R-E-S-P-E-C-T

This week marks 2012’s Teacher Appreciation Week.  It made me think about appreciation and what it is I think teachers really need.  In my opinion, what we need, what is truly missing from Rick Snyder's approach to public education, is respect.  Michigan's politicians pay lip service to respecting the education process, to respecting what teachers do everyday, to respecting the necessary institution that allows all children the opportunity to improve their lives through the life of their minds.  We need less theoretical respect and more practical respect from the folks in Lansing.

Here is the big disclaimer:  I know way too often, we teachers bring this disrespect upon ourselves.  NPR interviewed Davis Guggenheim, the director for Waiting for Superman, and he said something I often ponder.  He said that his most sincere intention was to actually honor teachers rather than attack them.  He said, and I am paraphrasing, he was trying to jump start a diseased system and show how important education is in the lives of the average American.  The quote that hit me revolved around the trust parents instill in teachers everyday.  Loosely, he said that everyday, teachers need to ask themselves what sort of teacher they will be that day.  When my students walk into my classroom, who will they see?  What teacher will greet them?  That question directs who I am in my classroom. By the laws of averages, it stands to reason that not every teacher does, but I think Guggenheim and way too many politicians have limited the sample and focused exclusively on the Bad Teacher circa Cameron Diaz, 2011.

Guggenheim is correct on one level, but completely wrong on another.  He painted with a broad stroke.  In my school, I believe that 99% of my peers are 100% committed to their job.  When we gather on our off-time, we always still discuss the job, and as we face the looming change our current government is instituting, we are actually discussing how to do our jobs differently. 

Differently.  Not better.  I think what we do is very, very good.  We currently challenge our students to think and act and grow and become academic, life-long learners.  However, we need to start doing what we do so well in a different way.  We need to plug in and start making the technology our kids depend upon work for us instead of working against us.  We need to engage the student on their level and stop competing with all the Angry Birds and Words with Friends that distract the contemporary learner, both kids and adults.  Changing for the learner isn’t a new concept.  Sesame Street knew that in the 1970‘s, and if I had time, I publish a thesis tracking how teachers from antiquity to today have incorporated the students’ interests to enhance learning.  This new tech revolution isn’t really new.  It is the pressure and timeline haunting contemporary teachers that changes how today’s game is played. 

Here is where the idea of practical respect comes in.  We need the respect afforded any professional who is seeking to improve how they do what they do to benefit not only a few people, but the whole of society.  Here is where I feel completely disrespected.  I am many things, but I am not stupid: impossible timelines, impossible classroom numbers, impossible percentile jumps our students are supposed to make on standardized tests designed to have a specific percentile fail.  I am not stupid and I know we are being set up to fail.  In that failure, our students will suffer, our cities will suffer, our state will suffer, and our country will suffer.  

By adding respect to appreciation, those who pass laws, which will ultimately help us change-and-save or fail-and-lose, will give us the necessary leeway that ensures success rather than failure.  Respect infuses trust into the process of change. Respect would negate the established antagonistic relationship that expects failure rather than success.  I want appreciation, but I would much prefer respect. 

Expectations

Yesterday, I assigned a difficult poetry explication to my AP Lit students.  It is May, and they have three classes until the AP test (block scheduling makes counting off days much more optimistic).  After that, they will be working on a cutting edge iPad pilot project.  In short, they all see the finish line and are becoming restless with any and all work.  A bright young lady was struggling to understand both her poem and the assignment, and as she spoke with me, I asked her some clarifying questions.  As she began to understand what she needed to do, she starting making some very astute, academic observations about her poem.  I am a rather excitable lady, and because her intellectual prowess impressed me, I shrieked  calmly said "Yes!  That's it!  See...you can do this assignment."  She stepped back, shaking her head furiously.  "No! No!  Don't do that," she said.  "Don't have high expectations for me.  I don't like that."

We both laughed, she went back to work, and I turned to help another student.  I retold that story to my best friend, and we had another good laugh.  But I totally understood what this student was saying.  She wanted my expectations lowered so she would be assured of a good grade or, at the very least, an easy last few classes.  She wanted my expectations lowered because mediocrity is easier than excellence.  She wanted my expectations lowered because if my standards are low, failure isn't possible.

I teach in a public high school, and contrary to what way too many politicians, pundits, and lobbyists might be saying, teachers' expectations are NOT too low.  What we have, though, is a shifting cultural norm.  Paper and pencil has been replaced by tablet and laptop.  The idea of "reading, writing, 'rithmetic," of specific norms by which we quantify and qualify our successes needs to remain, but the dissemination of information needs to change.  Adding technology without shifting our pedagogical approach is ridiculous.  We cannot just hand students tablets or laptops or the gadget of the week and expect new outcomes.

As a teacher, I must shift my expectations.  I have expected myself to be the proverbial "sage on the stage."  I need to expect my students to shoulder a vast majority of the learning while I shoulder the responsibility of facilitator.  It is going to be a drastic change for me: in 13 years, I have developed some good, entertaining, captivating lectures.  I will miss having 35 eager diligent faces looking at me, responding to my jokes, writing down my words.  Letting go of the control of my classroom worries me, and I know I will spend hours I don't have building lessons based upon the Universal Design for Learning.  But I have to expect this because this is an inevitable change.

Like my students, it would be easier for me to beg for lowered expectations.  I am already tired thinking of the work that lies in wait for me and my school district.  Still, like my student, if the expectations were lowered, I would be disappointed.  Like her, I am kinda proud that somebody expects excellence from me.  It makes this job hard, and like Tom Hanks so astutely asserted in A League of Their Own, "It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard... is what makes it great."