In Praise of Teachers

I had planned for this second post to be part 2 of the Cake Method (yes, they have cake in Algebra 2 as well!), but I need to interrupt my own thinking to praise teachers. I saw a reel on Facebook recently (translation: I’m old) titled Jobs Teachers Didn’t Sign Up For. It starts with being a technician (copy machine repair person), then moves on to detective (mediating student conflicts), secretary, nurse, and more. This is so true, and I was reminded today that that list isn’t exhaustive.

Let me set the scene for you. I had my first coaching day with a 6th grade teacher that I had met just briefly before. I was a few minutes late to first period and we only had about 30 minutes to plan. That didn’t phase this young teacher. She was up for anything. Sure, let’s alter the lesson plan that I’ve carefully created - we can just change the slides! Sure, let’s try getting these kids up and working at vertical whiteboards (this school has been using strategies from Building Thinking Classrooms)! I’m not sure how my students will handle that task, but let’s try it and see!

Few people would be so willing to change something they’ve worked hard on, and on such short notice. We planned to co-teach the next period, so there was no time for rehearsing or even fully fleshing out our talking points. How many professionals can respond so flexibly and open-mindedly to someone attempting to change their work plan? Someone whom they had only met briefly once before?

As 25 chatty sixth graders rolled in, they joked with their teacher and each other, asked who I was, and plopped themselves into seats at round tables, their stuffed backpacks littering the floor around the room. The teacher took attendance and then checked homework, asking after a few students, remembering who had left their binder behind the day before, who needed support with which parts of each problem. At one point during one of her classes, she quietly pulled a fidget toy out of her desk drawer and slipped it to a student, with nary a pause in her instruction. She could tell from her student’s demeanor that day that a fidget would help him stay awake and engaged. Nobody batted an eyelash; clearly this was a regular occurrence in her class.

Through the 60-minute period, she showed an intense understanding of each of her students and what they needed academically and emotionally. She navigated students who tried to avoid the work or “forgot” their homework, a boy who decided to do his work standing on a chair, bathroom breaks, kids teasing each other (and her for her cute sketch of a cat). She answered a call from the office in the middle of class, the students patiently waiting, trying to figure out what message might be coming through the phone line. And she acted like I was an old familiar colleague, letting me jump in and ask questions, even handing the Smartboard marker to me. Her students handled the task like champs, energy buzzing around the room as they made mathematical discoveries through an Open Middle problem.

The next period, she did it all again – in Spanish!

This smaller class was mostly Spanish speakers with widely varying proficiency in English. Some were newish arrivals to the country, some had interrupted schooling, and others had been attending schools in the area for years and were fluently bilingual. There were students who carefully explained how our place value system works and others who struggled to understand the difference between multiplication and addition. There were students whose conversational English was pretty solid but who lacked mathematics vocabulary. Part of the teacher’s job was to help her students become fluent in English (and math English), but there were students who would opt to take the state test in Spanish, so she had to help them build up their math vocabulary in Spanish as well.

After these back-to-back classes, she spent her lunch period debriefing with me, with only about 5 minutes to go to the bathroom, read the 5-10 emails that had likely piled up in the last two hours, or do whatever else she needed to do. And don’t for a second think what a nice little break that must have been. The staff bathroom is several minutes down the long hallway, and it’s a big row of stalls – actually nicer and cleaner than most of the staff bathrooms in schools I work with. (Literally every time I use the bathroom at one school in the Bronx, I wonder what other professionals besides teachers would put up with this. Half the toilets don’t work, there are leaky pipes everywhere and no privacy at all.) I’m sure she rushed down there and rushed back again, not wanting to – and not by law being allowed to – leave students unattended in her classroom.

Lest you’re tempted to say “Sure, that sounds stressful, but teachers have summers off!” let me fill in some more details. Teachers work incredibly long hours during the school year, with faculty meetings, professional development sessions, and piles of papers to grade. Over the weekends, they’re usually working on grading (still) and lesson plans for the next week, which they often have to submit in a certain format to their supervisor, even if the supervisor could crack open a book and read exactly what the teacher plans to do from the district-mandated curriculum that the supervisor wrote the pacing guide for. And many teachers work summers just to make enough money to live and pay back their student loans – they attend trainings, teach summer school, or work a second job.

If you’re still not convinced, think about how that teacher is being judged, not just by society but by their supervisor. Teacher evaluations and school funding rely heavily on how well students do on standardized tests. Remember the class of Spanish speakers, some with interrupted learning, some with high emotional and behavioral needs, whom the teacher taught bilingually? They’re going to take a test in May, and she is going to be judged on their results.

(If you’re not convinced yet that teachers are saints, head over to the Teaching and Teachers subreddits, where you can read more stories about the mind-boggling situations teachers deal with, and the hoops they have to jump through, every day. Then check out Teachers in Transition and you’ll understand a little more.)

As this blog begins to take shape, I sense it boiling down to problems with the system. The teachers (the majority of them, anyway) aren’t to blame. If your child is struggling in math, if a note comes home from school that makes you angry, if the teacher forgot to email you back, pause before you lash out. Dig down to find some empathy, and think about what that teacher had to deal with that day. Ask yourself if you would put up with an old dirty bathroom with questionable liquids on the floor. And then reach out kindly, with a curious mind rather than an accusatory one. Try to question teachers a little less and say thank you a little more.

I don’t pretend to have answers to the systemic problems in education, but I know that teachers, by and large, are not one of the problems.