the activity we do together doesn’t matter to my students, besides the attention I give them during the activity. For kids, adults are treasure troves of attention, and they want that attention. Give it to them in positive ways and you will see the relationship grow. Don’t worry about whether or not you produce something in the end, it was the relationship that mattered to the child from the get go.
Really only adults, through social conditioning, are worried about producing something. Kids just want to feel important and feel part of a healthy, positive relationship.
I like your reply, but for different reasons. I am a middle school teacher, and my day to day is managing people. It is tiring, decidedly so, and yet at the end of the day, management is rewarding for me for because it is relationship building through gaining individual understanding and building classroom consensus.
I love my job and am good at my job. But if I’m to step outside of my classroom your latter quote becomes far too truthful for me:
“we seem to have a managerial class who seem to be getting away with doing it very poorly”
Your quote applies directly to my supposed superiors; assistant principals, principals, and higher ups in the school board. Most of the managerial class outside of a classroom is trash at their jobs. Their management style seems mostly morale busting and ego inflation at day’s end.
I agree with you, just from a different occupational domain.
Yes, to what you stated. I teach middle school title one, as well. My students express the same perceptions about dark and light skin as indexes for mental and physical abilities in their jokes and language, as you described.
I’m going to give your words some thought as I move forward in my curriculum. Thank you for these insights.
Teaching. I moved from a big tech company to teaching. Teaching is the hardest job I’ve ever done, and requires entire new skills. Teacher pay, depending on where you are, can be real low compared to FAANG money, but damn do I sleep well at night knowing that I help people. There is nothing like watching someone struggle and then suddenly understanding the subject.
But seriously, it is a hard job. You learn quickly that just because you understand something doesn’t mean you can explain it to someone.
In my own life I find myself sharing articles with many contacts in my phone. Sometimes 10-15 people at a time. I don’t know if this acts as a means to create a facsimile of the community the author alludes. If my sharing articles is a thrust towards crafting community, it is a paltry comparison to the type you and I envy.
> “Anyone here have any anecdotes where you had that same experience?”
I actively engage with strangers in public. I do so in ways that match our current activities.
What this looks like:
Last week I was grocery shopping in the freezer section. The place I pick up tortellinis from had moved them, so me and another person were searching through the freezer cabinets. After a fruitless moment I asked them what they were looking for in the hopes during their search they had spotted the tortellinis’ new location. They mentioned they were also on a hunt for tortellini. I mentioned to them in passing that when a store moves something a note or something similar would be helpful to tell shoppers the new location for the item.
We then continued talking about shopping experiences at other places, and some how wound up talking about our favorite dishes.
In the end my new shopping acquaintance found the tortellinis and asked me how many bags I wanted.
Most experiences occur in shared events, such as standing in line for something, waiting after for an order to be fulfilled, or simply overhearing a conversation in a shopping center and commenting about my experience on what they mentioned. All these interactions, from my recent memory, have been positive.
I like speaking to strangers. I feel uplifted and I depart conversations feeling like I participated in something societal.
At the base, speaking to strangers has also taught me a crap load of stuff too.
Examples: how to hang a nearly squirrel proof bird feeder, how to cook lamb better, how to wire a lamp, where good restaurants are, how to put a post in the ground more securely but with less concrete, etc.
And, yes, I like humanity more because I talk to strangers. I see my appreciation for others happen when I become angry at people. I find myself asking “well they’re doing this for a reason, I just haven’t asked them their reason, yet.”
Admin churn and policy changes have a direct and deleterious impact on teacher, student, and school performance. I can't focus on teaching academics if I am supposed to reteach classroom policy changes at random times throughout the year. Policy changes can take weeks to months to integrate into a classroom.
Teachers who are whipped back and forth between admin and policy changes don't have a moment to settle in and focus on what they were hired for. Instead they juggle the ever changing classroom culture, incorporating morphing policy decisions about how their classroom should be run, and socially adjusting to staffing and admin changes. There is no time to settle in and so burn out and nihilistic expectations take shape in many teachers.
This description is only a small part of the problem with admin and policy churn in school systems.
Parents and parenting styles are other pernicious issues that are extremely controversial. These issues directly affect students and indirectly affect teachers. Whether it hurts or not to admit, parents have power over the school system. Many people outside of the school system focus on teacher unions and large scale public school administration as a main pain point.
Yet when teachers and school administration are under threat from being sued due to happenings in class because parents don't like what occurrs, the school system adjusts to accommodate those parents' wishes. At some point the school system begins to become an inane policy labyrinth to avoid lawsuits. There are plenty of lawsuit examples if searched on any search engine. These lawsuits set precedents in our county for how policy will look in coming years.
As for parenting styles, these are varied and diverse. Every household has their way of rearing children. Yet when you take diverse children and put them into a class of 20+ students and typically one teacher the varied rearing styles become a pain point when applying teaching standards. In one highschool class you can have students reading on a college level, while others are emerging eighth grade.
Has the system failed them? Sure, the system didn't catch them in time before they moved on and moving them now would take months due to admin churn and County backlogs on the other hundreds of thousands of students issues weighing down a bloated inept system. Or maybe the previous school was worried that funding would be cut causing admin to push through many students that should have been retained because if not the "greater good" of hundreds of other students would be impacted by funding cuts.
But it isn't just the school systems that have failed students, so have the parents. Sometimes students aren't held back because of parental intervention. These interventions can be lawsuits or putting up enough of a fight that the county relents and allows the student to progress. The latter has happened four times in my classes and many more times to my other teaching peers. When teachers hold students back and parents put up a fight by bringing in the county, the school's admin and teacher have to follow the county dictates, which almost always fall on the parents' side. A cause for this is teachers are not considered experts when it comes to education. There are a myriad of reasons for this ranging from poorly funded college education degree programs, to society's mistrust of experts, to a belief parents know their children the best. As exemplified by the recent pandemic and social media post hating "lazy teachers who want to get out work" , mistrust in teachers and their teaching abilities are pretty apparent.
Let's start at the top with administration. I'm not going to speak in detail on administration actions because my expertise is within the classroom and working the policy decisions made by school boards and administration into my daily lessons.
Over the course of my career as an educator (27 years) I have had 16 different principals. Teachers call this the "admin churn." This is when budgeting experts and superintendents look at collected data on schools and make decisions about what schools need from a budgetary and grade performance standpoint. Out of this comes the decisions to move principals and assistant principals around the county to "help increase or stabilize" schools' performances. This leadership churn is devastating to morale. The devastation comes from having to relearn an entirely new leadership's expectations and personality. This churn can happen at any time, the beginning, middle or the end of the year. This churn has a deleterious effect on teachers' morale because teachers who settle-in and get their classes following the codes and ethics of the school are suddenly given new guidelines to teach students. These guidelines, much of the time, upend the previous guidelines already established in the classroom. That means curriculum must be placed to the side and the new school guidelines are taught.
It's important to note that teaching guidelines is not as simple as telling students "these are the new guidelines. Please follow them." Instead it can take weeks or months, depending on grade level, to incorporate new guidelines into a classroom. This is due to how children and young adults ingest information. This accounts for mostly all students, including neuro-divergent students. All information must be practiced and students reminded hundreds, possibly thousands of times as a group or as individuals before information becomes concrete.
A fantastic example of concretififaction are the mask mandates we recently went through in our country. Getting students, whether in highschool, middle, or elementary to wear masks required a bunch of practice and reminders.
In my county, admin changed the rules partially through the school year at the behest of the school board's policy decisions. At one point students in my county had to wear face shields and masks, then just face shields, then just face masks, then back to both. All this change paused academics mostly so that the mask mandates could be incorporated into the classroom.
This is a small example of how policy decisions from the top directly impact teachers and students, yet these same policy decisions can have a consequential effect on important structures like school lunches, students grades, teacher teaching styles, and funding allocation.
I have taught for multiple years in a southern state in the US within Behavior Support units for the "emotionally disturbed or distracted students." These classes range from neurotypical, ADHD, autism spectrum, to learning disabilities.
These students being the so called "bullies and disruptive kids" many people in this thread have directly judged as poor ROI and "not worthwhile."
Many of these comments trivialize the complex issues surrounding the school system. They widdle down the problem to "lazy teachers", "not worthwhile" students, and "teacher unions" as a few examples. These comments also ignore contributing factors that happen outside the school system, such as homelife, cultural and societal shifts, economic and technological gaps, and policy changes, which in effect directly impact how the school system behaves.
I'm chiming in to this discussion because I have first hand experience from me and my peers, troves of data collected on students' performances (not anonymized, so I can't dispense it), funding resources and student allocation receipts, and ample secondary resources from my peers that mostly corroborate the experiences many teachers are forced into within poorly managed and maintained school systems.
I think overall the school system is an easy lumbering target to hit with our worries and hatreds. Corrupt or inept school boards, poorly functioning officials and administration making ineffective changes that seem to directly or indirectly impact students' lives and their potential future prospects. Teachers who are "lazy and uninterested" who are "unwilling to work harder at representing students within a fading, failing American school system."
I think many of these comments come from not understanding school systems' inner workings, and more importantly, not knowing what the inside of a classroom is like on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis.
Thank you for this conception. Metaphor and analogy are vital in every human endeavor.
As for my reasoning why:
Analogies and other figurative speech is important, not just as conversational tools, but also in thinking.
Language is a metaphorical tool we place on reality to manage and interpret it. This is true for human languages and programming languages. Take Python. This is a high level language which an interpreter uses to help a computer parse it into the needed lower language for its understanding. The language alone though does little on its own without the multiple layers computers use to apply given instructions.
Human language is multiple levels higher than computer languages when it comes to interpreting reality. Pretty much all human language is a metaphor because it doesn't directly mean what we are referring to. It instead refers to our mental conception of what we are attempting to relate to in reality.