mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (11/10/83)
(I am enclosing the full text of this article since it appeared in net.flame, even though the discussion is going on in net.cse.) It's from utcsstat!laura >I went home to fix my brother's pinball machine tonight (and brought the >wrong sort of fuses, so have to go again tomorrow, ARRGGHHH) and talked >to my mother, a grade 8 teacher. > >My mother is a wonderful teacher. She is having a very tough year. Her >problem is that her Vice Principal is a moron, and once in a fit of >exasperation she turned to him and said "My dear child!". He is young >enough to be her son, and she never swears at school, but you never >call a VP "my dear child!". They have been waging war ever since. > >My mother has now taken stock of the other teachers because she is now >in the same bad position w.r.t. this VP as children in her class have >said to be in w.r.t. other teachers they used to have. > >She thinks that teaching attracts more losers than any other profession. >people with timy egos go into teaching so that they can lord it over the >kids. They use their knowledge as power to make the kids feel small, so >that they can feel big in comparison. When they find a kid who is either >bright or merely resentful of this attitude, they try to squash him or her. > >She thinks that there are a lot of people who are this insecure, but that >teaching attracts them like a moth to a flame. It sure matches my school >experiences, but then I was the collosal discipline problem who lived >in the office getting disciplined when I was not skipping school, so I thought >that I was hardly typical. > >What do you remember? Does teaching attract this sort of yo-yo? And what >should we do if it does? > >Laura Creighton >utzoo!utcsstat!laura My experiences with teachers were largely very good. There were certainly yoyo's, but I can count them on the fingers of one hand. Most of my teachers seemed to be genuinely interested in helping the students learn, and in spite of the problems I caused by wanting more out of school than the stock material (which I manifested as behavioral problems) very few of them seemed to resent me. My high school math teacher, Mr. Ringstrom, put up with an incredible amount of flak from me. Yet he did not retaliate in any way - he seemed to make it a point to bend over backwards to help me learn. He even says good things about me to his current students. There were a few bad apples. I recall the 10th grade English lit teacher, who graded on a straight curve (the mean grade was a middle C) even though a survey taken at the beginning of the year showed that almost everybody in the class had gotten an A or B in English the previous year. Then there was my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Haney. She had heard about me from the 3rd grade teacher (whom I have good memories of) and was "dreading me all summer". I remember she took it upon herself to rid the English language of sentences beginning with the word "well". Whenever a student was called on in class and started "Well, ..." she immediately cut them off, announced that they had drowned in a well, and called on somebody else. It wasn't until I started to take German in high school that I discovered that the "well" concept was so important that it exists in other languages as well. However, all indications are that schools have gotten much worse since I graduated. Teaching is more like surviving. Part of the problem is that funding is way down, so teachers make little money, and people who might make good teachers go someplace where they can support themselves. (My sister in law is a 3rd year teacher, and literally cannot make enough money at the job to be self sufficient. I begin to believe that someone expects teachers to be women with employed husbands.) There is no incentive for a teacher to get better at teaching, either, since salary is strictly a function of seniority, not merit. (I have never understood the seniority concept, in schools or in trade unions.) At the other end of the spectrum, there are the kids whose parents think schools are awful places and encourage the kids to rebell, or at least don't discourage it. I think these two factors have snowballed in the last 10-20 years, producing the current situation. Mark Horton
mjl@ritcv.UUCP (Mike Lutz) (11/13/83)
I graduated from high school back in the middle ages (1966), so my feelings
about my experience probably do not jive well with the current state of af-
fairs. In any event, I can't recall any teacher who I really hated, nor any
who seemed to be sadistic, ego-tripping, megamaniacal monsters. On the other
hand, I remember several who, in one way or another, made a significant posi-
tive impression on me. Like my physics teacher who taught us *physics* for 35
weeks then spent 5 weeks drilling us on what the NYS Board of Regents
*thought* was physics (so we could pass the state exams). Or my senior year
English teacher, who did more to expand my intellectual horizons than any oth-
er teacher I had before college (it was a class in which everyone was disap-
pointed when the period ended).
Now I'm following my daughter's progress, and so far she's been fortunate to
have excellent, highly motivated teachers. Such persons do still exist, but
they're getting harder to find as the incentives that once drew competent pro-
fessionals into teaching become disincentives. In its infinite wisdom, New
York State has decided that increasing the school year by 10 days is the
answer to declining student test scores and general aptitude. This, of
course, simply glosses over the real problems, since the current school year
was sufficient back when test scores were at their highest levels. The real
problem is to make teaching an attractive profession once again, and to find
some way to rid the system of the incompetents who filled the void in the
past.
Mike Lutz
{allegra,seismo}!rochester!ritcv!mjl