I’ve had so many intensely bad experiences with the teachers of my sons, that I want to paint them all with the same brush. And, of course, that is not fair. I forced myself to remember clearly the last 15 years and give this just treatment.
Cooter refused to learn to read in 1st grade, too busy! His middle-aged teacher pounded the phonics into him every day until…he came back from Christmas break and in two weeks leaped to 3rd-grade level reading. He wanted to read the Texas Field Guide to Snakes. He refused to learn how to count 1-100 until…she asked him to paint a snake with 100 scales going all around her classroom. That boy has always had his own agenda. I suspect everyone is like that. But how can a teacher find every kid’s unique personal motivation. The setting: Very expensive private school, Houston, TX.
Kindergarten, 2nd, 3rd, 5th grade: He had a lot of young white female teachers who were so inflexible, stressed, and petty-minded that it’s a shame they were allowed to work with children. Setting: public.
4th Grade: You will be a math success in Janice West’s class, there is no other option. She said, “He makes me laugh every day, and that is very special.” The next year, she became a vice principal at a different public elementary. I heard this very smart, energetic young black woman died tragically shortly after. Her words live on.
He attended a religious private school in 6th grade. That teacher came up with the idea of using a kitchen timer on him, to keep him focused intensely til finishing the worksheets. The racing pace kept him in it. He loved caring for the many animals in her room.
Public junior high was one of the worst periods of his life. Both boys attended this school at different times. Both were lucky to have certain teachers. Mrs. Cox is one of those awesome English teachers with mind-blowing lesson plans. Students watched “Remember the Titans” to discuss racism. Cooter was given a picture of a Jewish boy from the Holocaust and told to create a history for him. Then she revealed where those depicted real people are today. He tells me now he learned more about difficult clauses from her than anyone else.
He had a male geography teacher, teaching for 40 years, who was psycho, mean, unrelenting. He conducted all sorts of crazy social experiments that infuriated me at the time. An entire row was awarded the same grade earned by that week’s “row leader.” This man doled out shame on a daily basis. The wrong colored pencils? You were doomed. He once counted every one of Farnsworth’s correct answers wrong due to punctuation issues or what he felt were erasure messes. He taught everything but geography, and both of my boys loved him. The oldest visits him when he’s in town. This man refused to do what the establishment told him, and I think it made him a little crazy. In his own cranky way, maybe he was teaching why socialism sucks. I’ll tell you what, his students GOT it.
High school: Cooter had another great English teacher. The first day she had students write a poem about their own hands. Another lesson involved analyzing the impact of tv on presidential campaigns. A history teacher’s assignment at the end of the year involved hosting a dinner and inviting historical figures. What to serve, where to seat them, what conversations are they having? A biology teacher inspired him to create an artistic metaphor for a human cell – it still hangs on my wall. A science teacher asked him to bring his guitar and amp to demonstrate how hearing works with his devices.
We come to a teacher he has now who totally understands how his brain works. She devised an entire Creative Writing program for him. He writes stories based on classified ads, weaves random assigned objects and letters together into stories, explains a meal preparation, uses starters like “Officer McCarthy finds a dead body,” “The nation is controlled by…” and “My body…”
Consider all the types of thinking he is pushing through: organizing, following rules, stretching rules, keeping one eye on details and the other on direction, exploring emotions, juggling, storing, finding his own perfection.
Cooter will never be an engineer. I wish the government would understand this and quit forcing their “space race” mindset on everybody. Hermie does not want to build toys, and then he and Rudolph ran away. One size does not fit all.
Farnsworth’s speech and debate coach also deserves mention. I remember a black male student rapping his way to national forensic points and college scholarships. Two young Muslim female students of Middle Eastern descent wrote and performed a brilliant humorous skit focused on common stereotypes held about them.
Mixed in with this “wonderful” is a whole lot of bad: coaches who are blatantly partial, Cooter’s English teacher fired last semester (yes, fired) for sexting nude photos of herself to a male student she was having sex with.
I have to share one “bad teacher” story about the infamous APUSH teacher (AP US History). My oldest was awarded 20s and 30s all year on weekly essays, with no explanation of why such low marks. His students passed their state-required End-of-Instruction exams for this subject a week before the final, so boycotted the final…except for Farnsworth. The teacher was furious. The final consisted of one question: what color are the teacher’s shoes. Farnsworth got it right and earned enough points to bring his F to a D, thus passing the class and getting to graduate, so he could go on to college where 21 hours of advanced standing credit (earned in AP exams) awaited him (6 of them in US History).
I know of another student, a female cheerleader he hated, who got zeros for all the assignments she missed while in the hospital with mono. She didn’t get them in within the two days.
I’ve noticed the worse teachers we’ve experienced teach math. That’s weird, isn’t it, considering the enormous extra-special emphasis on this area by the government. The math teachers for a particular grade “team teach,” all of them teaching the same thing at the same time from the same materials, to stay on careful schedule for the government-required tests. No flexibility, no individual attention. If the child didn’t get it, roll over him. The problem is many aren’t getting it, and they’re left on the road side. Algebra teachers are frustrated trying to teach kids who haven’t mastered computation. Give ‘em calculators, move on, they’re told.
It’s clear to me: the more government involvement, the more messed up it is.
I’m so glad it’s almost over for me. I remember how the “AR” program almost succeeded in making my youngest child never read for pleasure again, the annual Parent Science Projects, the ridiculous amounts of homework that cripple family home life, the arbitrary grading and crushing hateful written comments, teachers who admit they hate boys, all the stomach aches and tears when they didn’t want to go to school.
Reporting truthfully from the front lines of education,
The Stoopid American Mom
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