This is an excellent article by historian and former high school teacher Jack Schneider.
He writes about the students who remember him fondly many years after graduation.
What do students remember?
Here is a sample:
My best teachers taught me how to read, write, and cipher. But they also treated me with kindness and humanity. They made me feel like I was welcome in their classrooms. They instilled in me the sense that I mattered. They inspired me to grow up and be like them. Where, I wonder, are those kinds of characteristics in our current policy discussions about teacher recruitment? Where is that in talk among so-called reformers about overhauling teacher training? Where are those traits in our evaluations of the “value” added by teachers?
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It may be worth noting here that this comment is just the sort one hears about from students who attend the private schools to which “Reformers” send their own children. When “Reformers” subject their kids to their own “reforms,” perhaps the level of discussion about K-12 education will begin to rise.
I am so tired and sick of reading about VAM. It’s BAD…plain and simple.
How many children will be lost, because of a ridiculous evaluation system for teachers? Who will suffer? Answers: this country who likes wars and can’t find humanistic solutions except fear and punishment, which in the end DIES NOT work. Btw, tell the DEFORMERS we know it’s about $$$$$ and control. The DEFORMERS want widgets who can’t critically think.
yes yes yes yes yes
Love Mr. Schneider’s comment!
My students always return to say how much my tests meant to them, but then add that they have especially fond memories of me taping their mouths shut.
After the fundraising, and the magazine covers, the cult of personality and monetizing the data, it’s all really about our most valuable assets, isn’t it?
I was just thinking about this the other day. There is no correlation between my favorite high school teachers and the subjects they taught. I took intermediate algebra my senior year (math was never my strong suit) with Mr. Behm, whom I had known since sophomore year when most of my friends had him. For three years we ate lunch in his room and listened to his conversation with Mr. Lafkas, my senior AP English teacher, and another fave. He played classical music, he’d play comedy albums, he spoke to us like adults, he ignored us, put up with our juvenile humor. He recommended books and movies to us, based on our likes and dislikes, and then discussed them with us. I loved eating in there, it was….comfortable. He was also the “Gate” coordinator, which mainly consisted of a bit of money for enrichment activities. I was smart, but I wasn’t Gate, but that didn’t matter. He felt strongly that being identified as Gate meant little if the kid had no curiosity, so he took anyone who wanted to go. I went on his fieldtrips to the San Francisco Opera, the symphony, plays at the American Conservatory Theater. I learned there’s big world out there (even though I was born and raised in San Francisco!) and I learned that life can be ok. He, and school in general, were an enjoyable escape from poverty, welfare, a mother with mental health issues and a house to help run.
When I finally had him as a teacher my senior year, I was very excited. However, while he was a good enough teacher, I don’t think struggling kids were his forte. Oh, well. I barely passed, and retook the class that summer at a nearby community college where I passed with an “A.” Maybe some stuff did get there!
These two teachers aren’t my favorites because of what they specifically taught me in math and English, most of which I don’t remember. They’re remembered fondly, 30 years later, because they treated me with respect and as someone who had something to offer and say, even at the age of 17.
Really lovely, Laura. Great that you remember and honor these teachers.
Laura, some of my favorite teachers were in subjects that were not necessarily ones I did the best. Here’s a newspaper column I wrote last week about “Mr. Hardy and a student who could not sing”
http://hometownsource.com/2013/09/04/joe-nathan-column-mr-hardy-student-couldnt-sing/
From Mr. Schneider’s essay:
Where is the talk of care in policy circles? Where is the talk of teachers as role models? Those are the characteristics that actually make a difference in kids’ lives.
Just ask David Coleman: “No one gives as —- what you feel or think.”
Kids need models, people they can connect with, look up to, admire, and want to emulate.
I have been fortunate in my life to have had many great teachers, and they all had a few characteristics in common. First, they gave a damn. They were thoughtful, caring people. Second, they were learners themselves. They were passionate about particular, peculiar topics, as real learners always are. And yes, they had high expectations, of themselves and of their students because they valued those students and believed in them. And precisely because of those high expectations, they focused their attention on process and formative feedback, not on summative testing.
So, some of those teachers:
This teacher was fascinated by wave motion. That one thought that Chaucer’s wife of Bath or Shakespeare’s Falstaff was funnier than anything in the oeuvre of Robin Williams or Louis Black. This one had read a gazillion books about Holocaust and would tell one astonishing story after another–about a fellow who spent 2 years in a hole in the ground supplementing his diet with flies he caught and keeping himself sane by inventing a new method for mental arithmetic, about a little girl in the Lodz Ghetto who, not having dolls, would play with bits of dust on the windowsill, giving them identities–this one is the Mommy, this one is the Daddy. These are their children. That teacher was fascinated by computing as a mathematical construct, independent of its physical instantiations and would beam as she explained how to build an adder out of Tinkertoys. That one could show you how you, too, could actually do remarkably good line drawing in perspective using a Durer grid. This one wanted you to learn to write like Robert Browning. That one would lie back on his desk and close his eyes and recite Annabelle Lee (oh, yes, he was an odd one, but he had a point to make: “You won’t get Poe unless you are willing to take his trip–to suspend disbelief, to go there”).
And what one mostly got from such people was the windfall of their unique and often peculiar passions. One learned what it was to be a learner.
And guess what? One didn’t decide to become a learner in order to acquire proficiency on standards CCSS-ELA-RI.7.3a and c.
There is not a child in the country who gets up in the morning and rushes to school because she so wants to do her part to improve her state’s test scores. But there are millions who dread going to school because of the crap curricula and crap pedagogy resulting from the crap standards and crap tests being foisted upon the nation by the totalitarian technocrats who are trying to turn our schools into test-kids-till-they-scream machines.
cx: And precisely because of those high expectations, they focused their attention on their students, on content, on the process that was unfolding in the classroom, and on formative feedback, not on summative testing.
One of the things that made these teachers whom I honor in my memory to this day as great as they were was that because they were learners themselves, they had significant mastery, themselves, of content. And kids said to themselves, “Yeah. That’s interesting.”
The teachers I remember best from high school were those who I was able to talk to before/after class hours. I have one or two teachers from middle school who I still contact via email every once in awhile, and at least one high school teacher I have on Facebook.
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