I am a teacher but I was a student and I’ve never forgot it
School can be boring hell
I am a teacher since almost 30 years and my experience has a wide range of schools, each one with its specific background, each one with its history and traditions, each one with its core beliefs about learning models and tools.
In the latest years, since I became a kind of STEM/STEAM chief and tutor, I’ve been in more than one hundred classes from age 4 to age 16. It’s really exhausting but indeed a great opportunity to develop a big picture about educative relations between teachers and students. I had the possibility to test some of my intuitions in different contexts than my classes and to prove they were right.
Considering that we all spend a lot of our lifetime inside school, I’ve always found that this amount of time could have been better used. In my opinion, there are three main points that seem to define a kind of core for a meaningful learning relation and that it’s what I’d like to share with you, teachers, parents, enrolled students or individuals not anymore implied with any education system. Because there, in the education system, there is our future that is growing up.
Everywhere I go I speak with teachers and they are complaining about students always in the same way: they are not committed, they just warm the chair, they are in another world, they don’t know how to manage failures and so on. I am sure that also students complain about teacher always in the same way, why don’t we listen to what they say?
Last year I began to reply that is the school in another world most of the time: while students try to survive to a contemporary world that is quickly changing and unpredictable, with parents that are mostly too absents or too oppressive, the school is comfortably seat in the middle of the XX century; if we are lucky. Don’t be surprised if they are not responsive, we are telling them stories from a reality that doesn’t mean anything at their eyes using plus or minus the same tools of one hundred years ago.
Would you like to go for surgery in a clinic that still use medical tools from the 19th century? Personally I really wouldn’t.
Of course I speak in general, so don’t be upset please, I well know there are wonderful teachers all over the world, I met many of them and I am still thankful for what they are able to share with students and colleagues.
By purpose, I also won’t discuss here about the benefit or not of digital education or about formal/informal education, might be for another time; anyway the actual pedagogic debate too often still misses some central aspects and sincerely I am discouraged. Furthermore it doesn’t clarify to parents why the education system is less and less effective in developing and promoting wellness and hope and concrete possibilities among students.
I’ll be short, simple and not too diplomatic, I know this already, take it as a way to prod your critical thinking and to challenge your will to answer, here if you like or in your mind.
I wrote about three main points, so here they are.
Point one — Why teachers leave part of themselves at home or wherever as soon as they enter in class?
Let me explain what I mean with an example.
Imagine for a moment Ms. Helen R., she is 36 years old, she has two kids and an husband; she likes a lot drawing, cats and walking in mountain. When she’s home she spends time to join some groups and course online about the things she loves and with her family. At school she is a math and science teacher, point.
Why can’t she share her passions and her skills? Why can’t she involve her students to see the math in drawings, in paintings, in nature? Why does she avoid to surf the web and teach her students that there are online courses and repositories of useful contents, that there are groups of interests where you can find people whom you can share and grow and partecipate? Why can’t she promote to build their own groups of interests inside the school or a research about math or science and art? Why she can’t teach them how to build a blog and analyze statistics and make previsions? Why don’t they go in mountain together and in other places to collect and then study rocks and their beautiful structure? Why doesn’t she use some tools like robots and sensors to program data logging and teach them to read graphics and code?
Why math has to be taught mostly by exercising executive abilities over and over without knowing for what purpose they will be ever useful? How can she teach math if she doesn’t love it? And, if she loves it, how can she teach this way?
I was an excellent math student and I always got a soft spot for algebraic equations (I was the only one by the way), they were like brain games for me, but I understood what they were for at the lyceum (I am Italian) when I was almost 18th. Which kind of twisted game are we playing with our youth?
Would you like to be involved in something without knowing what it is for?
Why do we think that our students should sit hours and hours to learn contents that don’t have any real link to their actual life? In the name of which future, if you don’t engage them to build the future right now? Why they should love to study your subjects if you don’t show up yourself as a life learning student always ready to investigate reality and beyond?
Point two — Why teachers are blind about emotional states?
I ask you now to imagine Mr.John S., his wife has a cancer and she is not really well, he has on his shoulders all the duties about the house and he has to assist his wife when she can’t stand up. Plus his father needs him at least two times a week because he is too old to drive. He is fond of chess but lately he hasn’t the possibility to join the club, too much to do and to handle for one single man: most of the time he falls in bed tired and worried. At school he teaches English and history, he’s always been a good teacher but lately he feels nervous and some days going to school feels unbearable.
Often he enter in the class with no smile and run a flat lesson, the students are less and less captivate and they start to skip studying; their grades begin to fall. Mr. John R. is very upset about student’s performances, this rise his nervousness to the top, also because he is conscious of being not as the same level as before. So, one morning, as soon as he sees Mark drawing on the desk instead of doing the exercise, he explode.
Do you know why Mark got his head around and since a long moment wasn’t able to focus at school? Because his mother was sick, she got a cancer. And why Jennifer couldn’t study last week? Because she got to look after her little brother. And why Melissa doesn’t care about English or history or whatever? Because her father his an alcoholic and her mother is falling apart.
They were doing rather good because Mr. John R. was brilliant to take them for a ride in the large fields of literature or in poetry or in the chaos of the Civil War; but now they were all back inside the present in view of their missing guide.
So why don’t they all stop for a moment and talk about life? Why they can’t support each other and demonstrate empathy and solidarity? Why Mr. John can’t simply excuse himself about screaming for a bullshit? Why can’t he see that many of his students are coming to school with such a weight on their souls that prevent their possibility to learn just as he is now unable to be brilliant as before by his familiar situation? Why we adults allow ourselves to go blind and pretend that everything is fine? Aren’t we missing giant opportunities to teach fundamental skills to improve our lives and our society?
Why teachers can’t be human?
Point three — Why teachers believe they have to know everything about their subject?
Didn’t Socrate say that the only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing?
So I am wondering why many teachers favour close doors instead of open spaces, prefer old subjects to new subjects. I am also wondering why they don’t work together with colleagues of other disciplines and instead they continue to split the world in little pieces of knowledge and then expect that students will be able to recompose a global vision by their own.
Are we teachers afraid to lose credibility? Do we truly believe that credibility and respect arise from the amount of knowledge we suppose to have and not from the humility to admit that we still have a life to learn? Why can’t we learn with our students? Why can’t they teach us something? Why can’t we become good team leaders and show and guide how to build a serious research, how to solve a real problem, how to team up with others to reach a common goal?
Briefly speaking I am very annoyed by all the adults that are asking to the youth some they are not able to give and to do first. And when those adults are also teachers, well, this is a huge trouble that all we should not underestimate.
I never forgot I was a student, I never forgot how much I was feeling alone, I never forgot that I was put behind the blackboard simply because I was asking for a rubber, I never forgot I was six when I wrote down that my parents were always fighting and fighting and none never asked what was going on, I never forgot how much I was bored and detached because no lesson was teaching me how to survive my personal hell, I never forgot that I was punished for reading a book while my teacher was speaking.
I also never forgot Professor S. that spoke to my parents and advised them to let me go, I was 17th and he saw I needed bigger space where to grow; as I never forgot Professor T. when she propose me to work by my own during her lessons to investigate some topics out of the curriculum and then asked me to report to all my schoolmates. And what about Mr.C. that came to advise me gently that I was on my way to exceed the maximum numbers of absences and I was risking my school year? They saw me, they felt I was desperately trying to find a way out and they took my side, they were brave and honest and human. They taught me a great lesson, a lesson for life.
Probably is not the educational system the real issue but that the educational system is too similar to the rest of the society.
