My daughter has been teaching middle school for the past eight years. She’s bright, beautiful, and passionate about her job. She’s an amazing teacher. She works in a very tough middle school in Oregon, which has a free and reduced lunch population of over 80%. It is a tough, tough job, but if anybody can be successful there, I know she can.
She could have been anything she wanted, and I do mean anything. She was that TAG kid in your class that also happens to have leadership and people skills. She might be the most organized person I know. She had a 4.2 grade point average even while playing PAC-10 volleyball. She still does all kinds of sports, including softball, volleyball, triathlons, and running marathons. She also sings like an angel and performs in a band during her spare time. I’m not writing this just to spend time bragging about my baby, although I could go on for days. I just wanted to show a bit of her background to explain her view of the world. She’s a happy, active, vibrant, and successful person.
At the time she was deciding which career path to choose, I didn’t discourage her from teaching. I’d always adored my job. Both my husband and I had been teachers forever, so she wasn’t going to be one of those people who went into the profession blind. I knew she’d be great at whatever she chose. Now sometimes I’m wondering if I did her a disservice.
I’ll never forget when she first began teaching. She called me up and said, “Wow, this is a really hard job!” I remember laughing and asking how she didn’t know that before since she grew up with two teachers as parents. She said something about us making it look easy, and I laughed again thinking she had to have noticed how hard we both worked.
It didn’t take her very long to become comfortable. I like to think that it helped to have her parents to bounce ideas off, but honestly, it was 99.9% all her. She has had to change assignments several times already in eight years, from teaching science only, to math and science, to self-contained sixth grade, to honors math. I know that made it harder, but she’s handled it with ease. She’s quickly become a leader in her team, and her school. Last year she won a grant for technology, which has required two years of district-wide training, and since, then she’s been asked to be on the district math committee.
The problem is that she doesn’t adore her job. Maybe most people don’t. It just seems like she should, and I wish that for her. She’s great at it. She loves aspects of it; she’s passionate about her students. But already, after only eight years, she questions whether she made the right career choice. It makes me worry at times that I should have guided her in a different direction.
A week or so ago, she went to a district professional development class. It was the third or fourth one in a series about differentiation. So here was her problem. In a class about differentiation, they didn’t bother to differentiate for their students—the districts’ teachers. She told me that there was absolutely no new information for her in the class. Not that it was terrible to hear it again; she knew it was good information. But with so much to do, so many different demands pulling on her time, and so little time to accomplish her own list of goals, she felt like it was really wasting her time to be repeating information. She said that what she really needed was time to work on creating lessons that were differentiated, not another lecture about the need for it or the philosophy in general.
I got to thinking about what she said and I realized that’s what’s really wrong with the over-emphasis on testing in education today. The tests really don’t differentiate at all. I mean that for kids and for teachers. The students are all expected to be taking the same tests, getting the same scores in order to meet arbitrary goals, regardless of their interest, background, or any other extenuating circumstances. We teachers are increasingly being asked to teach the same materials in the same way, without any differentiation.
The overemphasis on test scores has led to underemphasizing several other subjects such as art, health, and social studies--anything that’s not counted on the school’s AYP. That’s made it even worse for kids who are gifted in music or P.E. (which have been cut in half), or art, or even the social sciences. Where’s the differentiation for the kids who have extraordinary talents in areas that aren’t emphasized?
I guess that means that I’m that TAG teacher in the background who’s exactly like my daughter asking, but what if I have a better way to teach reading than just working on test scores? What if I can actually get them to become real readers who love books and can talk excitedly about all the books they’re passionately discovering? What if my goal in math isn’t just to increase test scores, but to get them to be what I call mathoholics? What if I want them to absolutely love math and see it everywhere around them? What if I don’t merely want them to pass state writing benchmarks, but to see themselves as real authors? What if I want them writing real stories, songs, and books for purpose? Why does everyone think it’s so important for everybody to emphasize exactly the same things in schools nowadays? Where’s my differentiation, huh?