The Exhaustion of the American Teacher

My favorite high school teacher posted a link to this article on Facebook the other day.  After reading it, I wanted to share some quotes from it.  If you have abundant time, I'd recommend reading all of it.  If you're like me (who had to email the article to myself to read later while I wolfed down lunch), then hopefully you'll at least make time to read some of the quotes from it...

The Exhaustion of the American Teacher
John Kuhn

With the 2012-2013 American school year still in its infancy, it's worthwhile to note that the people doing the actual educating are down in the dumps... They've accumulated invisible scars from years of trying to educate the increasingly hobbled American child effectively enough that his international test scores will rival those of children flourishing in wealthy, socially-advanced Scandinavian nations and even wealthier Asian city-states where tiger moms value education like American parents value fast food and reality tv...

The American child has changed, and not necessarily for the better.  Many shrill voices argue that teachers must change, too, by simply working harder.  The favored lever for achieving this prescribed augmentation of the American schoolteacher's work ethic is fear, driven by a progressively more precarious employment situation.  But teachers by and large aren't afraid; they're just tired...

Americans have explicitly handed off character education to schoolteachers.  Such a practice says a great deal about our nation's expectations of its parents...

Truth is, the problem with the American student is the American adult.  Deadbeat dads, pushover moms, vulgar celebrities, self-interested politicians, depraved ministers, tax-sheltering CEOs, steroid-injecting athletes, benefit-collecting retirees who vote down school taxes, and yes, incompetent teachers -- all take their turns conspiring to neglect the needs of the young in favor of the wants of the old.  The line of malefactors stretches out before our children; they take turns dealing them drugs, unhealthy foods, skewed value messages, consumerist pap, emotional and physical and sexual traumas, racist messages of aspersion for their cultures, and countless other strains of vicious disregard....  We're told not to worry because good teachers will simply overcome this American psychic cannibalism and drag our hurting children across the finish line... yeah right...

Adults -- not merely teachers -- have caused these little ones to stumble, but journalists and nonprofits and interloping government experts offer not a hand to the young but rather cat-of-nine-tails across the backs of their teachers.  Injustice for teachers is confused with justice for kids.

"Waiting for Superman" told teachers they were terrible, callous, and incompetent, that only magnanimous charter school operatives could save victimized children from their rapacious clutches.

[No Child Left Behind] told teachers that would only be considered successful if 100% of their students passed 100% of their tests.

Condoleezza Rice told teachers they were so ineffective that they were a national security threat...

Eric Hanushek told America that larger class sizes will improve education and, gee-whiz, they're cheaper too, so why wouldn't we grow them?  Bill Gates seconded the motion...

The educators I've known aren't the goats they're held up to be.  There are certainly goats, and they've made a terrible mess of things.  There are indeed Americans doing grievous harm to children; they just don't happen to always be their teachers...

When it comes to America's shamefully overflowing crop of ravaged children, [leaders] lead us in a chorus in which we either blame their teachers, or we blame some amorphous like poverty, or we blame no one... And so we fix nothing.



I don't usually get political on here, but after a heart-breaking conversation at Kara and Kelly's the other night where the four of us talked about the broken school system and I went to bed in tears, I thought this article explained a lot.  No, it was not my proudest moment, but I share it just to give you an idea of the mentality of the American school teacher.  We're not delusional.  We know we're working in a broken system.  We want to make a difference, reach those students who have slipped through the cracks so far in their education, but for the most part, we're fighting a losing battle.  We put in three tons of effort to squeeze out an ounce of effort from our students.  And we're exhausted.  We need help... I just don't know where that help is going to come from.