To Make a Difference

In the teaching profession there are a handful of teachers that did not arrive at teaching simply because of the hours (trust me, they aren't what you think), or the retirement (that's not enough to live on), or the summer vacations (that's when professional development normally happens).  A handful of teachers actually became an educator because they want to make a difference in the world.  At first the difference that wanted to be made was to affect the life of a child...and sometimes that desire grows into more than just one child or a handful of children. 


Lately, several teacher friends and I have found ourselves contemplating if teaching is allowing us to make the difference in the world that we set out to make.  One such friend has decided she wants to look at the nursing field, while others are roaming lost trying to find that purpose in life.  It makes teaching sometimes difficult to watch peers struggle with their purpose.


When did the world become so caught up in lobbyist, politics, and reform that it has forgotten about what is important. Each student has a genuinely different calling in life that standards aren't allowing teachers to groom.


This past week while talking to a parent I found myself frustrated. Teaching seventh grade English many students come to my class and can't identify a noun, verb, etc. in a sentence.  As far as seventh grade English goes, my standards do not really cover that skill; instead I have to teach them how a noun functions in a sentence, how a verb acts in a sentence, or whether a prepositional phrase is acting like and adjective or adverb.  So I spend most of the first semester reviewing concepts that are included in standards from third grade to sixth grade. Although I sometimes become frustrated, I know I must do this in order for students to grasp the application of the English skills I must teach them before they become eighth graders. However, as a teacher it is hard to explain to a parent that the student hasn't even learned half of what they will learn in my classroom and the year is over halfway over. Needless to say I sometimes feel defeated or question whether I am doing what is right for the student. Especially when parents call me a "hard teacher".


This past Friday I was talking to the math teacher on my team about the observation standards. This year in Tennessee teacher observations have changed, and although the majority of the process is a positive change, there are negatives to the areas teachers are judged. For example, a teacher is deemed successful by how many outside school events they attend. They are also gauged successful by how well students respect one another in their classroom, even if a teacher has no control over how much respect a parent shows others or how much interaction they have with the student to encourage respect. Frustrated by the changes, many teachers are wanting to leave the profession, forgetting why they became an educator.


Education is not about the standards. It is not about the summer vacations.  Nor is it about successful an outsider feels a teacher is. Instead it is about making a difference in the lives of as many students as a teacher can during the ten months of students' lives that they fill the seats in your classroom. No matter how many changes or challenges a teacher is presented with, look in the eyes of a student or find a moment of success in a student's life and be reminded why you started teaching in the first place.