I've been working on a project in Raleigh to unite an entire elementary school with writing. At its conclusion, I will have written with every child and teacher. One of the project goals was to hold writing workshops to teach teachers new ways of thinking about writing. But I'm learning much more than I'm teaching.
I'm learning how teacher time is chopped into a myriad of tiny bits because of the increased requirements which come from the school, county, and state. These are heaped on top of an already long list of demands coupled with existing parent and child needs which keep intensifying. It's clear to me now teachers have no time or energy to try out the writing process I'm suggesting. In one week six teachers apologized to me about missing my workshops explaining that a surfeit of meetings left them no planning time. It didn't take me long to realize how ill-conceived these workshops were and to see them as just one more item on a huge teaching to-do list.
I began to greet teacher apologies with a desire to better understand and I heard some instructive stories. One teacher told me that she thinks teacher work days are a joke; with mandated workshops for professional growth, she has no real time to plan or organize. Another told me that two years ago she'd had no problem fitting everything she wanted to teach in a year's study, but new demands have made it difficult for her to feel successful in covering the same studies meaningfully. Teaching requirements make for chopped up time that only allow her to give students small tastes. Just when she's gotten them excited, she must move on and she's almost always left with a hunger to teach more. A seasoned teacher is mentoring a student teacher. While she loves seeing the beginner's enthusiasm and eagerness to learn and try new ideas, she wants her student teacher to know the realities, too. She is trying to give her an honest picture of how demands can siphon off creative spirit without talking her out of the profession.
Crammed schedules, added paperwork, and increased demands mean there's neither spare time, nor energy to contemplate new ways of thinking. I believe this results from turning our schools into businesses. In some ways seeking measurable results has brought good changes. Quantifying, understanding, and assessing has taught teachers much about ways to improve their effectiveness. But in other ways education has become infected with the Bigger, Better, Brighter that characterizes most commercial enterprises.
Schools are competitive. They want to possess the newest technology, the best information sources, and the most up-to-date strategies. Success is measured by test scores, so focus is constantly on the product. They've been contaminated with the "need to have" philosophy that seems to drive the world.
As education becomes a business, the art of teaching, which I consider the heart of learning, is obscured. Teachers aren't given the elements crucial to artistic growth. Artists need time to slow down, consider, experiment, and create. To true artists process is more important than product. When artists develop an exciting new piece, they want to communicate what their discoveries. New demands rob teachers of time for communication with colleagues, individual professional growth, or important time to restore themselves and come up with innovations. We deny teachers the opportunity to practice an art form when we turn education into a business.
I wonder what we're really teaching our children when there is not enough time to completely cover one subject before we must jump to the next. Do they see skimming-the-surface as the way to learn? With the sheer expectations of all these little bits of information to be mastered, children have no time to make connections or experience deeper, more satisfying study. In a decade of teaching, I've seen children's attention spans shorten. Like most teachers, I believe much of this behavior comes because children are trained by television to think the world operates in fifteen minute segments.
But lately I wonder how we contribute. As far as I can see, children have no sense that their lives are being crammed fuller and fuller. This amazes me for I can hardly believe the stress increases I've seen in schools in the last decade. Children just accept this as the way education works.
If education is made into a business and children are its product, I think we'd better worry about our ultimate end result and reconsider what kind of schooling we're selling our children. Susie Wilde lives, teaches, and writes in Chapel Hill