“Ping.”
The first time I heard it I ignored the sound and enthusiastically returned to giving instructions for the day’s project to my generally apathetic ninth grade class.
“Ping. Ping. Ping.”
This time the sound was accompanied by giggles and snickers. I identified it immediately. Someone had lifted the beads that I used to illustrate how alleles separate during the process of mitosis and meiosis and was now playfully flinging them around the room.
“Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping.”
Not wanting to appear too alarmed, my first reaction was to pause long enough to let the class simmer down. I then calmly requested that the “alleles” be returned. I waited. A few students shuffled reluctantly over to the supply table, deposited their booty, and shuffled back. I waited some more.
“Sorry for chucking the beads,” one student mumbled.
“You mean alleles,” I corrected.
When I felt like the distraction had been satisfactorily extinguished, I jovially began to address the day’s project, again. We had already wasted ten precious minutes, and I had spent all night planning and preparing. I was excited to get started.
“Ping.”
This was my first period class.
By third period it felt like an epidemic. I locked up the beads. I admonished myself for leaving them out in the first place. It was too late; there were already hundreds of them circulating. I tried humor, anger, even begging to get it to stop. At the end of my last period class, amidst beads whizzing through the air, ricocheting off of every surface, I crawled back to my desk, put my head in my hands and cried.
The bell rang. A few of the kids came up to me and said they were sorry. A few gave me lectures on laying down the law. Most of them hurried out the door, giddy with mischievous excitement. One student stayed after and helped me sweep up the beads.
This was one day of my first and last year attempting to teach ninth grade biology. There were days that were better. There were days that were worse. As the year wore on, disillusionment began to set in. Gradually, I was less likely to stay up all night designing and preparing some magnificent lesson and more likely to hand out a work sheet.
Half way through the year I alerted the administration that I was failing as a teacher and quite possibly having a nervous break down. They promised to visit my classroom more often. This happened for a few weeks, but the visits tapered off and chaos was eventually restored. I began to despise going to work. Everyday, I felt as though I was at war and had been shot full of holes. I made up my mind that I was going to quit.
About a month before the year ended the students had all heard the news.
“Why are you quitting?” they would ask, entirely bewildered, apparently ignorant of the extent of my torment. “You just started!”
“Because I suck at this job,” I replied, committing myself to the principle of complete honesty. “I want to teach you biology. I want you to love it as much as I do, or at least understand it. I want you all to be successful. The truth is, however, that I am unable to make those things happen, because, quite frankly, I don’t know how to handle your behavior.”
“Well,” one student said sarcastically, “they are just going to replace you with some earth hater.”
Okay, so sometimes they were funny, too.
I share this riveting story of downfall and defeat in order to raise a point that I find is omitted from every discussion I hear or read about education reform. Most experts seem to agree that “good” teachers are the most important factor in improving education. Therefore, much of the debate seems to center on how to attract “good” teachers and remove “bad” ones. However, what I believe goes unrecognized in this ongoing dialogue is the dual nature of the teaching profession. In order to be an effective teacher, one must be adept at two very disparate, sometimes irreconcilable, skills. The first is being able to teach and the second is being able to manage.
To illustrate this point, I am now going to brag that I am an excellent teacher. I am creative, interactive, enthusiastic, passionate, patient, and knowledgeable. Teaching biology is more than a job for me, it is a mission. I had been teaching for several years at the community college level, a job that I loved, but I needed full-time work and benefits, and felt I would be “good” with this age group. I, myself, had been a defiant kid who had been highly disenchanted with the prison-like, uninspiring atmosphere of public school. I remembered how this felt and was determined to make my classroom different.
On the other hand, as I believe the story above clearly exemplifies, I am not an effective manager. My disciplinary skills are pitiful. I am easily manipulated. I am a transparent pushover who hands out second chances like candy. Some of these kids scared me; they knew it and took advantage of it. Every day I would write up scores of students, only to find myself ripping these documents to shreds, telling myself that the kid really was not that bad, convinced that I would solve the problem “in house”.
Obviously, without these management skills, my teaching abilities were rendered irrelevant. Despite my sincere efforts, very little biology was learned that semester. Though it is worth noting that it was only a few students who were regularly causing me trouble, I devoted the majority of my time attempting to address behavioral issues that were disrupting the classroom, and very little time actually teaching. Some days I was lucky if one full sentence escaped from my mouth.
So, the question is, where do I fall? Was I a “good” teacher or a “bad” one?
While we are oversimplifying, I would like to address this question by calling for a slightly more complex descriptive model. Instead of the good/bad dichotomy, I would divide up the profession into four categories: those who are good at managing and teaching, those who are good managers but bad teachers, those, like me, who are good teachers, but bad managers, and those that are terrible at both.
The first category is rare. These are incredible, superhero like people. The second category, unfortunately, is more common. I think it is obvious why this must be the case. It is a pretty good gig to get paid to play around on face-book while students sit quietly filling out work sheets all day. There may be a few teachers who fall into the fourth category, but most of them would probably never enter the profession to begin with. It is the third category that concerns me. There must be a lot of us, and I think that we are the ones that leave the profession in droves.
Could good teachers learn how to be good managers? Maybe…or maybe there is something inherently incompatible about these two roles. If a teacher is engaging her students she must be moving around the classroom. She must be physically next to them, conversing with them, asking them questions, keeping them on task. A good teacher rarely sits down to survey her classroom. She cannot always be aware of the spiteful little monsters in the corner, quietly dismantling her microscopes.
It is for these reasons that I propose my very simply solution to the education crisis. For those teachers who want it, I think all classrooms should have two adult figures: one who handles the teaching, and one who handles the managing.
Though there is not the space to lay out the details, I can think of many ways this could be achieved. Somewhat facetiously, my favorite would be paying fully vetted ex-prison inmates, former gang members, or other menacing characters to do the job. We could call them “bouncers”, though I would never advocate grabbing students by their collars and tossing them unceremoniously out into the hallway.
In any event, there is one thing I am absolutely certain of. I am certain that if discipline had been taken entirely out of my inept hands that year, all of my students would have learned…a lot. In addition, I would have loved my job. I would have gone back. I would still be teaching.
There must be a lot of us out there.
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