To be an educator in America is to know that one day you may have to put your body between your students and a gunman.
To be an educator in America is to already know how to barricade doors that don’t lock and to teach children to throw things at a gunman because it’s harder to fire that way.
To be an educator in America is to understand deeply how much this country claims to value children and how hollow those claims are.
Another day, another school shooting. I was sickened by comments from Governor Abbott that this is unimaginable. I was horrified as congressmen suggested these shooters would find another way to harm people if reasonable gun legislation was in place. Maybe, yes, but any other method wouldn’t be as quick or as deadly. I was dismayed as Dan Hodges suggested that the gun debate ended with Sandy Hook in 2011. No, the debate on what America valued more, guns or children, was decided in 1998 in the wake of Columbine High School. The first should have been the last. Instead we are 24 years in the future and it hasn’t changed.
I have known my escape route and hiding spot in every school I have ever worked in. Educators across America are trained what to do in the event of an active shooter. However, unlike fire drills which have brought the school fatalities in a fire down to zero since their inception, active shooter drills haven’t done the same.
To the educators of America, I send you all my love. I know, like me, you will cry in your car and wonder how to enter your school and pretend to be a functioning human in the wake of this travesty adding to the pile of some of the worst three years education has seen. And you will wipe your tears and get out of your car and walk into your schools and greet your students with a smile. Same as always. Because that’s what we do until we can’t anymore.
To Uvalde, Texas: Your children deserved better. Your schools deserved better. Your community deserved better. My heart is with you today and always, as it is with the hundreds of schools and communities that have faced this unspeakable horror and lived with the apathy of the American government.
In my four years of high school I had approximately 32 different teachers. And even though the majority of them were smart people. The fact that only four of them I look up to and trusted tells me there is something wrong with the system. I have had teachers I’ve been afraid of, teachers who fall asleep in class and teachers who will get up and walk out of the classroom without explanation.
out of the four teachers I really trusted, only one of them saw and helped me work towards the future I wanted. One of them was the only teacher who would give me moments to myself when having an anxiety attack. The third was the first teacher ever, to remark on my talents outside of STEM classes to my parents and the last was and still is, the only teacher who curbed my social anxiety in the classroom.
4/32 teachers would equal 12.5% which means that only 12% of the adults who educated the ‘most important years of my life’ were ones I felt did a good job. That would register as an i on a report card because the number is so low they wouldn't bother writing it down.
think about that for a second, then think about the fact that the teaching system works based on seniority, not talent.
I support religion fully. I just want to say that so you dont think im actively trying to disrespect anyone, but please. For the love of god, please dont send your kid to a religious primary school if you have any other non-ab/sive options. My freind seriously did not know that the earth was older than 3000 years old until she was 10. I just- it makes me so ducking mad that theyre out spreading this kind of thing and not specifying otherwise.
Imagine the damage it could do for more serious topics and for kids with a closed mindset. Youre taught literal proven science after religion in most cases. I mean, feel free to do what you want, this is just a warning and opinion. Maybe im just biased though because i had the absolute worst time at a christian school though, so take what i say with a pinch of salt.
To people in favour of banning fidgets/spinners in schools:
It’s detrimental to neurotypicals, you say?
The non-ableist response is “then they should stop using it”, not “then we should ban them and keep them from kids who need them”.
That’s like banning prescription glasses for everyone because it’s harmful to the vision of kids with 20-20 vision, without any regard for the impact on the health, well-being, and quality of education it would have on people who need glasses.
That's like blaming prescription glasses for making the vision of kids with 20/20 vision blurry.
They're not meant for kids with 20-20 eyesight any more than fidgets are meant for neurotypical kids.
As most of you know, I teach the core sciences (Bio, Chem and Phys) to high school students with learning disabilities. My school has several levels of education for students with learning deficit IEPs: regular education classes, resource classes like mine, Life Skills for students who will require a carer for their entire lives, and a mid-way point between me and Life Skills that’s for students who need entirely different curricula for their core classes. This is a lot better than some schools, though we don’t do inclusion classes. However, my position in particular is poorly understood. Read on to learn why.
Here’s the problem. Resource Science is unfortunately rare. Core classes need support systems, period, but it’s also an issue because Science is where reading disabilities and math disabilities come together and become more than the sum of their parts. So often times, the idea that my classes will differ substantially from a typical RG class on the same topic is hard for administrators to grasp.
This morning I received an email from the Science Department Head, a teacher I have known since I first entered this high school in 2004. It told me and 2 other teachers (all chemistry teachers for at least one period) that we would be all using the same syllabus, doing the same lessons, holding the same labs and going the same assessments on the same days at the same times.
-record scratch-
I started checking in with my principal, my SpEd department head, my chemistry-teaching coworker, and the science head. Principal started trying to placate, as expected. Coworker sided with me. Science head pitched a tanty and began going on about how they were just trying to make things easier and implied that my new classroom is contingent on doing as I’m told. SpEd department head sided with me and helped throw the academic shit fit that ensued. Right now we’re on a ceasefire until we can meet in person next week and discuss this.
What’s the problem?
Pictured here are three sections of basic lesson planning I set up this summer. One each for my three core subjects. Please admire them. I put a stupid amount of effort into them.
You’ll notice that I don’t have sections listed as ‘lecture’ and that there are a wide variety of (sometimes oddly named) activities and assignments. You’ll notice there aren’t really final exams. Station activities happen often. Vocabulary features heavily. There are different sorts of media available.
A vast majority of the students I teach have been diagnosed with either ADHD or autism. I have definitely had kids on the spectrum who thrive on sage-on-the-stage lecturing, but for the most part, these students do not respond well to traditional lecture-style teaching. And honestly, neither do I. I don’t teach with textbooks for this reason- lots of kids, but especially kids with reading deficits, do not learn well or easily from a textbook.
If I had been told that we were going to have a master syllabus and curriculum, I would have volunteered to help design it. In doing so, I could have made sure that modifications and accommodations already existed in the lesson plans and that fluid, multi-modal lessons could be changed for student needs at a moment’s notice. Instead, I was told ‘here’s what you’re doing and when’ without any attention paid to the needs of my students.
Now, I’m salty as hell about all the work I put into planning and prepping being ignored. But I’m a lot more angry about what this says about how my students are being considered. Because they aren’t being considered. The amount of content this teacher wants to cover is not feasible for my students in the time allotted. There is a first-day activity that’s heavy on the reading comprehension and which is designed to fool students into believing false information. This is a BAD IDEA with my students. Trust is big with them, and if I tell them ‘this is totally the truth’ only to come back an hour later and say ‘no it’s not and you should know better’ I will have ruined the whole year for all of us.
I suspect I’m going to win this fight, because my state has recent legislation concerning discrimination against these populations, and because my students’ IEPs are federal documents, which take precedence over an older teacher’s ego. But what if I didn’t have the guts to stand up for this. What if I was a teacher who wanted the easy way out and just accepted the lesson given by the department head? What if I was new and didn’t know?
My kids would have suffered. And in many schools, they do, because education isn’t designed with them in mind. It’s designed deliberately withOUT them, because factory-model education is easier to design and implement. It’s bad for teachers and bad for students, but it’s easier and so it continues on.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go drown my fury in fresh figs.
This is a topic I want to touch on briefly. I might come back to this from time to time.
When you hear that people “dropped out” of school, your first thought it either college or high school.
Yet, there are some who drop out when they’re in middle school.
MIDDLE SCHOOL.
If that doesn’t give you a sense of how the education system is doing something wrong to help students succeed, I don’t know what do tell you.
I have nothing against those who drop out. Everyone has their struggles. I wish those regulating how school operated understood that everyone’s background is different, and that we all don’t have the same resources available.
It’s easy to compliment those who regularly do well, but it takes extra effort, time, dedication, to help those who need it.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t help those who already present themselves to do well, but we definitely should be making the effort to help those who struggle.
And a major part of that problem starts from schools.
