(Author’s Name Withheld)
The Enlarged City School District of Middletown is starting to take a much stronger stance on looking at how teaching is done in the classrooms. Children as a whole in this district are deficient readers and writers. Many are reading below grade level and some kids arrive at 2nd grade barely able to read at all. I think administration and teachers can agree that some sort of concentrated effort needs to take place to help correct this. Unfortunately, teachers are being limited as to how they can address this situation.
At the Elementary levels, teachers are being asked to lose their individuality and to smother the particular instructional styles that are, and have been, a blessing of the diverse personalities, backgrounds, experiences, and educations of our faculty. Everyone is to plan together so that each class at each grade level is doing exactly the same things at roughly the same times. There is to be no more pulling in of outside resources; the only acceptable course is to teach according to a strict plan that has been designed by the school district leaders. All outside teaching tools are prohibited unless they have been approved by the district. No actual blueprint for instruction has been provided, just a hard hand telling teachers what they cannot do.
Everyone wants results. Unfortunately, while maps sometime seem impossible to fold, the map we have been handed is as confusing to unfold. The one thing that is clear is that the current approach to fixing our sinking ship is not as educationally sound as its promoters would like it to seem.
Children need to be taught concepts. This takes time. With the way things are being done now, students are introduced to concepts but not enough time is devoted to ensuring that they master these. We test, and we test, and the results show the same thing — our students are not meeting the mark. Instead of over testing, it is time to start teaching. Telling the teachers what skills to focus on is fine. Suggesting to them how to structure the teaching day is also fine, in order to ensure that all important subject areas get attention. The problem we are experiencing lies in the way so many requirements are piled into the instructional day. Something is bound to get short changed.
Thanks to the new district approach called “Nothing but Harcourt”, that is exactly what has happened to our classrooms. Every teacher has been restricted to teaching from just this program without being allowed to supplement if they feel it is necessary. The children are under a microscope and they don’t even realize it. There has been no communication to parents about how Middletown children are not meeting the mark; no explanation about what they are doing in the classrooms. But we have wholesale changes in how teaching is done.
These changes are going to hurt these kids in the long run. It’s being assumed that children come into the classroom as avid learners eager to get started on whatever the teacher has planned for them. That is just not the reality. Children are very social to begin with. Children today have been conditioned by society and the media into a constant state of attention deficit. It takes an enormous effort to get students focused on learning. Even when they are being quiet, getting them to be attentive to instruction is a huge challenge. I think all would agree that meaningful group activities during which the students can learn more from doing than listening, are a healthy alternative to a traditional lecture model. And so, the district has implemented a “Centers” approach, which permits teachers to work in small groups to focus on improving student reading levels. But here is our problem: for one teacher in a room of 25 or more students to pull this off, it would require students to be independent learners. Sadly, and despite the adamant insistence of our leaders, a majority of our students are not independent learners. If they were, we would not have to be so concerned about their reading and writing.
Other questions, consistently left unanswered, arise. How can a teacher focus on working with small groups when there are other students in the room who also need their help, a growing number of whom present behavior challenges? Considering that the majority of a student’s time would be spent working in “Centers,” how does this cosmetic approach to small group instruction lead to anywhere but overall mediocrity? What about science and social studies? What about writing instruction? Why is it that, when we ask for sense, we are simply given more training; when we ask for organization, we are given more matter; when we ask for models, we are made to do lesson plans?
Teachers have a passion for human intellectual growth. We work with flesh and blood, personalities and spirits, hearts and minds. Someone seems to have become enamored with programs and data. That is not a sound educational choice. Our Superintendent needs to facilitate the meeting of the hearts and minds of his teachers and principals so that, together, we may come up with a plan that will really help our children. No successful corporation would waste such a pool of talent as a school district has in its teachers. Yet we have little to no control over how we teach. We are being turned into gingerbread men and women, already stale out of the cookie cutter. The more we are trained, the less we actually teach, to the point that our mere physical presence among our students has been limited. This is just madness. A better way needs to be found and found quickly. It’s all about the kids, and they are the ones who are suffering.
