My Realities

I hope to have an opportunity to work at a school district like Sunnyside. Currently, I don't. Trotwood-Madison is filled with jaded teachers unwilling to change how he/she taught since the 1990s. "It work then - these kids just don't want to learn," is the mantra espoused by many of our veteran teachers.

We do not provide the students a say in how the school is run. In fact, we are on fall break this week and had a records day on Friday. During that time, the middle school staff met and determined that we are going to bring the hammer down on the kids when they return. We are going to follow the rules set forth in the student handbook. The administrators are going to present this information to the kids when they return with the students having no voice.

Our kids are far too reliant on teachers giving them the answers, and we are not properly preparing them to become productive citizens. I am moving to a problem-based math curriculum, which I will patiently implement fully knowing they are going to resist at first. I will give them some choice in the level of problems they work on and with whom they work in an effort to show them a level of trust they rarely experience from adults. They will initially take advantage of that, but I have to provide them relevant problems that make them forget they are working.

Our parents are not involved nearly enough, and we are financially strapped as a community and as a district. We will try again in three weeks to pass an operating levy in the hopes that we don't have to lay any more employees off.

Will the students work in a democratic environment? We have become so dictatorial and adversarial with the kids that I believe they would look at any attempt as a sign of weakness to be attacked. We, as the adults, have to be better and smarter at communicating the expectations to the kids in creating a modified democratic atmosphere in which the kids feel freer to learn at his/her own pace.