I recently read two essays, "Against School" by John Gatto and "I just wanna be average" by Mike Rose and I was surprised to find that there were actually adults who believed and cared that there is something wrong with today's educational system in America. Gatto talks about how the students are bored and don't care about what they're supposed to be learning because they do the same thing every year, and the teachers are also bored doing the same thing every year. I wondered how we could create better teachers, like Mr. Macfarland in "I Just wanna be average", and I remembered that teachers have to go to school too. So how do we teach teachers to be better teachers than the teachers they had? Or do we just leave it to chance and get a fluke, Mr. Macfarland the teacher who smokes all the time drinks coffee all the time and looks messy, but got through to the students labeled as remedial all their lives?
Stereotypes and labels are things we learn as we grow older, no child is born thinking "hey that kid is a bad kid and less intelligent than me because they wear black clothes and can't read as well as I can". We start thinking this way when those kids are put into separate classrooms to get extra help. It is not a bad thing to get extra help, but then we need to have children together for more than just recess gym and art. Otherwise they are doomed to be ostracized just as any kid in the "advanced classes" (if they are any) could be. Talent and difficulty should be recognized and treated differently than average, but not in a way that puts kids into a category, that is the easy way. And something I did NOT learn from school, is that "there is a difference between what is right, and what is easy"-Albus Dumbledore.
Writer,
ReplyDeleteYou have a very interesting viewpoint. I felt like the first essay we read was focused all on how the public schooling is downing everyone in the system. You take a very interesting approach by asking all of the questions you asked.
The second paragraph really intrigues me because I FEEL THE SAME WAY! Your view on the stereotyping is very accurate in my opinion because my Advanced classes in elementary school (GT) really didn't do much for me besides for giving me a label of one of the smart kids who always got good grades.
Thanks for sharing this in your blog!
Hi,
ReplyDeleteYou stated one question that I was thinking too and that is, what can we do as students to create a better and more caring teachers. I not saying that we do not have teacher that do not care and aren't good enough. The ratio for good to bad teachers is like 1:8. Also you are right about sterotyping student, but you cant just say its the teachers who are sterotyping the students. Some students are taught right from wrong before they enter school, so they already know what to do, so the student are sterotyping other students also. Hope you understand where I am coming from.
Thank You!
I think that teaching teachers to teach in a good way, would be fantastic! If they cared for what they were teaching about, they'd be more enthusiastic about teaching.
ReplyDeleteReferring to the whole public school thing, I think that if public schools tried to get teachers who cared about learning, not just the ones with the highest marks, they wouldn't be as bad as everyone claims. I had great teachers that cared about teaching and about their students learning. And it's not just with public schools either. You see this in private schools too.
All of my private school friends complain about private schools just as much as we do about public schools. They feel like their teachers are exactly the same-that they don't care about teaching.
I think part of it also has to do with the students too. If the students make it evident that they don't want to learn, the teachers will eventually stop trying to help them learn and just get by.