Grading the teachers
I am not a devotee in the Cult of the Teacher. I don’t buy into it being a noble and overworked profession, with brilliant, caring, self-sacrificing saints slaving away to educate and inspire our precious snowflakes. Even when I was in school myself, I recognized that there were a few excellent teachers, a lot of mediocre ones, and some that were rotten to the core. Universal reverence is not deserved.
It’s the end of the school year and grades are finalized. My kid had six teachers this year and I have to say, I wasn’t impressed. One of them was great: very organized, efficient, and straightforward. The kids knew what to expect from him and what he expected in return. A second teacher was pretty good. My objection to her was merely that she injected too much of her own opinion into the subject she was teaching, but she was an empathic person who had a good understanding of teenagers.
Then there were the rest. One who had a very difficult subject to teach, which she made more challenging by using inferior materials. Example: photocopied worksheets that were so blurry, we could neither read the text nor interpret the diagrams. Another was inconsistent, disorganized, and lousy at communicating crucial information. Then, there was the one whose subject was her third language. She often made mistakes and used the wrong language in class, confusing her already mixed-up students.
There was one teacher who was clearly the worst. This was his first year teaching at the high school level; it’s not that he was a new teacher, but he had been teaching another subject at a lower grade level before now. He didn’t know how to take control of a group of unruly, bored teenagers who had no interest in his subject — at one point he set them loose to run the halls to “work out their energy” and he yelled and sent kids out of the room on a daily basis. He lost papers that were turned in to him. He contradicted himself. In a move that infuriated me beyond belief, for weeks he had the students in his class read books they had brought from home on Mondays (and sometimes Tuesdays), effectively decreasing his actual teaching time by >20%. His subject was already a difficult one for Kid Dreadful and this teacher made it harder and more demoralizing.
Maybe we should be pleased that 30% of his teachers didn’t get in the way of the material they were supposed to be sharing. Maybe it’s normal nowadays for parents to spend hours reteaching classwork in the evening if they want their children to have a chance of understanding it. That was our experience this year.
