Thursday, 08 October 2009

What's Come Over Our Schools?

So at dinner tonight, I heard about one of my friends who has a teaching job down in Indiana. As I heard how she's doing, I wanted to throw my fork in the wall (and visualize it sticking to the stud and vibrating like in the movies).

My poor friend graduated from Bethel College with a major in Elementary Education and probably had high hopes for her own classroom and dreamed of all kinds amazing things she'd do once she was on her own as a teacher. Instead, she's scrambling to write curriculum while her students have NO TEXTBOOKS and what, for all practical purposes, sound like bare-bones resources to work with. Meanwhile, she's barely keeping her head above water with lesson planning, correcting papers, quizzes, tests, and the like, managing the classroom, and let's not forget that with being married, she has to be a wife too. Coming home through a half-hour commute from school to my house at 9:30 sounds AWFUL.

"Well, Tyler, surely it gets better with experience in larger districts and when you're a veteran."

WRONG. I was just talking with Dr. Richmond while I was down at Hope College during a visit after seeing Jeremy Camp in concert in GR and deciding to stick around for a short visit with friends. Needless to say, I was dismayed to hear how Mr. De Boer has been treated.

For starters, he's now in the last two schools he can picture himself possibly teach in that he hadn't already worked in the district. I know I find that ridiculous that the district has shuffled its music specialists that much and never let them settle with their resources/establish themselves in their own space. But what really gets my goat is what he has to work with in one school in particular.

My host teacher is a loyal employee. I'm not sure how many years he's worked in Holland, but in his time, he started the elementary choirs, the Ensemble (which has sung for the Detroit Pistons), established a friendly working relationship with the Hope College Department of Music, and there's more. Now, my teacher (who taught ME so much as well as a teacher-in-training) is now forced to work off a small cart in each teacher's room for music class. He doesn't even HAVE a classroom in one school.

I can't imagine how I'd feel. I always had at least a ROOM to work with during field placements and student teaching. If I didn't have a space... what to do? How do you TEACH music when the students can't even move from their seats and do anything besides listen?

I think of my friend's plight and being almost in over her head with planning and my mentor's plight of not even having ample space to work with. As much as I want to start teaching (and I was recently reminded how much happiness it can bring me), those kinds of prospects REALLY frightens me. If all I'm doing is staying up late working on lessons and cramming myself/students into tiny spaces that don't teach much, I'm not sure how much I want to be involved.

Currently MMHMM By Relient K Be My Escape see related