Let's get Real

I’ve been teaching for 22 years. I remember when I just started the job was “easy”: all I had to do, on my opinion of that time, was to transfer everything I knew onto the students. The roles of all participants were clear: teacher gives the students his/her knowledge and the students come to class to collect the knowledge. The image of a classroom was clear too: the students are sitting at their desks listening to the teacher. If the teacher asked a question the students had to raise their hands and the teacher would pick one person to answer the question. I don’t think there are many people who can see a different image of a school, but the number is growing and the time came for you to realize the defects of this fairytale image of a hypocritical pretense you still call a school. Kids are dropping out in record numbers and instead of thinking how to change and adjust to the kids' needs we are planning how to bring more police to schools. Many books are written and read about the fairytale of love and marriage. The “happily ever after” is the rest of your life and the wedding is just one day from your past or your future. Your task is to make it happy life with or without this one day. School is like that too. School is a part of everybody’s life. Some people chose to stay and live this life as adults by becoming teachers, but the majority will not stay and didn’t choose to be at school. Circumstances, like laws, parents, society made them to be here. So the role-playing that all kids come to school to learn and teachers come to school to transfer their knowledge onto the kids is falling apart just like the fairytale of “happily ever after” is falling apart for their parents. We are adjusting to the adults problem by getting used to divorce as a part of life and take each case as individual couple problem, but we still treat the kids as a group not as individuals; and we still are trying to make them stay in school instead of making school relevant to their real life. I am sorry that I started from something that seems negative. It is not negative, it’s an old fairytale. Fairytale is never negative it’s just not real. It’s a beautiful image of our great-grandparents of how they saw happiness. They had to work from early morning to late night. The labor was very hard: cut trees, break rocks, wash cloths by hand in cold water, dig soil, wax floors, plow, harvest, sew, weld, build, lay railroads and highways, etc. etc. etc… They wanted their kids to have a childhood, to play and learn. They fought for their kids’ right not to work until they become adults. For too many of them happiness associated with the time they did not have to work. Times changed. More and more people find happiness at their workplace. More and more people go to work because they love what they are doing. More and more people are proud of their achievements and want their kids to achieve even more. This is why educated parents push their children to go after higher and higher education. This is why uneducated parents want their children to be the first generation in the family with high school or college degrees. We have to thank technology for making that possible. Thanks to technology we do not have to dig soil or plow the fields with our bare hands. Thanks to technology we wash and dry our cloths with just a push of 2 buttons. Thanks to technology we can transport ourselves from one place to another without walking. Thanks to technology we build, sew, weld, plow, harvest, and even calculate by dialing, switching, and clicking. We don’t even have to cook every day any longer. We have new problems though. We got fatter, we poison out bodies with pollution, we react to a little pollen with an allergy like it is a bio-attack, we consume antibiotics and hormones with our foods, our air is filled with harmful invisible rays, we cover the constant noise of our environment with loud music or TV broadcasting. I am not complaining, I love every moment of my life and I would not exchange it to anything else. I am just trying to be real. For every need and every problem we, humans, got we have people who would take care of it. There are farmers to grow our food, there are cooks who will prepare it, there are vendors who will deliver it, there are drivers who will transport goods, there are sewing and knitting machine operators who will make out cloths, there are doctors and nurses who will take care of us when we are sick; there are entertainers and sportsmen and authors who will keep out minds occupied ;) There are lawyers and judges who will help us to solve a conflict. Unfortunately, there are also politicians who will deepen a conflict and journalists who will play on a controversy. But for them we have activists who will fight for our rights and create even more controversy :) There are scientists who are trying to answer our current questions and solve some of our problems. Of course, while they do that they create new questions and new problems for the future generations to search for more answers. For each of these occupations people have to learn, study, get education. For each of these occupations people will have to practice how to operate a specific piece of technology. The school is still very much needed, maybe, even more than ever before. What is the role of school in this circus of life? And what is my role as a teacher? Am I still required to transport my knowledge onto my students? What part of my knowledge is so valuable that worth to be transported? How do I know that the knowledge I give them is useful not just litter for their young brains? How do I know that they learned? Do tests measure learning? Too many questions, too few answers. Life is real, life is messy, life is unruly, life does not have all the answers to all of the questions and if school is a part of everybody’s life it should be as messy and as diverse as life itself. Your teacher should not give you the answers to all of her questions; she should help you to search for your answers to your own questions. Then and only then we’ll bring up generations of happy and content people. People who know themselves, can answer to their questions, and stand for their believes. A teacher is not a boss; neither is he/she a friend. I am a servant of the future. When I give my students a mark on the report card this mark reflects how well I served and how happy the future will be. Believe me, the students do not want an “A” for nothing. They will lose any respect for a teacher who gave them a good mark for nothing. They always know when they deserved a real “A”. Today I think that the role of school should be helping the students find their "calling". I know how hard, sometimes impossible this task can be for some people. I know that for majority of the students we will not find that "calling". But we’ll make the first step, we’ll help the young person to start learning about him or herself. The more they understand themselves and each other, the more excepting they are of themselves and each other, the happier beings they will be. Here, I will try to start a new fairytale for the school of the future. After a while it’ll become as hypocritical as the current fairytale is, so what. Its life and life never stays the same. I am surprised the current school survived for so long.