Thoughts on Education

I've been working for about two months now, and in my limited time in the school, I've come to see a lot of aspects of our education system that are incredibly frustrating. Many times on the ride back from work, Tou Fue and I will just be discussing our day and we'll end up critiquing flaws in our education system.

Ask any teacher at any level and they will probably tell you a big reason they decided to go into this field was to impact the lives of the students. That's all well and good if teachers are given the freedom to run their curriculum based on the state standards and benchmarks. Unfortunately, teachers also have to bow to the requirements of the administration who are trying to run the school as effectively as they can.

I totally understand that running a school is a thankless job because there are definitely money shortages that can only be met by having teachers focus on certain areas while cutting down on others. Unfortunately, that overhead decision often comes at the expense of student learning. For example, in the high school, the administration decided that homework should not account for more than 5% of a student's grade. Their reasoning is that a majority of the students in this district have to work after school, and their purpose as a school is to "cater to the community". What it tells me is that the district is worried about dropping their student failure rating by artificially boosting student grades. I also heard that it is common practice for teachers to "preview" tests by going over questions days in advance which leads to higher test grades. This is by no means condemning those actions, in fact, many of them actually have very innocent intentions (helping in reinforcing vocabulary, going over test formats, etc), but one would have to be really naive to believe that all teachers do it for those reasons.

The reason why I've been thinking about this so much the past couple weeks is because the students I work with in my classroom are so behind in their conceptual understanding in all their subjects. Part of my frustration probably stems because the students in my program are typically the lowest in each grade, so my experiences are obviously incredibly skewed versus a "regular" classroom. But dang... I'll be sitting down with these kids and they don't even have a firm grasp of how to multiply numbers, much less understand the concept of adding and subtracting positive and negative numbers. Thankfully, many of them are slowly picking up on the foundations of the different concepts I help them with, but it makes me so bitter at the teachers before them who just passed them on to the next grade without really testing their understanding.

Something I was thinking would be really interesting was if teachers stayed with the same group of students throughout their stay in the school. For example, a group of elementary school teachers would work with the same batch of students in first grade all the way through fifth grade and a team of middle school teachers would be in charge of the same group of students from 6th-8th grade. It would be really cool since the students would already know the expectations of each teacher and they would already have that rapport built from the previous years, thus cutting down on wasted time having to reteach and getting to know a new group of students. There would also be more of a sense of investment on the teacher's side guiding the children and seeing their growth throughout the years and when the students end up graduating to the next level, there will be a healthy sense of closure.

I'm pretty sure there's a ton of holes in running a school like that, but the concept itself was novel enough that I wanted to share about it.