A few teachers from kindergarten to senior year inspired me to pursue even the most unrealistic dreams of my childhood. They used any means necessary to make knowledge stick, from costumes to dances to Venn diagrams. Remembering their passion has inspired me to choose a career in teaching as well.
But for every one of those brilliant and dedicated individuals, I can think of at least three who embodied everything that makes education one of the least respected fields today. I am a product of the public school system, and while my district was one of the best in the nation, I witnessed a multitude of men and women who clearly had no passion for what they taught.
Class periods were spent correcting my government teacher’s mistakes on the tests he never bothered to read. I should have received a D on my honors physics final, but due to an outrageous curve, I got an A+. Needless to say, I know nothing about physics.
Common sense tells us that bad teachers will produce sub-standard test scores. Study after study warns of underachievement linked to poor instruction and lack of resources.
Giving teachers more money would certainly attract more qualified applicants to the field, but this is unlikely to occur and may further drain funds used to buy computers and keep schools safe.
As Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner demonstrate in their book Freakonomics, even incentive programs and the “high stakes testing” required under the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind act fail to improve the quality of teaching. States may offer bonuses to teachers or threaten to fire them if test scores are not satisfactory.
Teachers could improve their methods by working longer hours or developing individual relationships with students to achieve the required scores on standardized tests. Instead, Levitt and Dubner say, many teachers simply cheat. They change student responses. They write the answers on the board.
These teachers manage to beat the system, but they do a great disservice to the students, who will inevitably find that they have no foundation for more complex learning later on.
The alternative, then, is to properly train those already planning to teach. This does not mean simply ensuring that they know how to analyze Joyce or that they can solve quadratic equations. No student needs another math teacher silently working out sample problems on the board.
Programs like Columbia’s Teachers College and Berkeley’s Urban Schools Project expose future teachers to poor students and to immigrants. The famed Teach for America, which hires college graduates from all majors, exposes teachers to poor urban and rural settings.
The problems, though, do not lie only in the inner city or in isolated farming communities. Children of every race, class and gender have real problems, and what they need most is inspiration. They need to know that, no matter what their home life is like, no matter how many friends they have, no matter how much or how little money there is for college, teachers are there to support them.
A recent article in The Washington Post reveals local findings that parental support is relatively unimportant in students’ success. The quality of teaching is what counts.
One woman said that according to the principal of a poor but successful elementary school in Richmond teachers there are able to help students because they don’t assume support is available at home. By filling the roles of parents to ensure responsibility in the classroom, teachers can be mentors in all aspects of life.
My best high school teachers did just this. They gave out their home numbers, they encouraged the loners to find their niches and they knew more about our daily lives than even our parents knew. When I become a teacher, I will call upon these persistent men and women for advice. Without attention to fame or riches, they helped mold my generation. It is up to us to mold the next.
