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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Teaching - interesting essay
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I spent 2 1/2 years in the trenches as a teacher, so this essay was interesting to me. I'm not sure what I think about his ideas; I can definitely identify with his administrative issues though. While I was teaching, actual backup from the school bureaucracy just didn't happen - as a teacher, you either have the help of the parents, or you have no one - don't expect help from the system. I often tell people I left because of the money (going to work for the US government actually got me a significant pay raise!) - but that was only part of it. Trying to make a difference in a system where too many parents don't care at all, and where the system doesn't support you as a teacher, is deeply frustrating. I taught in an urban district, and that had a lot to do with the lack of partental support - nearly every student I taught came from a broken (or worse) home.
There's something to what the author of that essay said about learning disabilities though. I was teaching what New York State called compensatory education - in my case, mathematics. I was trying to catch kids - 6th, 7th, and 8th graders - up to grade level. Out of 120 students I had my last year, exactly one was actually slow. He was a sweet kid - less trouble than all the rest - and also dumb as a post. Not his fault; he was clearly born that way. The rest of them though - that was an entirely different story. They came from a background of social promotion and families that simply were not interested in education. Calling the parents in those cases on matters of discipline or educational performance was just a losing game.
After awhile, all of that - combined with the pay and my first year (which had been a classically bad experience) - drove me out of the profession. I'm not sure what keeps people in the job anymore.
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