Think of who inspired you most as a child, and who scared you most as a child. Chances are teachers fit both categories. We have all been taught by the good, the bad and the ugly, and we won’t soon forget our extreme reactions to each.
No wonder our attitudes toward educational reform are so ambivalent. I’ve taught for 35 years, and my feelings about education are as ambivalent as yours. I want children to feel comfortable and inspired in the classroom, but don’t know how to measure that. Should it be by student test scores? Popularity on teacher rating Web sites? Administrative endorsement? Anecdote? Or first impressions derived from Back-to-School Night? Each year we hope for consistency in all of the above.
Those measures are rarely consistent, yet there’s a lot riding on each year’s teacher. Those who have had the most influence on us — good and bad — conjure up both sweet dreams and nightmares. There were some who believed in us when no one else did, and perhaps a teacher who was overly critical and destructive. As a student, it was frustrating to realize I couldn’t predict which camp a teacher would fall into; sometimes the strict “ogre” turned out to be challenging rather than stifling, and other times a “nice” personality masked someone who played favorites.
On the first day of school this year, I woke up at 5 a.m., even though I no longer have daily 7:20 a.m. classes. I felt waves of anticipation and fear, just as I had for the 23 years I taught high school, and 20 years I was a student. The beginning of the school year as a parent is also fraught with anxiety. Will this be the year my child will discover a lifelong intellectual passion, or a year full of social trauma and failure? Thankfully, most years my children fell somewhere in between those extremes, but I was never sure what the year ahead might hold.
There is one kind of educator, however, I will always condemn: the person who has all the answers. I never trust teachers, administrators or academics who know the answer lies in measuring teacher performance by test scores, or measuring it by longevity. Those who think the answer lies in charter schools, or in open classrooms, or in lecture classes, or classes run by students, are all suspect. “Highly qualified” teachers? Some of the best come from other professions, and did not major in what they teach.
What the classroom has taught me is that there is no single way to create a wonderful educational climate for children. There are extreme situations that are bad (an unsafe environment), but aside from that extreme, I have seen learning occur under adverse conditions, and student boredom occur in friendly environments, too.
Schools can be as scary as the wicked witch in Snow White, or as reassuring as the “happily ever after” that always concludes fairy tales. Predicting which part of a student’s life tale the coming year might be is not easy, but I know that few children experience only nightmarish or only great teachers. The sole certainty is that those who have all the answers are not to be trusted!
