The Beginning of the End

It was Thursday, October 27, 2011 and I was looking forward to Friday the 28th. The students had the day off, the teachers had a workday, and I was hoping to make some sense of the stacks of papers on and around my desk. Things had changed so much since I first entered the public schools in 1979 that it was hard to recognize my profession as the one I had become a part of so many years ago.

When I began my career as an elementary school teacher, I had the liberty to create innovative lessons for my students as I taught them the foundations of reading, writing, and arithmetic. So much of teaching now centered around testing that the world of education seemed to have gone from a place of creative thought and exploration to a robotic delivery of information. I couldn’t imagine that anyone who was in the position to decide what would be taught in the public schools, and how it would be taught, meant for things to end up this way, but my love for my job was dying because I could no longer teach the way I loved. It seemed that the emphasis in the classroom had shifted from the student’s love of learning, to how well the student tested. For me, the emphasis had shifted from creating and delivering stimulating lessons to testing students for data collection, recording and graphing the data, and then being made to use the data to show that the students needed more intense drilling so that when they were tested again, the data would look better.

The weight placed on testing and data collection put a damper on the fun activities we once shared with the students in the classroom. The autumn with Columbus Day, Halloween, and Thanksgiving, the winter with Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, and Presidents’ Day, and the spring with St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, and Memorial Day once brought feelings of excitement and happiness to the teachers and children as they busily worked on fun, creative projects while learning about the history of the United States and its traditions. In many of the public schools these activities were now considered frivolous, or even more disturbing, politically incorrect, and so if a teacher presented a lesson and activity related to a popular U.S. tradition, she did so with the fear that she might be reprimanded for it. Everything taught in the classroom had to relate directly to one of the required benchmarks and evidence was to be written in our lesson plans.

Lesson plans— another area that was becoming difficult for me to keep up with. Weekly lesson plans that used to fill two handwritten pages now took fifteen or more typed pages because of the additional required information that had to be included in our daily procedures. My lesson plans were to be written two weeks in advance, but for me, writing lesson plans that far ahead of schedule was a frustration because they often didn’t go as planned and had to be rewritten, usually more than once. For those who have never been an elementary school teacher, the following are some of the reasons lesson plans don’t go as written:students’ teeth fall out, students wet their pants, students throw up, students tip over in their chairs and get hurt, students get their feet stuck in the rungs of chairs, students have emotional problems and disrupt the class, students have anger problems and scare the class, children with special needs run around the room screaming or sit lethargically when they’re supposed to be working, fire drills, tornado drills, lice checks, technology breaks down, toilets plug up, students c