‘Teaching is like trying to hold 35 corks underwater at once’

 

This quote is likely to elicit a few knowing chuckles.

Not only do we try to hold down student ‘corks’, but also the ‘corks’ of school management, administration, political changes and staff dynamics. 

Yet we lose or risk losing quality educators because the system itself squeezes and frustrates and pulls and stretches well meaning and highly educated teachers in all the wrong directions. There is little time spent in professional development, in continuing to understand how students learn or deeply developing subject knowledge. 

Instead, we are daily faced with the piles of documentation that we must keep but know and are told we will shred and do nothing productive with. The endless discipline issues that arise and interrupt teaching and learning. The enrolment and funding issues that often mean larger, less productive classes. The last minute planning and sketching of curriculum that leaves beginning teachers in the lurch. The pretense of progress and ‘individualised’ learning.

I know that most children will learn something. Some progress will be made somewhere. But we should stop accepting this vague ‘progress’ and turn our attention to strategies that will actually provide true individualised learning for EVERY child. Often the advanced children benefit from time or specialised classes but their brilliant work, we sometimes read and know we have added little to the natural existing talent.  The struggling students dominate the attention of the teachers in classrooms, and then there is the middle group of students, who quite frankly could probably continue learning on their own, from a computer.

And then the time poor teacher continues to feel perpetually frustrated that they aren’t able to really draw out and nurture and encourage the unique potential and strengths of each student- a task that cannot be replaced by a computer. 

I believe the proper and quality education of children is unbelievably important to the future quality of our society. I want to see alternative education systems.  I want to see the expectations of teachers to be truly teaching and not administrators, psychologists or crowd controllers.