Friday, February 26, 2010

Someone Who Cares

Recently a teacher friend of mine made an interesting point. All of this talk about "bad teachers", she said, about getting rid of the "bad teachers", as if this will solve the problem and enable all of our students to learn. In every profession, she pointed out, there are people who aren't very good at their jobs. We have bad contractors, bad police officers, bad taxi drivers, bad doctors -- but the nation doesn't get all worked up about those. But a few bad teachers, and it's suddenly a national crisis. Shoot, we even have bad Presidents. You'll never have all "good teachers" any more than you'll have all good parents, all good students, or all good anything else.

This got me thinking about those Rhode Island teachers again, or any teachers, for that matter, who work at "failing" schools. I guess I'm still thinking about it because I haven't come up with a good answer to the teacher assessment issue. I mean, lets face it, if half the time I can't tell if I'm meeting my student's needs, how is anybody else going to be able to figure it out?

I did come up with a missing point in the argument of Melinda Gates in her Washington Post article, "Education Reform One Classroom at a Time". She claims that all children can succeed in large numbers, no matter what their economic status. She uses her schools, and their high success rates as proof. It occurred to me, however, that Gates did not take into consideration a critical component. The students at her school are there because they have someone at home who wants very badly for their child to succeed, and who isn't afraid to think of alternative routes to make that happen. Someone who is paying attention. Someone who washes and puts out their child's uniform every morning. Someone who decided to seek out the best school possible for their child, who went to the trouble to fill out an application, and who made the commitment to make sure their child makes it to school every day -- week after week, year after year.

Maybe the Gates Foundation schools do have a better curriculum. I'm sure, with all of that extra money, they probably do. Maybe they do have better teachers. Again, with such powerful resources at their disposal, I'm sure they can hand pick all of their instructors. But what she doesn't mention is perhaps the most critical component of all. These students have someone at home who cares about education. If only every child were so lucky, my job would be a lot easier.

2 comments:

  1. Listening to NPR this morning, there was a program about early childhood exposure to words, the sheer number of words that children were exposed to and the encouraging or discouraging aspects of them seems to have a drastic affect on a child's future. Again, someone at home who cares, or someone at home who has the time, resources and opportunities to make that caring come through in meaningful ways towards a child's education is absolutely the number one factor in education. This program was highlighting the push for reading to kids in at 'risk areas' and educating parents about it.
    Gosh, what a boat we are in. Thank you for taking the time to make us more aware of it all.

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  2. Yes! I first became aware of this particular problem when, at the beginning of a lesson, I asked my students to recall a character from a children's book they were read to as a child (i.e Little Bear, Wilbur, Frog and Toad). The majority of them could only recall TV cartoon characters, and reported that no one had ever read to them. I now try to include encouraging them to read to the future children in their lives as part of my curriculum. Thanks for the reminder!

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