Ch 8 of 20: School Size

Have you heard of “a Bank too big to fail”? How about “a School too big to succeed”? I bet you have never heard this one, yet it reflects a sad reality…

Schools became industrial monsters with a mission to input as many students as possible and output them as fast as possible; preferably never beyond four years… what happens in between is a black box…

How do schools do that? How do they enter thousands of students through their gates and make sure that they do not entangle on their way out four years later? Well, this is a very big, well-oiled, machine that uses a huge amount of resources. With years of practice and history of experience, the system runs, technically, quite smoothly, but on the way to efficiency, it forgets its exclusive purpose – educating young people; it loses its human factor. Who has time for that?

Deans of discipline have tens of students lining up in front of their office every single day. Counselors never have enough time to catch up, being responsible for programming hundreds of students and for other endless duties, while their real job, counseling, is at the bottom of the list due to lack of time.

And what about teachers? Teachers at a public school see, typically, two hundred students a day! Imagine, first, trying to learn names of two hundred kids, and this is without counting those who come and leave, especially at the beginning of the school year. A good way to handle it is creating seating charts. It really helps, but it takes a long time to create, and even longer to maintain …

One of my yearlong assignments was teaching algebra to 9^th graders, replacing a teacher who left for maternity leave. It was the beginning of the school year and I had a pretty good start. However, as soon as I created seating charts, a special education teacher came to tell me that they are re-arranging class assignment for their students, and thus, number of students from each class had been replaced with new students… Few days later an administrator said that due to a crowding situation they are moving students around to create a satellite campus… again certain number of students were removed and others joined… Less than a week passed when another teacher announced that he is switching some of his students with mine so that he can continue a program that he started during the summer… By that time I realized that all my good students were replaced with not so good students, my seating charts are worthless, and it is going to be tough. And it was…

Even at classes that do not change that dramatically, sometimes it takes almost a whole semester to master all 200 names. At one school, where I started mid-year, teaching math lab to students who failed algebra, I had a tougher than usual time putting names and faces together. It was a new school, new material, and new students’ population, where, to my inexperienced eyes, many of them looked alike… To make it more confusing, some first names were similar, and even worse – numerous last names were the same. It took me almost the whole semester to learn who is who… At last, when I thought that I had it all figured out, all of a sudden I realized that during third period, there is a student that I could swear I had already seen at first period. I didn’t give it much thought until the next day when I had that same déjà vu. When, at last, I decided to check it out I discovered, to my great embarrassment, that these students were identical twins…

The amount of work that goes into monitoring two hundred students is quite impossible. A weekly quiz of only 5-10 problems, one minute each to check, becomes more than three hours job, without rechecking any. Add few rechecks, several notes and, of course, recording grades, and you have spent well over five hours a week checking just one tiny quiz. What about a chapter test every few weeks, a semi-final or final test? How about a project? An assay? And of course it will be nice to be able to check homework assignments from time to time, just spot checking, only twice a week… It will be eight AFTER HOURS hours!

It might not be the right place to talk about preparation since teachers have to do lesson plans regardless of number of students. It is, however, the place to mention that a teacher is supposed to create three different lesson plans – one for average students, one for the special need students that are probably part of your class, and one for the high achievers who need extra challenge. I don’t know too many teachers who actually do that on a regular basis, but this is what a teacher is expected to do!!! …And if you are in a teaching credentialing program, or some other program to upgrade your qualifications, (and teachers are always in one program or another), you are sure to be required to obey this rule…

So how did the system make this impossible time-frame possible? One of the most genius inventions of the twentieth century was the multiple-choice tests and the beloved scantron.  The happy noise of the scantron machine grading your students’ finals can be only compared to the noise of a gambling machine pouring rain of coins when you hit the winning combination (and they don’t even have those anymore L). Listening to the scantron doing the work for you and thus saving you hours and hours of work is just as exciting as winning big! Real big!

Yes, it is such an efficient tool – yet, with so many deficiencies… We are losing to its effortlessness a big part of teaching and learning. Using it, teachers are unable to see where students are mistaken, what part of the learning needs re-enforcement, and do students know the material or just guess the answers. To make it worse - we created a whole system that trains students in being good at guessing the right answer; a whole industry for teaching students how to work around the need of actually understanding the material, how to fake a knowledge… We teach them how to be successful test takers, not successful learners…

Do you think that students don’t get the message? You bet they do! They learn early in their school life that the main goal is to ace the test. They don’t bother too much with the journey, then, they just want a shortcut to the results. By the time they are in high school they are accomplished test swindlers… Seconds after receiving the test form, they already figure out how many versions the test has, and who is their best copying resource. They have more ways of doing that than we can imagine, including using technology. We, the teachers, joke that if students were only half as resourceful learners as they are swindlers, they would be ‘A’ students. Yes, the system is smart about mass evaluation, but students outsmart the system.

One of my colleagues tried a way to control different test versions. Being a very well organized person, he created color-coded versions. This method might have worked for him, having excellent class control, but it didn’t work quite as well for me. As soon as the students realized what the colors meant, a secret trade started immediately. As naïve as I was I didn’t catch the trade on time, and was quite surprised to find a pink next to a pink and green next to a green. It was not until I saw an actual trade happening in front of my eyes that I realized what was going on… students were making sure they have the same color as their resource …

I tried to outsmart the students by numbering all the tests and secretly coding the version (even numbers, numbers ending with 5). I don’t know that it worked. I suspect that, somehow, they managed to break the code (never underestimate students) but one thing is sure, it didn’t help my reputation with students…

Additional, interesting, comment about copying - it always surprised me that some students would rather copy a test from someone, anyone, and not try themselves …

Another masses nightmare is communicating with parents. To shield teachers from the need to meet with all 200 parents, frequent report cards are mandated, 8 report cards a year!  If you are not a teacher you don’t know how much work it involves. Every single grade has to be well thought and well documented; it is a very time consuming process that has to be done every 5 weeks! Is it a good system? Better than nothing, but the problem is that it cannot replace the value of meeting with parents face to face. For one thing – some parents never see those report cards. Their students have a way of hiding them. Others do not know the whole picture or cannot use their authority to push the student in the right direction, and when at last they realize how poor their student’s performance is, in many cases it is too late…

Some schools use automated phone system to inform parents about students’ absence from school or class. Some schools use automated calls to inform about bad behavior or academic problems… And yes, it is better than nothing… but in order to really solve problems and keep students on track there should be a direct communication between teachers and parents. But with all good intentions, it is not realistic for a teacher to call periodically every student’s home, let alone schedule a10 minutes meeting with 200 hundred parents, because 200 appointments times 10 minutes each, equals 2000 minutes… over 30 hours of extra work…

Ch 7 of 20: Books

Remember those light weighted books that our parents would buy us at the beginning of the school year? Well, maybe what I remember from a different country, in a different era, does not apply to my generation’s experience in the US, but I am sure someone remembers, even here, a time when a textbook was just that – a text book. Not an artistic creation with colorful pictures and short sophisticated clips, but just a book with text. Don’t get me wrong – I am all for enrichment of the mind and the senses, and teaching with open horizons is more than just a good idea… but…

How many students do you know that are looking at those additions just because they find them interesting? We do; the teachers, the parents, the adults who are holding the textbooks, but most of the children do not. “So what?” you would say – “if only one in a hundred students looks at the enriching part then it is well worth it…” And you may be right. However, this enrichment comes with a price… each text book weighs more than an average person can hold for several minutes… if I need to move two or three books at a time I really have a problem – and I am a fit adult who is able to handle more stress than many teachers I know. “Well, students are younger and stronger” you may claim, and you may be right again, but what happened when they have to carry five or six books that are just as heavy? My daughter suffers from backaches for years now, since she was in middle school. Being the ‘A’ student that she is, she carried all her books back and forth, as she was told to do, in a backpack that was as heavy as her skinny early teens figure… I used to watch her with pain as she carried those torturous heavy books, and I would frantically call the middle school office begging them to delay the school bus departure for several minutes so that students would have enough time to get to their lockers and get rid of the weighty burden at the end of the day, but of course my appeal was never listened to.  Yet, as a parent, I was quite impressed by the quality and richness of the textbooks, and considered their weight as a trade-off. I changed my mind when I became a teacher…

I realized that no one of my students had ever read or paid any attention to the extra information. Few of them might have found some of the information mildly interesting if I read it to them, and even that slight interest happened only in the higher-level classes. I found the over-loaded information too confusing for the average student, the pages too busy, and the important information too hard to find. My favorite Algebra and Geometry textbooks were two simple books that were assigned to me when I was teaching special education class on my first year; basic, colorless small books, with the learned material simple, clear and easy to find. I used those books whenever I could do so without risking my career…

One of the hardest and least effective battle that I had to fight with my students was making them bring textbooks to class. It was just a losing game. Once you sent the books home with students, at the beginning of the school year, as you were supposed to do, most probably you would never see them until the end of the year (usually still brand new and untouched...) If you allowed students to leave their books in your classroom, most probably they will soon disappear, and not only that would not be used, but you, the teacher, will be blamed for their loss. Officially, teachers are not allowed to store students’ books in their classroom.

So… many schools came up with a solution – they offer a class set. Sounds like a great idea? (especially for the books’ publisher…)  Not so fast! These books are not assigned to a specific student since they are being used by all learners that take the same class, and thus they are subjected to neglect and abuse… I saw classroom books flying in the air toward unsuspecting student, being torn, left on the floor and stepped on, being transported to random locations at the school grounds, and most of all – being an open space for graffiti, innocent in the better case, but quite often inappropriate and vulgar.      

Different teachers have different solutions for the books dilemma. One of my colleagues, whose classroom was next to mine, a tough guy who was also a respected coach, did not give in to the books situation. He did not agree to have a class set and demanded that students bring their own textbooks. Students that came empty-handed had to stay standing up for the entire period… It took me a while to figure out why some of his students would come to my classroom and ask to borrow an algebra book, with a solemn promise to bring it back (and they did). But, when more and more students showed up with the same request … I, at last, asked him what was going on and found out what the reason was…

Other teachers’ answer to this impossible situation is not using textbooks at all – they use only worksheets… Imagine the expense that results. Not only that the school spends hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars on textbooks (and they are mandated by the district!) it wastes many additional thousands of dollars on duplications. Most of those papers are just for a one time use and being tossed (or become flying objects) very soon afterwards. And the worst part of using worksheets is not even the waste, but its poor value as learning materials. Students get into a bad habit of just plugging in an answer in the “fill in the blank” area (makes the job of copying real easy...). I was shocked to discover, when teaching Algebra II to eleventh graders, that doing homework means for them just writing the answers on a piece of paper, without even copying the problems (and in most cases just copying the solution from the back of the book…)

So how did we get ourselves in such an impossible book situation? The answer is, unfortunately, quite common in the education business – money! Someone is making money, a lot of money, out of those textbooks. Think about a large school district that enforces a certain textbook on all students in its domain. Each of these hard covered, heavy with hundreds of pages, books, cost the district many tens, if not hundreds, of dollars. How can the publisher charge so much for its product? By padding it with very many un-necessary colorful pages so it can justify the price. This is not a new trick by any means. Restaurants, for example, give us enormous and unreasonable amount of food just so that they can charge us a lot more…

Of course, this is not the only way to get the district pay unbelievable amount of money for textbooks… Every so often, the school district is committed to buy a new edition of the same books… well, hard covered books don’t get destroyed very easily so there must be another way to move and re-vitalize the book business -  new edition... They do that also to the colleges and universities textbooks, although probably not with as much revenue as in the K-12 industry.

So, here we are again… Teachers (and students) pay the price for a system that is completely ignoring their needs. Books that are impractical for use by teachers and don’t fit the needs of students. A situation where teachers are scrambling to find a way around the system to supply their students with what they really need. And in doing so, not only they, quite often, use their own money to supplement a budget of millions of dollars used inefficiently, but they are also prevented from doing what they really want to do – teach efficiently…

Ch 6 of 20: Discipline

From: Cubs Pre-School

Picture going to a lecture on your favorite subject, on a topic that you are anxious to learn about. What are the chances that you will comprehend and learn from it if the people who are sitting around you are constantly talking? What if right in the middle of the most interesting part of the lecture your friend at the other end of the hall calls for your attention to something she wears or a good piece of gossip. What part of the interesting lecture would you understand, or even hear?

And, what if this lecture is not that interesting to you? You need to take it in order to qualify for something, but it is not really your favorite subject? What are the chances that you learn anything from it at all?

This is the situation that teachers face every single day in their classroom, when trying to compete for students’ attention… Imagine a history teacher trying to teach about the French Revolution, not a bad subject at all, and can be interesting even to a non-history enthusiasts… But can the history teacher win the attention of a fourteen, or even eighteen years old student who listens to a real juicy piece of news about a classmate, a friend or a teacher? No way!

Now… think about a teacher trying to teach not history – French Revolution, but math… geometry, for example, a mandatory subject for all students…

You would say, it is the responsibility of the teachers to keep the class quiet and make sure the students’ attention is focused on the lesson, and teachers who are unable to do so are “ineffective teachers”. Really!

Well, how exactly does the teacher supposed to do just that – keep the class quiet and focused? In an upper middle class, sub urban areas, there is some leverage for a teacher. He/she may ask students to stay after class or after school and talk to them, appealing to their reasoning. If it does not help he/she may call students’ parents, and if not enough invite them for a meeting. Teachers may assign students extra work, and of course can always use the mighty threat of report card grade. If none of the above helps – the last resort may be used - referrals to an administrator or dean of discipline. Teachers do not like to use that as it reflects right back at them, perceived as not being in control, but it is an option...

But…What are the tools for a teacher who teaches in less favorable areas – in a lower socioeconomic or inner city areas, where many students don’t respond to the usual measures, and a bad grade is not a threat.

I can’t even count the number of times when I asked students to stay after class or come after school and they just did not show up.

So, I would try the next step, contacting the parents. Often I would not be able to reach them because contact phone had been disconnected, or, family had been relocated…  If reached, parents would usually be supportive; however, chances are that they are struggling with basic life’s necessities, working several different jobs, trying to feed kids and elders. They do want to help but many times are unable, and sadly, sometimes, they have little or no influence on their kids…

Teacher’s choices, then, are very limited, and they have to use their last resort - appealing to the help of the school administrators or deans, and thus pay the dreaded price of being labeled by them as “ineffective teacher”, because the other option is even worse – being labeled by the… students as “ineffective teacher”…

When I happily graduated from the teaching credentials program, I knew it is not going to be easy, but no one prepared us, the future teachers, for the ruthlessness of some students, or told us how exposed and helpless teacher really are. It is not that students are necessarily bad or mean; it is just that they know exactly how far they can go without being panelized. They completely understand that the system is a hundred percent behind them while their teachers are practically defenseless.

I used to be very resentful toward the deans of discipline, feeling that they don’t help enough, until I heard, unofficially, a dean speaking his mind and telling how helpless he is when it comes to strict measures of discipline. He was describing situations where students caused so many problems and yet he was just unable to expel them. Every time he did, they would, somehow, be back at school… This was when I realized that the system’s incompetence is far deeper than I thought…

You see, discipline is not only an obedience problem, it is an academic problem! If a teacher tells a student to bring a notebook and a pencil, to open a book or to copy from the board, and he refuses to do so just because he is not interested, this is not a disciplinary problem anymore, but an academic issue that its implication goes far beyond one individual. It influences every person in that learning environment.

Yes, some students, maybe ten percent of the classroom population, will always be able to learn. Some students, maybe another ten percent, will never learn (at least not for now), but what about the other eighty percent?

I am not exaggerating when I say that we lose eighty percent of our students’ population every single day, every semester and every school year, to the disturbance of ten, maybe less, percent of the students. The major part of a classroom population is missing its chance to learn because they are taken hostages by a small number of students whose sole purpose is to divert others’ concentration from the learning, and become the center of attention…

I saw an example of a creative solution in one school, at a satellite campus, where teachers and administrators, enjoying some independence, dealt with the problem in an innovative way. On the second semester of the school year they decided to get rid of the disturbance and removed the failing students (those who failed algebra on the first semester) from their regular program and created a new class for them. Their goal was to give the algebra teachers a chance to progress without the constant interruption, and thus give their full attention to the motivated students. I was assigned to teach the failing students. Not surprisingly, it worked great for the regular teachers. They were able to teach, at last, and kept thanking me for talking the problem students. The real surprise, though, was that it worked well for me, and my students, too. I was not pressured to move in a certain pace and thus was able to go back to basics and concentrate on subjects with which students were struggling. As tough crowd as they were, it actually worked quite fine, and at the end of the semesters students came to me and said that now they are able to understand concepts that they had never understood before. Unfortunately, the program was cancelled once the satellite campus returned to the main campus, and creativity gave way to rules and regulations…

We must realize that discipline is the main obstacle in the way to a better education structure, and that teacher’s “shortcoming” is a direct result of the system’s shortcoming …

I challenge all politicians and “education specialists” to step into one of those schools in an unprivileged areas, where administrators and teachers are losing sleep over students achievements, and to spend only one month there as classroom teachers… Of course, a whole semester would be much better. Few days or even a week, are not enough time to be part of the effort…I want them to experience what teachers are facing every day. To see how a small number of teenagers are holding hostage the learning experience, and how highly educated adults turn blind eye toward the real problem. I want them to feel the frustration of teachers, the essence of education, as the system turns its back to them…

From: Cubs Pre-school

Ch 5 of 20: Standardized Tests

Imagine a manager who works very hard, during the day and after hours, on weekends and vacations, and being paid only forty thousand dollars a year, sometimes even less. Imagine a manager who has to buy not only his/her own papers, pens and other office supplies, but has to buy them for his entire staff, from his own pocket, with a very slim chance to ever get paid back. And, how about hundreds of photocopies, paid cash at Kinko's, just because the company’s copy machine is either out of commission or tens of people are waiting to use it?

Picture a manager who is being pressured by the board of directors to increase productivity. He knows his paycheck is not going to be altered as a result, but his performance evaluation depends on it. Of course, he wants to do his best and provide top service to the company, so he asks the board for some guideline on incentives he could offer his employees for doing well and deterrents for an unsatisfying job. The response is – none, neither incentives nor deterrents. “Your employees will be just proud of the company”, he is told. “But if they don’t raise productivity - are they going to be fired?” asks the idealist manager. “No! Not at all! It is not going to affect them; they should do it for the sake of the company…”

Now, think about a teacher who is asked to raise his students’ standardized tests score, and whose performance evaluation is based on the performance of his/her students on that test. There is an enormous pressure on schools that, in turn, becomes an enormous pressure on teachers, to perform well on the standardized tests. I have seen teachers trying to do everything, including the impossible, to get students to perform well on those tests; volunteering endless hours, even weekends, with no additional pay, buying food for every single person in the class, meeting students during the summer to correct their report card grade if they increased their test score (even by ONE point. Even if that teacher’s job is not secured for the following year…)  I have seen schools forcing teachers to spend so much time on the standardized testing preparation that they don’t even have time to teach half of what they supposed to teach…

Why doesn’t it work? The answer is very simple. It takes a common sense of a child to point out to what thousands of sophisticated adults refuse to admit about the emperor’s clothing… that he wears nothing…

Our students know the truth. They know that the entire force of teachers, administrators and district leaders, are armed with NOTHING that can make them do well! If performance is not going to affect their report card grade they are not going to put effort in it… they know that nothing can be done to them!

You see, our students are just as smart as those employees who are asked to raise productivity. They ask – “What is there for me?”

If the employees know that raising their productivity does not come with a raise in their paycheck, and on the other hand, there is no danger of being fired, they are not going to perform – why should they bother? How much do they care about the image of the company?

If student know that the results of the standardized tests have no consequence on their report card grades, and they are neither going to benefit nor penalized for their performance - why should they bother to do their best on a long, tiring, and irrelevant test? What is there for them…? And they raise this very question every single time before a standardized test.

I have many stories about the pathetic hysteria that occurs at a school during the tensed time of the testing. I can tell you about countless hours put by paid and unpaid school employees who are assigned to the job as full time or part time coordinator (…and it is always more than a full time job…)

On my first year supervising a test I caught a student cheating (using a calculator when no calculators allowed). I dutifully dragged that student to the headquarters of the testing and reported him to the supervisor in charge. Soon enough I found myself being interrogated about the nature of the cheating, if I really saw it or just imagined seeing it, was it really a calculator or only seemed to be a calculator, and so on… At last I realized that I’d better cooperate with the nature of the investigation and leave room for a doubt that maybe it didn’t happen… it took me years to realize what scrutiny schools face if they don’t reach minimum percentage of participating students, and what exercises schools practice to reach this percentage…

Another story is about a different standardized test, mandated few times a year by the district. During my first year, teaching full time, it was a periodic nightmare. Without any warning, the department head would come to me and instruct to administer this test immediately, make sure to check the open response answers myself, and submit it on the following day… Then, for a while, I didn’t see that test and almost forgot about it until several years later, when, due to an injury of the permanent teacher, I took over teaching algebra to classes consisting of repeated algebra students. These classes were very tough and challenging; I knew some of the students from previous years and was walking on eggshells dealing with them… All went quite well for several weeks until, all of a sudden, a command came from above – Administer the horrid test! Now, these are very low motivated students, who are so smart and calculated about where and if to put their effort. Certainly, they are not going to do anything that doesn’t pay to their immediate interest. Thus, I had to face an ethical dilemma - do I just let them take it easy, compromising about noise level in the classroom, and letting them pick at their neighbors’ test (stupidly – the test is only one version), or do I act on my conscious (and on the fear that administrator will sure come and check on them, and on me…) So, I started a losing battle, in a desperate attempt to get them to work quietly, as hard as they can, and on their own…  I lost not only that battle but I lost it for the rest of the year… from that time on I could not make them do anything any longer, and each day of the remaining two weeks of school I was praying that the day will be over without any major incident…

A curious finding about that specific test: When I received the tests results, I was surprised to find out that students’ performances were almost in an opposite correlation to their ability, according to my assessment. It took me a long time to figure out why. What I realized, at last, was that students who didn’t care, just marked all the answers without checking them, but did finish the test. Obviously some of their answers were correct. The good and conscious students took a long time to answer and check, but never got to the end of the test, and thus their overall score was lower than of those who marked randomly, but answered all questions… 

That much for standardized tests, their value for assessing students, and even worse, their value in assessing teachers…

Yet, time and again, teachers are being blamed for the failure of their students in the standardized tests. Blamed in the best case; evaluated, penalized and in some cases – being fired, in the less fortunate case. Blamed for something of which they have no control, nor do they have the tools to control it…

Ch 4 of 20: What is wrong with our education system?

EVERYTHING! Everything EXCEPT FOR … believe it or not… THE TEACHERS…

to teachers with love...

For the past ten years of being in education, I have NEVER met a bad teacher. I met teachers whose teaching methods might have not been ideal, in my opinion. I met teachers with whose opinion I did not agree. I met teachers that were not as organized as I thought they should have been, teachers whose response to a situation was different from mine, but not even one of them was a bad teacher!

All the teachers that I know love their job and try to do their best. They are very intelligent people with knowledge that goes far beyond what they teach, in their subjects and in general. They show up to school when they are well or sick, fresh or tiered, making almost impossible arrangements for their families to take care of their sick children, aging parents, or incapacitated spouses. They come to school early, some of them very early, and often stay late after school hours, long after their learners had gone. They remain at their rooms during lunch to accommodate struggling students, and they come in the evenings to endless required, or even only recommended, meetings.

Teaches spend a weekend after weekend preparing lessons, projects and tests, checking endless amount of papers, and planning new policies and methods in hope that maybe this time their effort will bring better results. They answer emails and phone calls from administrators, parents and students. They are available for anyone at any time, almost twenty-four hours a day, almost every day of the year.

Yes, there might be some CEO’s out there who are responding to communication coming their way at all times, maybe even on vacations and off time, but shall we compare compensations?

A teacher is paid for six hours of teaching a day. Yes, it does include, sometimes, one “free” hour, conference, for preparation time. I don’t remember too many conference hours that I actually used for ‘future’ preparations, let alone “free” time. There is, always, so much to do that teachers use conference hours to catch up on school errands, and they barely make it.

On average, and this is quite an accurate assessment, for each classroom instruction hour there is at least one, out of class, additional hour of work. It means that at the end of every school day a teacher had already worked two school days. It means that by the end of the school year the teacher had already worked for every single day of the summer vacation, winter vacation, and every other vacation. In most cases teachers had “covered” most of their weekends, as well, and probably more than that…

So – what IS, really, wrong with the education system?

NOT the teachers! Yet they are the ones who are being blamed for all the ailing of our education system, and why not? They are the easiest target…

It always reminds me of a joke about a man who is looking for his lost key near the street light. When a neighbor asks him where he lost the key, he points to the other side of the street. “So why are you looking for the key here?” asks the confused neighbor. “Well, it is too dark over there…” answers the man, “it is much easier to look for it here…”

We are looking at the easy place, in the light, instead of looking where is right… The real problems and solutions are not under the comfort of the streetlights, but at the dark corners, far away from the easy and bright…

Yes, we all heard about cases of bad teachers, and yes, there are bad apples everywhere, but if there is one field where it is very rare, it is in education.

Why should a person want to become a teacher? For the money? For the respect? For the support?

No, a person who wants to become a teacher is an idealist (or a fool…), an optimist who just does not know how hard it will be to make his dream a reality; who does not realize that the system will consistently be against him and will continuously stand between him and the dream…

What do I mean? …Where shall I start…?

Ch 3 of 20: Part II: History of my education career

I was now a credentialed teacher, but for the first semester after the charter school experience, I worked as a daily substitute. Came December, though, I was ready for a full time job. As bad as teaching is, subbing is even worse, and the phone calls in the early hours of the morning gave me anxiety attacks. I sent resumes everywhere and was called, at last. I was interviewed, offered a job, and accepted it, all on Christmas Eve, and started the day after the New Year. These were support math classes for students who failed first semester algebra; an additional math lesson.

I had a supportive administrator backing me up, two excellent math coaches, young, capable, and very nice, and a dean who was decisively with me. I have never had such an excellent support before or since that position, yet another failure. For one week the students were great and even told me how much they liked my teaching. The math coaches, however, just smiled, knowingly, and promised– it will get worse… And it did… On the second week, students were testing their power, on the third week I was sending students to the dean on a regular basis, on the fourth week they hated me and made my life miserable. And, although the support team had never abandoned me, as it often happens, I felt a complete failure… At the end of the semester I was offered a full time position, but after few more short assignments that, luckily, ended before it got real bad, I left, unwilling to commit to a permanent position. For a while I worked as a daily sub. I also tried private schools, Adult Education, tutoring - private and through agencies. But, in December, I updated my resume and sent it to every school within a reasonable driving distance.

An unfamiliar school called me for an interview, and I immediately liked it and its staff; but I was contemplating teaching a higher math that was out of my comfort zone. My son suggested that all I need is to be one page ahead of my students… and I will forever be thankful for his advice. While stressing to the top of my ability, I had the best teaching experience, ever. This was exactly what I thought teaching should be – simplifying complicated concepts for students who strive to understand. Answering questions for learners who actually care to know, seeing the light in their eyes… These two math analysis classes will forever be the jewel of my teaching!

I was asked to return on the next school year, to temporarily replace a teacher on maternity leave. As the holidays drew nearer and no replacement came yet, the position seemed permanent enough, but right after the holidays vacation, only few weeks before the semester end, four out of my five classes were switched; new students and new subjects… My evaluation at the end of that year was so bad that I thought my teaching career is over not only in this school, but in the entire country… I fought fiercely against its unfairness and was promised that it will be reversed. I don’t think it ever did but, surprisingly, I was offered a full time position for the following year.

I had a full time job, teaching dream subjects! Yes, I had to travel between four different rooms, not having my own, and had a terrible geometry class that was assigned to the worst location, but I believed I would manage with time. Three weeks into the school year I was called to be told by the principal that due to low enrollment, my position is being cut… This was painful! Starting to feel successful, believing that this time will be OK.  I also had to leave a great group of fellow teachers; the kindest, smartest, funniest and most frustrated group that you will ever meet…

Next, I took an assignment at a school whose principal sounded nice, and for few days I thought I found the right place, but two weeks later, after my cell phone was stolen twice, I left. They wanted me to stay but could not give me a key to my classroom, or to the nearest bathroom, and with two – 2 hours blocks back to back, and a very short passing time, it meant 4 hours without bathroom break. Add to that a very difficult student population, not very accommodating administration, and… no teachers’ cafeteria (stand in line with students…), I decided not to stay there beyond the 2 weeks for which I was committed.

Additional experiences: Over the course of experimenting with education venues I came across so many types of alternative education settings – from continuation schools, adult schools and home schooling that the public education offers, all the way to different sorts of private schools and tutoring institutions, many of which are contracted by the district to provide education services. Millions of dollars are spent on private tutoring agencies to assist under privileged students, with questionable benefits to the students, but undeniable profits to the institutions. With the trend of privatizing education, it, apparently, became a profitable business, but produces, in my opinion, very poor results…

Through years of experience and volume of experiences, there were only very few institutions that really impressed me, however, one element of education never failed to impress me - the… teachers!

Ch 2 of 20: Part I: History of my education career

My first professional contact with a school was as an observer, part of my credentialing duties. I then volunteered to stay there to help, and on the next year, I came back as a (paid) teacher aide, working in Special Ed and ESL classes. On the following school year, I was offered a position as a math teacher in the special education department, and after a long hesitation decided to take it.

And so, armed with all the tools and enthusiasm of a new teacher, and, thankfully, with ignorance about the well trained, fearless troops of high school students, I signed my first teaching contract at a well-respected high school in the neighborhood. Yes, I knew it is not going to be easy teaching an SDC class (Special Day Class), but I had an experienced teacher aide, classes were small, less than 15 students, and a supportive staff, so what could go wrong?

That year was an introduction to what was to come in the following years. Students who talk over you, completely ignore you and your teaching, who are so rude that you are taken a back because no one had ever talked to you this way before. Students who come to school without supplies, and abuse the supplies you give them; Flying paper airplanes, erasers, crayons or broken pencils. Books filled with graffiti, profanity in most cases. Parents that cannot be reached because they are not around, have moved away, didn’t pay their phone bills. Administrators who are overwhelmed with problems, limited by regulations, restricted by budget cuts; so burdened with their own difficulties that can hardly help you… 

My aide, helper, would step in half an hour late and start a chat with students about shopping and sports, or would tell them stories about her family, ignoring my mid-lesson instruction. Of course, they liked her far better, and it did not help my standing with them, or with her.

Then there were the IEPs, Individual Educational Plan. It took me a long time to learn how to write them, until I realized that most recommendations are the same (a seat at the front, shorter homework, longer test time), but I resented spending conference hours catching up with the load.

However, despite all the difficulties, that year was my best teaching year. Not credentialed yet, but I had energy, fresh ideas, and the belief that all students are created equal. Bad behavior or inability to grab a concept was just not acceptable. I made the entire class retake the chapter on Solids because I could not believe that comprehending Volume and Surface Area is beyond any student’s capability. I sent students to the office, disregarding reprimands from the deans, made calls to non-existing numbers, had parents sit in the classroom with their misbehaving students…

At the end of the school year, though, I was quite sure what I do not want in teaching – no IEP writing, no helping aides, no special Ed! But I was not worried. I was on my way to becoming a math teacher, and with the shortage of math teachers, I would have no problem finding a job in the general education… I was practically expecting jobs to fall on my lap without any effort.

The first eye-opener came from that same school. I thought I did quite a decent job and was expecting an offer. It came, but only for special ed… Thus, I started my journey looking for a position in the general ed. “Math? you won’t have any problem…”, every one told me, so I applied at the district, answered few ads at teachers’ sites and was waiting for the phone calls to pour in, but only few job interview invitations came, mostly from charter schools. One school called back and offered me a position. They didn’t press me into signing the papers so I took my time, still waiting for the rush of calls from all those desperate schools…The summer almost wore off. I went on vacation and came back, and at last realized that the charter school offer is the only offer I have, and I’d better hurry up signing the papers before I lose this one too…

That year was some experience and at the end of the school year, I made every effort to complete my certification because I made up my mind never to be a full time teacher again… as one of my credentialing classmate said – “let’s get the certification so that we never have to teach again…”