Just finished my first day of my 39th year in education. This was the usual "get to know each other and introduce the new people" day along with the " great job last year, you are a super group, lets do better this year" speech by the administrators. I gave plenty of those speeches in my 25 years as a principal. Some years I meant it. Others, I had to fake a little.
In 1969, when I started as a 22 year old high school History and Current World Problems teacher, we had pretty much the same meetings. Then we went to our room and tried to figure out what to do. I had no testing data on kids. I had not curriculum guide or state standards to help me design lessons. I had no internet to turn to to find a ready made lesson. I asked experienced teachers what to do. I was told to take the text book and go chapter by chapter until school was out in May. I was told that I would be able to figure out what kids could do by the end of the quarter and then adjust from there. I was told to grade hard, but not too hard that the seniors would not graduate. Give a D- if need be and do not give a B to a kid who was in line to be a valadictorian or salutatorian. Give an incomplete to the star of the football team so he can make it up with a D, but go ahead and flunk the sub, so it looks like we are no giving athletes preferential treatment. That was pretty much my mentoring. I was surprised how well it worked.
We now are inundated with test data and can tell if Johnny can decipher a plotted tree graph (whatever that is) or pass the rubric (who ever heard of a rubric until at least 2003?) on explaining why the South lost the Civil War. This, of course, is a tough question in Alabama. We, and everyone who reads the newspapers, knows the test scores of all schools, grades and classes. We now have curriculum guides spelling out what to teach and when. We have special reading programs with so many bells and whistles that the kids don't read so much, but they learn about a whole bunch of rules on how to read so when they get around to actual reading, they know the "i before e rule, except after c, I think." We have internet searches and a great deal of plagerism, It was hard in 1969, when most reports were done longhand, to really fool a teacher. We have a great many more tools than ever before, including Head Start, Magnet schools, counseling, special ed, chapter 1 and so many special programs with lots of letters like BEST and EALRS, or NFL (actually, that is National Football League).
But, the bottom line, is that it gets down to what it has since I began 39 years ago and before that. If you have a good, caring, professional teacher that wants and likes to teach kids, then you will have, it does not matter, what ethnic group or race, what economic situations, or what social pressures and problems at home, kids who will learn. Teacher - student. That what it is all about.
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