Business as Usual

What with the hectic holiday season and the time dedicated to the last podcast episode, I haven’t kept up with #reverb11.  However, when I received today’s prompt in my email, I realized that ever there was a prompt I should respond to, it’s this one:

Teaching Moment - Sometimes we find teachers in the most unexpected places. Who surprised you as a teacher this year, and what did you learn?

I came to teaching from industry in January 2003 and started in my present position on my birthday that year.  When I tendered my resignation, so many people told me I was making a mistake.  I’d made it to middle management before the age of 40 after a 5 year hiatus as a full time mother, held a high stress yet highly rewarding job at a logistics firm in Edison, enjoyed a comfortable middle class lifestyle in one of the most expensive states in the nation on a single salary, yet I never saw my kids.  Two hour round trip commutes, conference calls to different time zones at odd hours, and the real fear I felt after 9/11 all led me to look for a job closer to home. As an added bonus, teaching hours allowed me to be there on holidays and breaks rather than scrambling for childcare, juggling work and sick kids, or just generally stressing out because my kids saw my sitter more than they ever saw me.

Truth be told, I also felt that the work I did held little meaning other than padding the bank accounts of the various retailers whose products were shipped out of those warehouses each day.  My mother strongly suggested I get my teaching certification in college “just in case”, and during the recession of the early 90s, I started grad school and obtained my English certification.  Of course, there were no jobs in education at that time so I got a job in the fledgeling marketing department of a local engineering firm. I never finished that degree because I got pregnant with my daughter and then my son.  When I got divorced, I jumped back into the workforce with a vengeance what with a mortgage, car payments, private kindergarten fees, and all the other costs of single parenting without a care to the time it took away from the kids that called me Mom.

So I took that job in education and received my computer science certification based on my years of experience in industry.  Little did I know how true the line from that Who song would be.  You know the one, “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”?

I’m not sure if education has changed or I’ve changed.  After all, my personal circumstance isn’t what it was back in 2003.  My daughter’s a sophomore in college, my son’s a senior in high school, and neither are all that concerned with seeing Mom on a regular basis (which is as it should be).  We all know from news reports how, as a result of the economic situation, school budgets and teachers salaries were cut and some positions eliminated. Teachers now pay for their healthcare just like every worker in the private sector, and here in New Jersey, we must now pay more into our pension due to the government’s failure to pay their fair share into the fund.  Everyone’s hurting, it’s true, but what worries me is that as we all decry the state of education and the limited funding available to address the problems, the solutions proposed all seem to come from the business world.

What we seem to forget is that children aren’t widgets and teachers aren’t foreman (or forewomen as it were).  We don’t receive 20 identical teenagers at the start of a semester, add some subject matter, and produce 20 perfect widgets at the end of the process.  You can’t assess my ability as a teacher by “crunching the numbers”.  We applaud individuality in this country but the proposals coming out of Trenton and Washington stress uniformity in teaching method and assessment.  Teachers know kids learn differently, come to school with an entire spectrum of issues, and may be prevented from learning by problems beyond our control.

The teaching moment of this entire year is that the business world has caught up with me, and if I wanted to focus on the “bottom line” (or test scores in the case of education), I would return to the business world, make a significantly higher salary, and do what I love rather than equipping the next generation with the skills to do what they love. Removing the personal from education won’t fix what’s wrong, and incorporating business practice into the classroom won’t make the teacher better at his or her job.  Changes in education need to come from inside the classroom with input from the school community, not as directives from a government office far removed from the students they intend to help.

Americans know their education system is broken, but what they don’t realize is that it will take new thinking to fix it, not adapting what works with widgets to a discipline entrusted to equip the nation’s children with the skills they need to be successful adults and involved citizens.  Until that happens, talented teachers will burn out and students will continue to struggle.  The teaching moment in the coming year for all of us should be taking a look at education from a new perspective and trying to accomplish real change in our educational system.