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A ‘Most Outstanding Teacher’ from the Philippines tries to help save a struggling school in rural Arizona
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- Title
- An American education
- Published
- Oct 2 2022
- Word count
- 5201 words
In response to this article, I went diving into my comment history for a story I was sure I’d told here before.
I didn’t find it, but I was surprised by what I did find: this comment of mine, from September 2019, the start of the school year that would end up being cut short by COVID. Here are some of the lowlights:
The good news is that I no longer feel this way. The bad news is that I feel like I’m the only American teacher who’s gone in that direction. Based on the (admittedly limited) pulse I have on the career, most teachers feel worse about their jobs than they ever have before. They’re feeling how I felt in that comment.
The story I came here to tell, though, is a simple one.
The school I started at was almost identical to the one talked about in the article. We had a 70% turnover rate for teachers in their first three years. After returning to teach there for a second year, I had been there longer than over half of the staff.
In my third year at the school, we got a new principal. He made a big show of hiring (well, poaching, really) some of the top talent from other schools in the area in an effort to turn our school around and get us out of our rut. A 10+ year veteran teacher from the district who had won multiple local awards was placed on my team.
A few weeks into school she was completely broken. She became a shell of her former self.
I remember her coming into my room after school one day and just sobbing uncontrollably.
She was undoubtedly a good teacher, but there is only so much a good teacher can do against much bigger and much more powerful forces.
I share this story not to shame her in the slightest. I cried after many a day at that school myself. I mentioned crying in my previous post, and the school that provoked that — the one I’m currently employed at — is a thousand times easier to work at than the one I started in and that broke my superstar colleague. I do not fault her in the slightest.
I share it because Ms. Obreque in the article reminded me of her, and it made me profoundly sad to see the exact same situation continuing to happen in a different school and a different state.
Also, I started teaching in the 2000s. We are now in the 2020s. The only major difference seems to be that, instead of poaching local top talent, our schools have turned to doing it from overseas.
I say all of this because you might read this article and think that it is covering an abnormal standout — a lowlight, but not something necessarily characteristic of our whole country.
I can assure you that the situation shared in the article is more normal than you think.
And it’s more normal than any of us should be comfortable with.
I’m wondering how long has this been normal? And it appears that schools in other countries aren’t the same way. Why not?
My memories are hazy, but it doesn’t seem like teachers had this much trouble maintaining control of their classrooms when I was a kid. I do remember study halls being somewhat chaotic and substitute teachers had it the worst. (It was a suburban / rural school district.)
I doubt you’ll be able to find a satisfactory answer to that question. Data of that type (e.g. disruptive behaviors, noncompliance, etc.) isn’t really available. You could find stuff like disciplinary records, but that only captures incidents that escalated to be handled at a building level. Stuff like folding paper airplanes in class, using the bathroom to get out of class, or breaking pencils to avoid work (this was a particular favorite of my students — I used to take regular trips to IKEA and steal pocketfuls of those golf pencils they give you to write down your item locations to give to my students because they couldn’t snap them as easily) is essentially invisible with regards to oversight.
Same goes for just general indifference or passive hostility towards the teacher, like Ms. Obreque faced.
If you didn’t experience that sort of thing at your school, it’s likely you went to a school that wasn’t severely impacted by negative social forces. Any school that’s hit by things like poverty or teacher shortages is going to break down, and when the school cannot adequately run, students will tend to check out and misbehave more. They’re not only able to recognize when they’re not getting a fair shake and resent that (now more than ever because they have social media and can see what things are like elsewhere), but also they are children without fully developed brains and will make silly decisions and do bad things because they can or because they want to see what will happen or because they’ve learned that doing so can actually give them a sense of control over an otherwise chaotic environment.
Breakdowns in our social and educational structure create these types of environments, and if you didn’t experience that, you’re honestly pretty lucky. I didn’t either as a kid, but as a teacher I got it in full force. I also got to know a lot of other teachers who taught in other districts, schools, and states who saw the same thing I did. I’ve actually taught in two districts in two completely different, non-neighboring states, and because both areas were slammed by poverty, my experience in each school was practically identical to the other. The only difference was that in the second I was better equipped to handle things having learned a lot from my time at the first.
As for different countries, it’s hard to do fair comparisons because there are so many different social and educational factors at play. Coming to any sort of meaningful conclusion is very difficult. A lot of very bad educational policy and conclusions have come from people who just look at different countries and assume they’re comparing apples to apples.
One thing I find surprising is that directly defying a teacher (like snapping a pencil as a way of refusing to work) seems to be a social norm? I don’t remember anyone doing that specifically when I was a kid, but it seems like the sort of thing someone would do if they wanted to get sent to detention. (While I didn’t keep track, there were some kids who we were unsurprised to hear getting detention, and others for whom it would be very surprising.)
Is detention a thing anymore?
Detentions are somewhat out of vogue, but even in schools where they’re in place, they’re only usable for specific, isolated behaviors. If the target behaviors are widespread within a class/school, and if they’re not explicitly misbehaviors and exist in a gray area (as most will be when they’ve reached that level), then detentions will be completely ineffective and will actually likely backfire.
I'm wondering what it takes to reset social norms and all I can think of is when a kid transfers to a new school with different norms.