Education is not merely an institution that passes on knowledge or the history of a particular country. More significantly, education shapes and produces what type of person a student is supposed to be. Ideally, the student would be a productive, educated citizen able to fully participate in society. However, in our country, that type of student is rarely produced.
During my first year of teaching, I saw first-hand how our schools and our government work together to produce students who are under-educated and unable to fully participate in our society. It was hard for me to believe that anyone with half a brain would put my students in the educational situation I encountered. I taught emotionally disturbed high school students aged 15-20, yet most of my students were reading between a 1st and 6th grade level. My studentsí low educational skills were produced by a combination of their disability and long periods of time spent outside the educational system due to prison terms and severe absenteeism. Yet, I was charged with teaching them material on the 9th grade level.
How were students who had only had a beginnerís level of reading and comprehension supposed to understand material designed to challenge students functioning on a 9th grade level? On top of being academically handicapped by their disability, they were also stunted by the lack of teaching materials my school provided me. I was only supplied with six textbooks, even though there were 12 students in each of the four classes in the Earth Science program. My students, instead of being provided with the services and materials to ensure their educational success, were set up to fail right from the beginning.
Finding themselves forced into such an anti-educational situation, my students came into the classroom filled with frustration and anger at a system that wanted them to fail. As the most immediate representative of that system, I had the joy of being the target of my studentsí rage and anger. Incidents such as a group of female students pushing their way into the classroom and screaming that they hated "white faggots" and that "white faggots should die" (I am white and gay) or a student intentionally dropping a glass beaker on my foot were not uncommon.
On a daily basis I had to decide if I wanted to go back to the hellhole that was my classroom. Did I really want to educate students who seemed to despise me and showed no desire to learn what I had to teach? Could I stand the next round of yelling and screaming and not freak out? Luckily, before I had some kind of breakdown, I learned the vital lesson that all teachers have to learn if they are to continue teaching: it is not about me. All of my studentís anger, frustration and hatred were not really about me. They did not really hate me, because they do not even know me. Instead, they used me as a punching bag as a way to get back at a system that had under-educated them for so long. While coming to this realization did not make dealing with the daily abuse any easier, it did make it possible for me to continue to work with my students.
As the year progressed, things did get better. My students, after putting me through hell, came to accept me and trust me with their education. I had to work on undoing all of the damage to their self-esteem that years of being in special education or years spent repeating the same grade in general education had done to them. The echoes of "we are special ed, we are supposed to act this way" or "we are sped. Ed., we don't do work" still ring in my ears.
After the year was over, I was able to take a step back and start thinking about why my school, and our whole education system, was like this. My school and my students did not end up the way they are by accident. Students do not simply come to school angry at their teachers for no reason, books are not accidentally missing from our classrooms and it is no accident that the average new teacher only lasts for two years in the classroom.
Our schools have been crippled by high stakes standardized testing, tax policies that allow more money to be pumped into white, suburban schools and be pulled out of inner city schools, and military recruitment on our high school campuses. So, instead of creating students equipped with a broad education and critical thinking skills, our public schools intentionally produce students who are pushed into the military and low wage jobs because they lack the skills and resources to get into college or a high wage job out of high school.
While my situation, as an educator working in a broken educational system, may seem bleak, I believe there is still hope. Many youth, like me, who are horrified at our educational system, are becoming teachers. We, along with many other angry educators, are working to stop the hijacking of our schools by standardized tests, discriminatory tax policies and military recruiters. We see our schools as a vehicle for social justice and the creation of educated people -- not damaged students.
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Dynamic Magazine
