A parent of one of my students works IT for a private Christian school. He has access to all the kids' work -- it's almost all done digitally. He claims that the kids there are all cheating on everything and he has his child in our school because there are no devices. His child isn't a great student, but it's his contention that being at our site will be an enormous advantage because our students actually have done the work and, so, may have actually learned something.
I was so so excited to get into teaching... I love my content with all my heart, I am an English teacher who is constantly reading and writing, literature is truly my PASSION and I also love teaching and love talking about books and connecting with others about them, so of course, I became a teacher. Fast forward three years and I'm seriously considering leaving the position and starting over with an office job, which may be soulless and not at all connected to the things that I'm passionate about but will at least be less painful than this.
First of all, I teach tenth grade. Most of my students are simply unable to understand or approach tenth grade level literature. Things that I was being taught in eighth grade, such as To Kill A Mockingbird, are now the purview of tenth grade honors classes, and considered "incredibly difficult." My school mostly wants us to teach YA and graphic novels to our students, which are valid and worthwhile forms of literature, but are simply NOT at the same level as things like The Great Gatsby, Their Eyes Were Watching God, or Fahrenheit 451!!
I am constantly being told by my colleagues and admin that my assessments are too difficult and I demand too much. My discipline is frequently demeaned by teachers, guidance counselors, admin, etc, as something that students need to "get through" in order to graduate. I am not respected or treated like a professional, and most students do not have any respect for education at all, believing that nothing they are taught in school is relevant or worthwhile, which breaks my heart. I feel like my heart is broken every day, which sounds dramatic, but it's difficult to have the thing I love most in the world (literature) demeaned and devalued day in and day out.
Most of my students are at a fifth, sixth, or seventh grade level. If I wanted to teach middle school, I would. I am not interested in teaching middle school content or at a middle school reading level. I had hoped I would be able to show students the beauty of the written word, help them connect with people, times, and places that are completely different from their own experiences, and expand their minds and confidence in their own voices through rigorous writing exercises and various novels. Instead I count down the hours in my head until I can go home.
I don't feel like I can be the teacher they deserve because I am so demoralized. I love when I actually get to teach, those rare moments of connection with students, times when I see them understanding and engaging with the material. But those moments are so infrequent, and everything else is so arduous, that it doesn't feel worth it anymore.
Sorry for the essay - your words resonated and hit a nerve, I guess!
I completely understand. The amount of energy it takes to make them care, to teach the relevance of the great books to get them on-side is superhuman. Nobody should be asked to provide it. And nobody who is trying should be denigrated by those who don’t have the chops or the heart to try.
This is NOT just a job.
I wish you the best. Remember that there is no shame in leaving a system that delegitimizes the truth in favor of their own comfort and ease. Leaving in the face of such is actually a principled stand.
This is beyond belief; I am floored. It boils down to sheer and complete laziness in administration. They have given up. I will ask to sit through English and Math classes at possible high schools for my son before deciding. I want to see exactly how class goes. Lucky for us and him, he has been at an excellent private middle school but we can’t do private for high school.
They are VERY unlikely to allow you to audit any classes for exactly the reasons you articulated above.
Even parents are now having a hard time getting onto campus. The excuse is "safety" but I believe that's aabsolute horsefeathers. They don't want the community seeing for themselves just how shamefully bad things are.
I work as a teaching assistant while I do my MA in History at a Canadian university. None of this surprises me. I see so many papers handed in by students who couldn't write a coherent paragraph if their lives depended on it. Thankfully, most of them are gone by third year.
The ones in our universities just move into easier majors and continue on thanks to adjunct professors who know if they make their class too hard, they have no chance at a tenured position when the student surveys are completed at the end of the course.
How did I miss that connection as a humanities teacher?!
I guess that I've only let kids write in class timed essays for so long I didn't give Chat GPT a second thought. Unless all teachers adopt that approach, no essays will ever be written by young adults again -- except for the exceptional children who understand writing clarifies and refines understanding. So like... 3 kids.
Yes. That's why I have my students write in class essays. To get around ChatGPT or other AI software. I usually get wailing and gnashing of teeth at the start of the school year but then they finally get used to the in class essays.
If you have a solid approach to writing instruction, their writing improves enormously over a year. I had kids explode in growth in logic and understanding over two years.
History of crash of Air India Express flight 1344 from 2020 convinced me that equitable grading is path to nowhere but a disaster (in that case literal). Pilots of the same airline repeated the exact same accident scenario as it happened in 2010, why nothing no lesson was learnt? From amazing article „The Cost of Inaction: The crash of Air India Express flight 1344” by Admiral Cloudberg, published on medium:
„Failing to calculate the landing distance is undoubtedly a major violation of standard procedures. But investigators found that the practice was widespread throughout Air India Express. As it turned out, large numbers of Air India Express pilots were quite simply incapable of making the required calculations, even in a classroom setting, let alone in flight. Furthermore, the tables they had available to guesstimate the distances were not accurate enough to produce any useful information, and Boeing’s Operational Performance Tool, an iPad app which could have made these calculations for them, had not been installed on any Air India Express Aircraft. And finally, many pilots also believed that calculating the landing distance was a waste of time if they were familiar with the airport, as Captain Sathe was with Kozhikode.
When they observed the airline’s training program to understand why it was producing pilots who couldn’t do basic math, investigators discovered that nearly all the student pilots were given uniformly high marks regardless of their actual ability, which was in some cases appallingly bad. This was a major scandal all on its own, but in the midst of everything else, it only received a couple of paragraphs in the AAIB’s final report.”
This is terrifying! I went through magnet public schools for my k-12, there was none of this that you described. It genuinely scares me that the majority of students are going to be so ignorant and illiterate, but they will still have the right to vote!!!!
Oops. The above was meant to be a reply to you. Don't fret.
You can do what needs to be done at home. The great news about grading for equity is that work doesn't matter anymore since grades can be gamed.
Get an older set of encyclopedias and, if possible, the 10-book set Great Ideas Program, the 10-book set Gateway to the Great Books and maybe even all of the Great Books themselves. The Harvard Classics are very. similar, so that's another way to get access. The Great Ideas program will walk you through it all. There are plenty of used sets on eBay for around $60,. which is better than anything you're going to get in a public school.
If your kids can hack it all, he'll have a better foundational education than 99% of college grads.
Thanks, I will look up that Great Ideas Program. I homeschool my kids, none have stepped foot inside a public school, but it can drag on you as the primary teaching parent, to do all the side work needed to maintain the flow.
We usually go to the library once every 2 weeks and fill a bag with books. I read to them as well as the oldest reads to the youngest as part of their free play. I use the HOLD system pretty frequently when I want specific titles. I do let them free range in the library, which can lead to questions of "why is that not a good book?" But I would rather teach them as to why a book isn't particularly good to read versus curating everything.
Eventually they will see or hear something I don't like, but rather than being militant on shutting it down, I ask them to explain to me why those topics aren't promoted in our house.
You can help them. Read the first couple of chapters of the Well-Trained Mind by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer. Following the principles they lay out and the outline they've provided for. your grandkids' ages, take those little whippersnappers to the library once a month and let htem fill a laundry basket with books.
Your kids might not be fully into classical education, but this approach is non-denominational and will make your grandkids wunderkinds in the typical public school classroom. And YOU will do your family a UNIVERSE of good. No requirements, just, Grandma LOVES learning and reading and let's sit on the living room floor, have a snack, and see what we can find out in these books. They'll remember that their whole lives and maybe bring it into play for their own children.
If your library has a HOLD system, you can get so many books. If you have a little bit of money, you can buy used books on eBay for almost nothing.
Except that the library seems to have thrown out all books that haven’t been checked out in awhile. I don’t know if this is true everywhere, but libraries seem to have a static number of books as they acquire new ones.
eBay helps. I had a big public library system. Holds on older books were pretty easy to fulfill. But yeah, there were lots of things I wanted, but could never get.
A parent of one of my students works IT for a private Christian school. He has access to all the kids' work -- it's almost all done digitally. He claims that the kids there are all cheating on everything and he has his child in our school because there are no devices. His child isn't a great student, but it's his contention that being at our site will be an enormous advantage because our students actually have done the work and, so, may have actually learned something.
Even at a private Christian school! This style of non learning is quite invasive!
I was so so excited to get into teaching... I love my content with all my heart, I am an English teacher who is constantly reading and writing, literature is truly my PASSION and I also love teaching and love talking about books and connecting with others about them, so of course, I became a teacher. Fast forward three years and I'm seriously considering leaving the position and starting over with an office job, which may be soulless and not at all connected to the things that I'm passionate about but will at least be less painful than this.
First of all, I teach tenth grade. Most of my students are simply unable to understand or approach tenth grade level literature. Things that I was being taught in eighth grade, such as To Kill A Mockingbird, are now the purview of tenth grade honors classes, and considered "incredibly difficult." My school mostly wants us to teach YA and graphic novels to our students, which are valid and worthwhile forms of literature, but are simply NOT at the same level as things like The Great Gatsby, Their Eyes Were Watching God, or Fahrenheit 451!!
I am constantly being told by my colleagues and admin that my assessments are too difficult and I demand too much. My discipline is frequently demeaned by teachers, guidance counselors, admin, etc, as something that students need to "get through" in order to graduate. I am not respected or treated like a professional, and most students do not have any respect for education at all, believing that nothing they are taught in school is relevant or worthwhile, which breaks my heart. I feel like my heart is broken every day, which sounds dramatic, but it's difficult to have the thing I love most in the world (literature) demeaned and devalued day in and day out.
Most of my students are at a fifth, sixth, or seventh grade level. If I wanted to teach middle school, I would. I am not interested in teaching middle school content or at a middle school reading level. I had hoped I would be able to show students the beauty of the written word, help them connect with people, times, and places that are completely different from their own experiences, and expand their minds and confidence in their own voices through rigorous writing exercises and various novels. Instead I count down the hours in my head until I can go home.
I don't feel like I can be the teacher they deserve because I am so demoralized. I love when I actually get to teach, those rare moments of connection with students, times when I see them understanding and engaging with the material. But those moments are so infrequent, and everything else is so arduous, that it doesn't feel worth it anymore.
Sorry for the essay - your words resonated and hit a nerve, I guess!
I completely understand. The amount of energy it takes to make them care, to teach the relevance of the great books to get them on-side is superhuman. Nobody should be asked to provide it. And nobody who is trying should be denigrated by those who don’t have the chops or the heart to try.
This is NOT just a job.
I wish you the best. Remember that there is no shame in leaving a system that delegitimizes the truth in favor of their own comfort and ease. Leaving in the face of such is actually a principled stand.
This is beyond belief; I am floored. It boils down to sheer and complete laziness in administration. They have given up. I will ask to sit through English and Math classes at possible high schools for my son before deciding. I want to see exactly how class goes. Lucky for us and him, he has been at an excellent private middle school but we can’t do private for high school.
They are VERY unlikely to allow you to audit any classes for exactly the reasons you articulated above.
Even parents are now having a hard time getting onto campus. The excuse is "safety" but I believe that's aabsolute horsefeathers. They don't want the community seeing for themselves just how shamefully bad things are.
I work as a teaching assistant while I do my MA in History at a Canadian university. None of this surprises me. I see so many papers handed in by students who couldn't write a coherent paragraph if their lives depended on it. Thankfully, most of them are gone by third year.
The ones in our universities just move into easier majors and continue on thanks to adjunct professors who know if they make their class too hard, they have no chance at a tenured position when the student surveys are completed at the end of the course.
Good times.
Oh boy.
Great article. You can now add ChatGPT to the list along with Chegg and PhotoMath.
How did I miss that connection as a humanities teacher?!
I guess that I've only let kids write in class timed essays for so long I didn't give Chat GPT a second thought. Unless all teachers adopt that approach, no essays will ever be written by young adults again -- except for the exceptional children who understand writing clarifies and refines understanding. So like... 3 kids.
Yes. That's why I have my students write in class essays. To get around ChatGPT or other AI software. I usually get wailing and gnashing of teeth at the start of the school year but then they finally get used to the in class essays.
If you have a solid approach to writing instruction, their writing improves enormously over a year. I had kids explode in growth in logic and understanding over two years.
History of crash of Air India Express flight 1344 from 2020 convinced me that equitable grading is path to nowhere but a disaster (in that case literal). Pilots of the same airline repeated the exact same accident scenario as it happened in 2010, why nothing no lesson was learnt? From amazing article „The Cost of Inaction: The crash of Air India Express flight 1344” by Admiral Cloudberg, published on medium:
„Failing to calculate the landing distance is undoubtedly a major violation of standard procedures. But investigators found that the practice was widespread throughout Air India Express. As it turned out, large numbers of Air India Express pilots were quite simply incapable of making the required calculations, even in a classroom setting, let alone in flight. Furthermore, the tables they had available to guesstimate the distances were not accurate enough to produce any useful information, and Boeing’s Operational Performance Tool, an iPad app which could have made these calculations for them, had not been installed on any Air India Express Aircraft. And finally, many pilots also believed that calculating the landing distance was a waste of time if they were familiar with the airport, as Captain Sathe was with Kozhikode.
When they observed the airline’s training program to understand why it was producing pilots who couldn’t do basic math, investigators discovered that nearly all the student pilots were given uniformly high marks regardless of their actual ability, which was in some cases appallingly bad. This was a major scandal all on its own, but in the midst of everything else, it only received a couple of paragraphs in the AAIB’s final report.”
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-cost-of-inaction-the-crash-of-air-india-express-flight-1344-2b5300225048
Great suggestion! Thank you!
This is terrifying! I went through magnet public schools for my k-12, there was none of this that you described. It genuinely scares me that the majority of students are going to be so ignorant and illiterate, but they will still have the right to vote!!!!
Oops. The above was meant to be a reply to you. Don't fret.
You can do what needs to be done at home. The great news about grading for equity is that work doesn't matter anymore since grades can be gamed.
Get an older set of encyclopedias and, if possible, the 10-book set Great Ideas Program, the 10-book set Gateway to the Great Books and maybe even all of the Great Books themselves. The Harvard Classics are very. similar, so that's another way to get access. The Great Ideas program will walk you through it all. There are plenty of used sets on eBay for around $60,. which is better than anything you're going to get in a public school.
If your kids can hack it all, he'll have a better foundational education than 99% of college grads.
Thanks, I will look up that Great Ideas Program. I homeschool my kids, none have stepped foot inside a public school, but it can drag on you as the primary teaching parent, to do all the side work needed to maintain the flow.
We usually go to the library once every 2 weeks and fill a bag with books. I read to them as well as the oldest reads to the youngest as part of their free play. I use the HOLD system pretty frequently when I want specific titles. I do let them free range in the library, which can lead to questions of "why is that not a good book?" But I would rather teach them as to why a book isn't particularly good to read versus curating everything.
Eventually they will see or hear something I don't like, but rather than being militant on shutting it down, I ask them to explain to me why those topics aren't promoted in our house.
Thank you for letting us know. This is hidden for most parents and grandparents. It won't change until it is fully exposed.
You can help them. Read the first couple of chapters of the Well-Trained Mind by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer. Following the principles they lay out and the outline they've provided for. your grandkids' ages, take those little whippersnappers to the library once a month and let htem fill a laundry basket with books.
Your kids might not be fully into classical education, but this approach is non-denominational and will make your grandkids wunderkinds in the typical public school classroom. And YOU will do your family a UNIVERSE of good. No requirements, just, Grandma LOVES learning and reading and let's sit on the living room floor, have a snack, and see what we can find out in these books. They'll remember that their whole lives and maybe bring it into play for their own children.
If your library has a HOLD system, you can get so many books. If you have a little bit of money, you can buy used books on eBay for almost nothing.
Except that the library seems to have thrown out all books that haven’t been checked out in awhile. I don’t know if this is true everywhere, but libraries seem to have a static number of books as they acquire new ones.
eBay helps. I had a big public library system. Holds on older books were pretty easy to fulfill. But yeah, there were lots of things I wanted, but could never get.