The coming changes

MsB is the pseudonym for a second-year high school English teacher in Brooklyn.

The thought of next year scares me. All we talk about are the changes that are going to be made. Naturally, there is always room for improvement. The current educational system isn’t exactly flawless. The more experienced teachers shrug off the worries about next year. They’ve seen a million changes in the education system. It’s all the same to them. For me, a newer teacher, I am shaking in my newly pressed teacher pants. No superintendent? No one above our principal? What will this do to our school?

Again, people don’t seem alarmed. No teacher believes that it will affect their teaching at all. How can this be? The thought of other companies giving us curriculum and deciding what we will teach isn’t scary? Will the changes in administration trickle down and affect our teaching?

There are many options that each school can take. Right now, my school is leaning towards Empowerment. Sounds like a good thing. The language these politicians use always amuses me. Empowerment. They are dangling the thought of freedom over our heads, but really there is nothing empowering about it. If we fail with this newfound freedom, which many schools will, there is the threat of being closed down like so many of our neighboring schools. Our principal assumes if we form a network with similar schools, we can band together and change the world. Our principal wants us to join the best schools in my borough. My thoughts are that they won’t want us in their network. We are by far not one of the best schools in Brooklyn. We will surely only hold them down. And once we have a network, then what? See who in our network has the largest suspension center? Compare broken-down classrooms? Share our one working overhead projector?

As far as individual teachers are concerned, there is talk about how each teacher will be graded. There are plenty of rumors going around about how the schools have to account for the progress of every single student. Each student will have their own barcode (we all knew this was only a matter of time), and they will measure how much they progress and how much they learned. If your students don’t seem to have improved, then that teacher gets a bad grade. I have 170 students that I teach on a daily basis. Can I improve all of their ability to think? Maybe, but that’s not what I’m being graded on. Can I get them all to pass a test? Maybe not, but that is what matters in the end.

Is it wrong that all I want to do is teach? These tests get in the way of that. Teaching towards a test does not actually involve teaching. When you are preparing for a state exam, it’s explaining a formula to the kids. If you do A, B and C, you will pass. Instead, we should be focusing on thinking. We should be wondering how we can get our students to think critically about the world. There is already too much on our plates. We have to teach Regents prep, novels, poems, stories, writing, vocabulary, spelling, grammar, PSAT prep and more Regents prep. Therefore, we must be creative in our teaching methods.

I hate to be so negative, but in all of the conversations about the changes, no one ever seems to be thinking about what is best for the children. I understand that there needs to be some standard by which we can assess our children, but aren’t there other ways of doing this?

In my two years of teaching, I never once thought my job was in jeopardy. But soon, I fear, tenure will be a thing of the past, no one will be safe, and the youth that are the future of our country will grow up to be great robots that can fill out a bubble sheet with their eyes closed and one hand behind their backs.

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