Chapter Four

Sound Familiar?

The following is a description of what often went on in my classrooms during the first few years of my teaching.  I have to be honest, but when I think back on it I realize that I was just modeling the behavior I saw when I was a public school student and what I was exposed to in the Teacher's College.  When I began high school teaching I noticed that most other instructors perpetuated a similar kind of classroom environment.  For that matter, this kind of classroom is still what you will see in most high schools today and is replicated in movies and on television.  Why is the media is not willing to expose you to alternative learning and teaching classrooms?  Simple.  Either they do not look for progressive educators or they wish to maintain the status quo. Is there an agenda to be followed? 

Students are sitting in straight rows facing the front of the room completing yet another worksheet, not unlike Mr. Ditto in the film, “Teachers.”  I am sitting at my desk in the front of the room figuring out questions for the next examination:  true/false, multiple choice (guess), fill in the blanks, and matching.  Maybe even checking my email or on the Web.  Often during my coaching tenure, I would be figuring out the line-up for that day's soccer match and going over some new strategy I gleaned from a coaching manual.  I actually witnessed other coach/teachers doing the same and figured it was a normal thing to do. Some of the students would be busily looking for the prescribed answer in the five-pound, glossily illustrated district approved textbook while others slept, talked to friends, or did homework for another class. 

I did not know it then, but I was actively subjecting many of these children to a form of academic terrorism.  What is agonizing is that it I allowed it to continue, and still does in hundreds of classrooms around the country.  Students coming out of this learning environment face a tough future after high school.  They simply will not have the tools necessary to advance in a world where accessing, analyzing, and applying information in a new context are essential skills (Stiggins).  

Instead of integrating multiple perspectives into the area of study, presenting content that is broad-based and demands problem-solving, having students develop research skills and team consensus-building, integrating basic facts with critical thinking, and integrating diverse disciplines into a seamless curriculum, I just did as I observed and was taught. Why was this deficiency in my teaching not noticed by someone? 

Studies clearly show that most administrators, principals, and department chairs are not trained in assessment either of students or of teachers, so the system endures by feeding on itself.  Excellent teachers often get frustrated by the bureaucratic games that diminish their instructional skills and are beginning to leave the profession.  A veteran social studies teacher in New York remarked on how Common Core is impacting him, “I now find that this approach to my profession is not only devalued, but denigrated and perhaps, in some quarters despised.  Creativity, academic freedom, teacher autonomy, experimentation and innovation are beingstifled in a misguided effort to fix what is not broken in our system of public education….  I realize that I am not leaving my profession, in truth, it has left me….”

What seems to have happened is that mediocrity becomes the norm.  So, when school districts advertise through their brochures that their students are being taught critical thinking skills, the likelihood is that there may be some of that going on in a few classrooms, but for the bulk of the students, it ain't happening.  I am not suggesting that teachers who are one-dimensional in their teaching should be immediately removed because if they were, one third of the classrooms in this country would be sans instructors.  But, as teachers it is our personal and collective responsibility to continue to study professional literature to stay in touch with current thinking in the fields we teach (Stiggins p.59)

            I do not wish to languish on the current problems we see in high schools because I think it is more important to focus on alternatives to tradition.  But, it is necessary to at least give you a glimpse of what is seen on a daily basis and raise the question of why do we continue to see more and more of classrooms where students are dulled by continuous worksheets, traditional and incessant assessment, and department chairs, school administrators, and school boards perpetuating and promoting the status quo.  In order to move away from this tedium, it is prudent, instead, to replace it with a democratic problem-posing, integrated curriculum.