Way back then

As a storyteller and a technology integration specialist, I get to go into schools and classrooms and see all the changes that have occurred since I retired from classroom teaching in 2006. There are times that I wish that I was back in the classroom and then I look at the stress that teachers today experience as they try to cope with the new core standards and teacher evaluations. I see these excellent teachers work to figure out how they can maximize their individual strengths to prepare students to be innovative thinkers not just good test takers. The multitude of mandates and requirements placed upon them make that difficult. It was much easier, way back then. We didn’t all have to be the same.

I spent my last two years of college as an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Stony Brook immersed in schools. With my Supervisor, Dr. Dennis Littky, I was in a classroom 4 days a week the entire semester, working with teachers that were developing curriculum, creating a new school environment, and working with students.  When I left teaching in 2006, the student teachers that I had to work with never spent a full week with me; they had seminars and classes that cut into the time they could have spent working with kids. Instead, they got to stay with me 3-4 days a week, for about 6 weeks, before they were transferred to another class in another grade for the rest of the semester. If it timed out well, I invited them to parent conferences, to sit in with me. Rarely did they get to witness a faculty meeting, due to classes they had to attend. Their main interaction with other teachers was at lunch.

As a teacher in the 70s through 90s, I was not required to spend much time on testing. The curriculum was recommended, not mandated. This allowed me to spend more time on individual units. Teaching a skill and then letting the students practice with that skill with authentic projects connected to it, without the fear of having to move on to the next topic right away before the one I just taught sunk in. If I didn’t finish the whole curriculum, though frustrating, was okay. Nowadays I don’t even know how teachers can complete all the curriculum expected of them in one year. And they are held accountable for all of it.

I used to do a math project called the $60,000 inheritance project. It took place usually just before Christmas. The students were given an inheritance of $60,000. However in order for them to get the money (tax free) they would have to spend it exactly and include certain requirements, such as a gift for every member of their family, a new car, invest for college between $10,000 and $12,000 in stocks, 2 appliances for their kitchen, toys and food for a family in need, a new outfit of clothes, etc. We spent weeks prior to this activity collecting as many catalogs for the classroom as we could (which is why I did it prior to Christmas). Students had to keep records of their purchases, in some instances make phone calls to get prices and hand everything in, in a neatly organized fashion on the due date. This three week unit, took up most of our time. Students were working on searching through materials for items they need, using calculators and later computers to verify that the things they purchased added up correctly (I had several different ways in which they had to tally their results; all which had to equal each other). In all the years that I did this project maybe 2 or 3 students out of the whole class failed to get the $60,000. It wasn’t a real check, but they worked as if it was, gaining lots of practice in skills that they would need in math, some of which were not in the curriculum. I don’t think that can be done today.

My teammate and I in the 80’s had our classes plan their own end of the year trip. The trip wasn’t necessarily in the curriculum, though one of the requirements is that it had to have some educational value. Compared to the work that they had to do to plan it the final trip was dessert. We elected one leader and 2 co-leaders (the co-leaders had to be male and female) They had to decide on a place for the trip, which required skills such as writing and phoning for information, learning about voting, parliamentary procedure, and consensus in order to make a final decision. Once they had decided on where to go, they needed to decide how to raise money to pay for it. School buses I might be able to get through our school budget, but if they wanted a coach bus, they needed more money. Were we going to eat along the way or on the way home, if it was an all day trip? Once they decided how to raise the money they had to raise it. Letters to parents and community, filling out the forms, making the phone calls through our school operator, etc. They learned how to deal with adversity, especially when they made phone calls to museums, zoos, restaurants and were told that they needed to speak with an adult. I was the facilitator and the person who submitted the final paperwork. The class had to work together for this to be a success. We started in about April and the trip was in June. There were those students that for some reason or another I had to ban from going on the trip. There were some years when the class couldn’t get it together no matter how hard we tried and the project had to be cancelled. Most of these trip plannings were successful and all the ones we went on were great.  To this day ex-students of mine remind me of what happened back then.

These were but two of the things that I would miss being able to do, if I were still in the classroom teaching. Is it the economy, the number of mandates, the new core curriculum, teacher evaluation process, or society itself that has caused these changes? I’m sure they all have a part in it. We live in a different world than when I taught back then. Are the children that are graduating now any better off than the ones that graduated 10 or 20 years ago? Time will tell. Change doesn’t have to be bad. But it is important not to forget what we had and what that allowed us to do and become.