By PETER BERGER
I’ve never hidden from my students that they’re at the heart of why I’ve enjoyed being a teacher. I’ve plainly enjoyed their company and told them so. I’ve shared my stories and ideas. I’ve laughed with them, laughed at myself, and listened to them. I’ve been preachy and silly and stern and forgiving, hopefully in the right measure and at the right moments.
I hope they’ve appreciated their hours in my classroom as much as I’ve appreciated spending my days with them. I hope they’ve been challenged and comfortable. I hope I’ve been able to convey to them the value I see in what I’ve tried to teach them. Even when it seemed not to matter to them, I wanted them to know that it mattered to me, so that my questions and convictions at the least might give them pause.
I’m hardly unique in this. At the same time, not every teacher approaches his vocation this way. This includes good teachers. I know because I’ve sat in their classrooms as a younger man and learned from them. All I knew about many was they were competent in their subjects, adept in their instruction, and decent men and women in their classroom conduct.
At the time that was enough. They weren’t my parents, and their classrooms weren’t my home. Before you launch into the standard reform charge that students today don’t live in Ozzie and Harriet’s world, neither did most of my classmates.
Advocates point to mounting reports of child abuse, and the incidence of conditional parental custody and outright removal of children to state custody. They argue that deteriorating conditions in students’ homes necessitate that schools become more involved in what were formerly home responsibilities.
It’s possible, even likely, that the increase in referred cases partly reflects a heightened awareness and sensitivity to abuse and that more parents, children, and witnesses are now reporting what they’ve always seen. It’s also worth noting that in 1983 A Nation at Risk warned that the heightened responsibility for “personal, social, and political problems” that 1970s reformers had imposed on schools was “exact[ing] an educational cost” and compromising academic achievement.
That said, I agree that teachers too often do “actually provide a greater sense of belonging at school than some students find in their homes.” Over the years I’ve seen my colleagues’ kindness and those children’s sad, grateful faces. Some I can still see.
Policymakers have spent decades searching for the causes underlying America’s home problem and their consequent effect on our school problem. For example, in 1965 future Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan catalogued the ill effects of an increase in single-parent black families.
Today in the twenty-first century, “the rate of unmarried births among whites” is “considerably higher than the 1965 rate among blacks,” as “an estimated half of all children in the United States live with a single mother at some point before they turn eighteen.” The ill effects, according to a recent research compilation, include a forty percent reduction in the likelihood of high school graduation and an “increase in antisocial behavior such as aggression, rule-breaking, delinquency, and illegal drug use.” Declines in achievement are primarily due to problems with “social and emotional adjustment” and students’ reduced “ability or willingness to exercise self-control.”
Sound familiar? Listen in on America’s classrooms, and it will.
None of this means that remaining married is always best. Divorce is sometimes healthier than marital strife and abuse, and single parents can certainly be good parents. Moreover, in two-parent families where both parents hold down jobs, often multiple jobs, their work-related absence can strain children’s sense of belonging. Working parents face hard choices. Are we working to acquire optional luxuries, or to attain or maintain a safe, pleasant middle-class life?
These are private, personal judgments I don’t presume to make for anyone. What happens at school, in contrast, is a public matter.
I want my students to feel safe, respected, and cared for in my classroom. There’s a difference, though, between compassion and curriculum. All the “trauma-based” classroom management, “Plan B” negotiations with disruptive students, and social-emotional packaged programs, apart from their dubious effectiveness, inevitably and undeniably consume time and divert resources from school’s academic mission. In addition, by picking up the parental slack, we enable further irresponsibility and establish new diminished “normal” expectations for parents.
Even where special methods and accommodations may help or boost learning for those students who bring exceptional problems from home, public schools and teachers have to operate most of the time on the utilitarian principle of providing the greatest good for the greatest number.
When schools stop assigning homework because some parents don’t help their children, we deny all students the practice and preparation benefits homework offers.
When schools adopt a social-emotional curriculum because without it “we leave the emotional development of our children to parents,” their presumptuous intrusion breeds parental resentment.
When policymakers ask “what schools can do to address America’s marriage crisis,” when they suggest that a school’s instructional mission should include “childbearing decisions” and whether “young adults” are “drifting into sex and parenthood,” they demonstrate how clearly we’ve forgotten why we have schools.
I want my students to feel at home in my classroom.
But nothing we do should or will ever make it their home.
Trying to make my classroom their home will only make it neither.
Peter Berger has taught English and history for thirty years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the
editor.
As your daily newspaper, we are committed to providing you with important local news coverage for Sullivan County and the surrounding areas.