I do not teach in a poor school, nor do I teach in an affluent one. I teach in your middle of America school, where we have our constraints but do not have to spend our entire paycheck buying classroom supplies. I am lucky in some respects, yet sheltered in others, so I wonder whether I can truly form an opinion on movies like "Waiting for Superman.". Can I judge what this movie portrays when I have not taught in a fail factory or been labeled a bad teacher?
What I can respond to though are statements such as the one at the end of the movie, "Our system is broken...and it feels impossible to fix.". Statements such as this does nothing to fix the problem but perpetuates the pervasiveness of just how horrible the American school system is. This angers me. The entire American school system is not horrible, there are entities of it that are, and yes, those entities need to be fixed but is throwing out the entire system really the way to do it?
The preferred method of fixing anything in education seems to be to throw it all out and start over. You see it in school districts all over; desperate to fix falling scores or inadequate growth, money becomes the solution. Buy a new program! Buy a new test! More training! More supervision! More, more, more! It appears we are choking ourselves to mediocrity and then wondering who is to blame for the lack of oxygen?
So my plea is simple; enough with the reform! We have been reformed to death these last many years. Stop changing the strategies, stop changing the methods on how to test us and just let us teach. Let me teach. Give me time to reach a deeper level with my students. Give me time to let them create and explore. Give me time to differentiate for all of my students and not just the easy ones. Give me time to speak, to listen and to develop. Some may say that time is all teachers ever have been given. Not true; our time to learn with our students has been taken away minute by minute by new curriculum implementation, standards, tests and more guidelines. So before you tell me to change again, give me time to learn how to teach this way. Then I can become a better teacher and prove to you that our system is not impossible to fix, just give me time to teach.
