"Good Ideas" in Education

I taught fourth grade for eleven years. I loved teaching. I loved the kids. I loved trying to meet each child’s special needs. But eventually, it became overwhelming.

At one time, schools had fewer demands on teachers and society had fewer expectations of schools in general. But our country’s expectations just grew and grew and demands on the system grew and grew. Everyone kept getting ‘good ideas’ about what could be done in school. So, what was expected from schools continued to grow. School become a babysitter so it couldn’t close down. It provided meals for the needy and a safe haven for the threatened. But those were just the growing cultural requirements of schools. Professional development also overflowed with good ideas! And no question, they were good ideas. I found them to be very inspiring. I attended a conference on differentiation - the tailoring of each lesson for each child - and I was excited by this approach. But the hours I spent trying to prepare the next social studies unit to accommodate this idea were unbelievable. I mean I was at school late every night and still took work home. Then there were additions to the curriculum! Everybody’s good idea about what we could teach kids. I kept track. Every year I taught school, something new was added to the curriculum, and NOTHING WAS TAKEN OUT! Sometimes it was just one lesson, a SAPTE day at school. But other times it was an entire health curriculum or a new technology curriculum. Administration told us to just try and fit it in with everything else, piggy-back a health lesson with a literature or social studies class. But that was just wishful thinking; if you increase material to teach you need to increase time in the day to teach it.

Oh, and teaching instruction should include all the new, good ideas that people came up with: literary circles, core curriculum, curriculum mapping, group work, centers, different spaces where kids can work etc. Lectures and note-taking were no longer enough, and I agreed. I didn’t want the kids sitting in their desks all day listening to me talk, but it took imagination, knowledge, resources, and TIME to create different instructional approaches.

Another thing that irked me was educational research that said smaller classrooms had no effect on a good education. All I could think was they meant testing scores remained unchanged in smaller classrooms. The size of my class ranged from sixteen to twenty-six children and I'm here to say that smaller classrooms were much easier to manage. Each child got more attention. There was space to move around in and to learn and create in. You could allot more time to connect with parents. You could actually read and respond to what your students wrote. It was quieter. There were fewer discipline problems to deal with. The list was endless. But schools can’t afford to hire more teachers, build more classrooms, and provide for smaller classes.

I found if I wanted to manage everything, my students, my instruction, my curriculum, differentiation, reading my students writing, everything that was expected of me by administration and the community, I was often at school from seven am to seven pm. And when I arrived at school unprepared, I didn’t enjoy teaching. I didn’t enjoy not being able to meet the expectations of my administration, parents, students, and myself. I realized I was burning myself out.

I didn’t quite know where to lay the blame for the exhaustion I felt teaching fourth grade. I couldn’t lay it on the administration. They were at the mercy of ‘good ideas’ as much as I was. I suppose we have to lay the blame on good ideas. I think a good idea would be to have fewer good ideas.