The myth of the extraordinary teacher

[proud2BlibKansan]

By Ellie Herman

July 31, 2011

The kid in the back wants me to define "logic." The girl next to him looks bewildered. The boy in front of me dutifully takes notes even though he has severe auditory processing issues and doesn't understand a word I'm saying. Eight kids forgot their essays, but one has a good excuse because she had another epileptic seizure last night. The shy, quiet girl next to me hasn't done homework for weeks, ever since she was jumped by a knife-wielding gangbanger as she walked to school. The boy next to her is asleep with his head on the desk because he works nights at a factory to support his family. Across the room, a girl weeps quietly for reasons I'll never know. I'm trying to explain to a student what I meant when I wrote "clarify your thinking" on his essay, but he's still confused.

It's 8:15 a.m. and already I'm behind my scheduled lesson. A kid with dyslexia, ADD and anger-management problems walks in late, thro ws his books on the desk and swears at me when I tell him to take off his hood.

The class, one of five I teach each day, has 31 students, including two with learning disabilities, one who just moved here from Mexico, one with serious behavior problems, 10 who flunked this class last year and are repeating, seven who test below grade level, three who show up halfway through class every day, one who almost never comes. I need to reach all 31 of them, including the brainiac who's so bored she's reading "Lolita" under her desk.

I just can't do it.

More . . . http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-herman-class-size-20110731,0,3910343.story

[trayfoot]

1. As an educator, I can really identify with this!

[eppur_se_muova]

2. There aren't enough "superstar" teachers to teach even 0.1% of America's kids.

We don't need superstars, or any system that depends on them. We need teachers, ordinary people like the rest of us, who have been properly trained to do their jobs, given the resources to do them, and asked to take on a task of reasonable dimensions. We're getting farther and farther away from meeting that last condition. "Leaders" and "reformers" like Duncan seem Hell-bent on making it even worse.

[saras]

3. That's not teaching. Who the fuck are we kidding???

That's like being a full-time psychologist to thirty kids at once. That is such a bizarre extreme, and such an impossible set of demands to place on any person. How can we pretend there's not something profoundly wrong here, that has nothing to do with education?