by Dave Epps, Sheppard Junior High School, Ottowa, IL
I have learned many valuable lessons about school over the past twenty. Ironically, the most important ones were learned outside of the classroom but have shaped my vision of the primary function of schools.
I started my career in the people business twenty years ago as an outreach worker for the infamous Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. While working on my first degree and working for the Department I was able to attend several workshops with William Glasser who had just come out with his book Reality Therapy. His message to me at the time was clear and simple. This is a people business, one based on developing honest relationships. Glasser's therapy model stressed building a trusting relationship to help troubled young people back on the right track. The lesson - the relationship is key.
Ten years later as I watched my son begin to struggle in school I often wondered where were the relationships. Did anyone really care about my son? Of all the teachers he had over the years he will only talk enthusiastically about three. One was a counselor here at Shepherd who he felt was one the most honest people he had ever met. He felt that she would always take the time to give him a straight answer. Another was his special Ed supervisor at the high school. He talked about how she would spend time discussing little things like fishing, music, or her pickup truck.
The final teacher made history and science come alive for him. He allowed his students to really take off and wander when it came to doing projects. One of his projects I liked so much I am now using with my eight graders.The lessons - good people build good relationships and good relationships are the foundation of good work.
My son excelled with both of these teachers and I know he walked away feeling better about himself because of his contact with the counselor. What really makes me wonder is why only three. Is that all there was? I know there were others that touched and influenced him, but there were also others that if you mentioned there names today, he would become extremely upset. There were teachers that humiliated him, mistreated him, used him, and ignored him, and he can tell you some pretty interesting stories about each issue. The lesson - bad people can do a lot of damage.
Glasser's latest book, a companion piece to The Quality School, is The Quality Teacher. In this book Glasser stresses the importance of combining two important concepts - love and quality. In the first part of the book he stresses that if we are to meet our students' needs, we need to develop warm, supportive classrooms and only by doing this can we strive to demand quality from our students. If we want quality, students have to believe in us as professionals and care about what they are doing.
When I think back about the lessons I learned from Glasser and my son, it is very simple for me to see my role each day. Teaching is a charismatic profession. Schools are in the people business. Our primary job is to develop healthy adolescents who have a sense of hope for the future. If we do that job, the work will follow. I believe that schools need to concern themselves with who our students are going to become, not what they will be doing for a living in the year 2030.
Schools matter. But what really matters about school is the people in them. Good teachers can bring out the best in students. Too often though teachers get confused about this idea of carrying about students and the entire warm, fuzzy side of education. One of my fellow teachers automatic refrain is that he is not here to be friends with his students. For some reason teachers, like my friend, get worried when kids start to feel good or wander off into what they consider are non-school issues. Unfortunately, to do so is to overlook the Gestalt of the human personality. Students enter the educational arena with equal parts intellect, body, spirit, emotions, culture, and sexuality. These areas are school issues. To ignore them is to ignore who we are teaching.
We are at a crossroads in society. Our world has changed but more importantly our clientele has changed. In his book Beyond the Classroom, Laurence Steinberg points out that the real issues facing school reform and the reason school reform has failed is that it has not examined today's adolescent.
According to his extensive research:
An extremely high percentage of American high school students do not take school or their studies seriously.
American students' time away from school is seldom spent in activities that reinforce what they are learning in school.
The adolescent peer culture in America demeans academic success and scorns students who try to do well in school.
The basic fix for schools has typically followed along party lines. The idea of liberal school reformers has been to throw more money into education and schools will improve. The conservative push has been to get back to fundamentals, both moral and educational, and schools will improve. Both of these reform movements continue to overlook the basic product. To paraphrase the George Bush campaign slam, "Its the students, stupid."
Most educational research and reform has overlooked the fact that kids in this country are changing. One of Steinberg's most interesting findings was the old notion that part time jobs build "moral character." What he found was that students who work outside of school use drugs and alcohol 33 percent more than students who do not work. The reasons behind this and the effect of work on students academic behavior makes for some incredible reading and it also reinforces how little we know about our clientele.
Like most of life's important lessons, these ideas tend to be pretty simple. If we want to build good schools we need good people who know and care about their students. If we can accomplish this task, then we can start to demand and receive quality work. Like Siamese twins, we cannot perform surgery on one without effecting the other and if one dies the other will surely follow. As William Daggett said in "Today's Students, Yesterday's Schooling," if we want to improve what we teach, we need to rethink our "attitudes, values. and beliefs" and "stop teaching courses and start teaching children."