Jimmy Mundane
Mr. Mahoney
English 12
2/8/14Taking the Leap
Although it was the fifth summer since I had first gotten my teaching certificate, I was still painting houses and looking for a teaching job. My daily pre-work routine consisted of waking up at about 5:00AM to relax, have coffee and practice my Tai Chi Chu’an forms. In addition to their martial arts applications, I use the forms to help be more aware of the connection between the world, my creator and myself. Some consider Tai Chi to be a moving meditation, I think of it more as a prayer in motion.
This particular morning I was feeling apprehensive about my future. I had dropped my son off for his summer job as a camp councilor and I knew I would not see him again for months to come. In regards to my job search, I was seriously beginning to doubt whether I was ever going to find a teaching job. I had several phone interviews, mostly with smarmy, pompous office aristocrats from undesirable locations on either coast. I often would leave my jobsites to conduct these interviews, so my patience with these desk jockeys was somewhat limited. I recall one Superintendent from Turlock, California asking me questions that were wasting my time. I responded: “It’s in my resume. Do you have it there?...Do you need a minute to look it over?”…I could hear other people in the background laughing. I was not offered that particular position.
I have always been a pretty even-keeled person, but this particular day I had had a fitful sleep and was downright worried about my future. I began to hyperventilate, and realized I was having a panic attack for the first time in my life. I got my breathing under control and began to practice my forms. As I was conducting this prayer in motion, I told the great mystery of God that I was putting myself in his hands, and would go wherever I was needed.
I had not been a church-going person for many years, but I always thought that maybe I should be. Whenever someone would ask me about religion, I would say: “I’ve never found me a church that I liked… But I didn’t look very hard either.”
As I went through the postures of Tai Chi, I thought about how my journey to try to become a teacher was a long and indirect route. I had done a few different things for a living, but no matter what capacity I was employed in, I was always trying to teach somebody something, whether they wanted to learn or not… The phone rang.
“This is Kurt Haun, principal of Carroll County High School in Carrollton, Kentucky”… He offered me a job. I accepted… Sight unseen. Never visited the town never saw the school, never saw the apartment we rented over the phone. I put my house up for sale that same day.
Teaching school is not what most people think it is. Although the time in class with the students is to be treasured, there is too much oversight and documentation work. Given the choice of where I try to put my energies, I work on trying to engage students in class, and improving my content knowledge. I have not memorized the new common core standards. Why? I never knew the old standards. I teach students how to read analytically, think critically and write correctly. These are not skills that have changed much. I do not think there has been a new grammar rule implemented in my lifetime. I will not permit myself to be controlled or intimidated by institutional systems that manufacture new buzzwords, catchphrases and professional terminologies to lord over me. This is all about power. People who have their own self-interest in mind engineer alleged “improvements” in the curriculum, to give themselves an appearance of usefulness. They are actually creating barrier to learning. The Common Core Standards are overly complicated and nearly unreadable. They require what is called “deconstruction”. Deconstruction means that teachers need to rewrite them in order to apply them effectively. When the standards are used to communicate to the student, they are done so in what is called “kid friendly” language. Todays learning target: “Thou shalt use thy commas and semicolons correctly”.
Much of the momentum for the nonsense in education is coming out of the University systems. People who are putting in required time toward advanced degrees in order to get pay raises arrive at “Data driven instruction”. The system of requiring continued education for teachers may seem worthwhile to the outsider, and may seem theoretically essential, but it creates activity for activities sake. At times it seems like it is engineered to put “butts in the chairs” of the state university systems, allowing the state to get back some of what they have distributed in payroll, while dooming the educator to a lifetime of debt.
The idea of research-based and data-driven instruction is well meaning in several respects. The process involves looking at data concerning student performance before and after lessons or units are completed. Analysis of this information (test scores) should tell the instructor whether or not the lessons were effective. Although fundamentally solid in theory, there are several variables not taken into account. The data analysis process works upon the assumption that if the student did not learn, that something must have gone wrong with the method used to teach the skills in question. After attempting to use this system one thing became immediately clear: The students who performed poorly were invariably the ones who attempted to sleep, did not participate in class, or complete the formative assignments that would help develop the skill to pass the assessment.
If the students consistently fail assessments because of a lack of performance, there is no way to tell if the method of instruction was effective or not. Student motivation is a factor that I work on constantly. I do not need to spend hours looking at failing test scores and talking about it in meetings to arrive at a conclusion that I’m already trying to address on a daily basis. There is a quality education available in our public school system. Some choose to take what is offered, some do not. We have students graduating into some top universities, and people who have chosen their own type of success beyond the walls of our institution.
Students have a right to choose to succeed or fail on their own merit. I believe, as many do, that everyone will not be successful in everything that they want to do. Hard work and determination is what will separate the successful from the unsuccessful. I have not yet seen a student who tried hard that failed to make progress. I have however seen students grow accustomed to being advanced through grade levels without trying, because teachers, staff and administrators allowed it to happen. That is why I enjoy failing students that do not try. If I can enforce my personal ethics upon others, and challenge “professional conventions” along the journey, I feel I have at least lived my life the way of my own choosing. The fact that failure is a possibility is what defines success. One who is not allowed to fail can never truly succeed.
As long as I get decent results from most of my students, people seem to stay out of my business and let me teach in my own way. The day will come when this will no longer be true. I will leave and go find another place were I can live according to the principles I embrace. Those who teach Education classes in Universities would like us to believe that teaching is a science. When defined this way, it can be assigned a quantitative value. To those who are good at it, teaching is an art. The devices of man cannot measure the things that we do most effectively.