Over the Christmas break I was pondering my new life in Planet Middle School. I thought about the amazing staff at the Elementary Middle School where I’m working and how their practice is different from what I’m used to from years in the high school. Suddenly, I had an epiphany.
In high school, we teach subjects. We know our subject, we love our subject, and we seek to inspire that love to the adolescents on the cusp of claiming their world. We work hard. In our off hours, we study and explore to be genuine experts. We spend hours connecting with our students and endeavouring to engage them and encourage them. In the English department, we spend hours marking, evaluating and finessing fine points of language. We model reading and writing in our real world.
Teaching subjects is necessary. It’s profound work. It changes lives. It lights passions. It creates worlds. We endeavour to share our passion for our subject and to inspire students to take our subject with them into their adult lives in some way.
In Elementary and Middle School they don’t teach subjects. They teach students. Moreover, they are amazing at it. They juggle a million balls in the air, notice everything, understand behaviour, see long range consequences, and can plan and implement strategies to transform recalcitrant pubescent kids into functional members of society. Pubescent kids are not particularly acquiescent about the process! Yet in the hands of these experts, they are molded into improved versions of themselves and armed with the skills to face adolescence. It is a higher calling, and I stand in awe.
I have so much to learn.
Shawn L. Bird 
“Teaching subjects is necessary. It’s profound work. It changes lives. It lights passions. It creates worlds.”
I think this needs to happen at all levels. In my experience, good elementary and middle school teachers DO teach subjects. It’s also my experience that good high school teachers DO teach kids. I think poor high school teachers focus on the subject content to the exclusion of fundamental core of my philosophy, which is good teachers can teach most levels and most subjects because their learners are engaged in learning.
Learning should be a process and it should flow year to year. We lose our kids in the early high school years. I think this is because many teachers do not teach kids. I’ve never know anyone to get passionate about a subject area–only that they catch the passion someone else shows them. The human to human connection.
Theoretically, yes. I can tell you that from 18 years of experience, plus actively participating in ProD to hone skills, etc I thought I taught kids. I thought I was tuned in and wholistic in my approach, bringing their ‘real world’ into the classroom, etc. Principals gave me accolades for being so incredibly “student centred.” I was told that I was great at my job. It is NOTHING like what the lower grade teachers do. They are so attuned to every nuance of behaviour it is phenomenal. They are sociologists at the purest level. I am good at what I do, but they absolutely blow me away balancing 25 (or more!) lives. I am glad when I can balance just my own! I don’t know if in high school, when we see 200 kids a year that we could do it at the same level, but watching it in action is certainly inspiring me. I am watching and learning. I chose to do this job knowing that I would learn a lot teaching Middle School. I’m amazed at how MUCH I’m learning!
Thanks for the feedback. Our district is very large (50,000) kids. I taught mostly at mid level. I have found that one cannot really speak in generics. At my daughters middle school, teachers are verbally abusive and vindictive–just not quality people for any level. I have removed her from most classrooms. My son’s high school experience is just really a warehousing of students–he speaks and says he just needs to get through it. I don’t think my children’s experience is unique. There is also no real way to get problems solved here.
My experience with principals since 1980 hasn’t been impressive. I have found they give everyone good reviews, without ever really acting as leaders. No dynamics whatsoever. Just showing up and getting through the day. I know I dropped out of some Ph.D. classes because the head of education at KU had only spent two years in the classroom. I really didn’t feel that he had anything to offer expect what he had read in books.
Maybe your district is better–ours is not, even though our teachers are some of the highest paid in the nation. I really feel that it is reflective of the leadership (superintendent) of our district. She knows kids are being hit by a teacher, yet she spent more time creating a cover up and that teacher was allowed to continue to be in the classroom (this was in my daughter’s elementary classroom.) We have just recently had another teacher arrested for having sex with students. As a teacher, I had a TA who did grooming and molesting behaviors and the school district hid him with the mentally retarded teenagers.
I would bet that you DID teach kids. The idea that elementary and middle teachers are tuned into every nuance is just not my experience. I have found most regular ed teachers (I’m sped) to have very little understanding of anyone different from themselves. Our teacher routinely have more than 200 students per day at mid and high school levels. My experience in working with teachers at all levels is that teachers really work with each student in the same manner.
Our district is 52% minority with a large immigrant population. Those children are routinely discriminated against because the district is not in compliance with NCLB for parent involvement in Title I schools. Parents do not know their rights. The district just gets the money and then continually spends it however the superintendent wants.
I have not found anyone who cares. Children were being hit and I couldn’t get school board members to care. I was ordered to falsify documents for sped, yet school administrators don’t want to hear that. Even our city Assembly does not respond.
I would like to think that teachers are wonderful people. My professional peers here leave much to be desired. The most frustrating thing for me, as a parent, is to be totally shut out of decisions in which the only ones who pay the price are the kids.
Gloria
Wow. I am quite appalled to hear of this situation! This sounds like those American TV dramas!
Although there are negative situations, my experience as student and teacher in 3 school districts in British Columbia has shown me far more examples of excellence than mediocrity. I wonder where you are Gloria, and I’m hoping it’s not here in Canada. We are so proud of our rankings (top 10 in the world, slipped to 7 from 3 this year) that I don’t want to believe that kind of thing could be tolerated as routine here in BC or anywhere else in Canada. I know that the international placement scores for the individual provinces shows a direct correlation to the education budgets and our teachers are some of the best educated in the world.
I really hope you’re not here in BC, or you will have destroyed my romantic notions of my perfect world!
I’m in Anchorage, Alaska.
I have learned over the past couple of years that I didn’t really know what was happening in other classrooms. I would be in my classroom with my students. What I really knew of other teachers was informal, seen though my adult eyes in the teacher’s lounge.
I wonder if we really can know, if we do not allow children and parents to give honest feedback. With our teacher’s union here, principals hands appear to be tied in stating anything (good or bad) in regards to teacher performance. They are too easily replaced and so just do what they are told.
I know of teachers who have been put on suspension for allegations of inappropriate conduct. I know many more who’ve been spoken to/re-trained/warned and put back onto the path of good teaching. Part of our Union code of conduct requires us to report certain issues and/or to discuss concerns with colleagues, and we do have a system for dealing with concerns. I don’t think it’s too hard to know when something is up. Kids talk. If they believe they are being treated disrespectfully or inappropriately we hear about it, and we do something about it. I think we know what goes on if our ears are even slightly tuned in. Those teachers either get it together or leave. I spent quite a few years working off and on as a Teacher on Call and I was in a lot of schools. Kids told me a lot of things about their teachers and other TOCs. I knew the best TOCs and the ones who needed to find another job. Issues of child protection are set in law here. If we know of emotional, physical or sexual abuse, but don’t report, there are serious legal implications. Perhaps the spectre of the abuse of the Residential Schools is too close?
We have all of the appropriate rules in place. We just have a dictatorship, which means cover ups of wrongdoing. People do know, their hands are totally tied. The information is also withheld from parents. If a teacher has been drunk at school, I believe I should have the right to know that person is still in the classroom.
It is too bad that human nature will always allow the weakest to take the brunt on the wrongs. Our superintendent is not a woman of integrity and the school board would rather close their ears and eyes than admit they have allowed her to run a muck. It would make them look bad, but in reality, they are just stating that they are more important than the children.
Here’s my post on my blog.