Nate Fish’s Blog

My wife and I both teach. We both went into teaching because people had poured their lives into ours as kids and adolescents and we wanted to reciprocate that investment into other young lives. When you are first starting to teach, just surviving the daily mix consumes much of your energy and time. Therefore, it takes a few years until a teacher–even someone who has a very successful first couple years–really gets into his/her stride. Once “striding,” there is a feeling of accomplishment: the rapport with students develops much more quickly, your competency of the content is distinguished, and classroom management comes naturally. For me, this is the moment when I really felt like students were finally being omptimally impacted by my presence in their lives.

I started having this feeling during my third year of teaching, but I still had some classroom management kinks to work out. Last year was my fourth year I thought I was there in the sense of being able to handle everything. I did have some setbacks, however, that came from administrators seeking a personal agenda that had me in the way of it in some manner and for some reason. It was then that I started to really think about what makes a good teacher.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was introduced during my first year of teaching. Blame Bush if you want, but it was Ted Kennedy who pushed it into law and made it an easy way for Bush to show some bipartisanship. Anyway, even a rookie such as I could see that this was going to push states and school districts into some positive growth. However, I could also see some potential negatives if districts started to feel pressured and were tempted to skew some data-recording methods to make it look like there is more growth than there actually is.

The past couple years, we have seen our school district immersed into a regime highly centered around data. Somewhere, someone must have realized that if data could be put into a computer to have it computed in Excel or something similar, then maybe this meant every facet of our lives could be quantified in data. Then came the testing, the learning checks, the bigger push during state assessment week, the pep-talks to students about state assessments, core content documents that had to line up with everything else, and–new this year–walk-throughs to make sure teachers were putting the daily objectives (like a military operation) on the board. Not all schools have adopted the new gimmicks as much as others, but my wife and I (she at a middle school and I at a high school) have principals who drank the “data koolaid” received from the man in dark sunglasses and asked for seconds.

All of this has led teachers into a routine of having so many i’s to dot and t’s to cross that there is little time left for truly creative approaches to impacting the lives of students. There is a new game to be played. The federal goverment made the rules, the states started interpreting them, the districts broke them down into visions and goals, and the lowest rung on the ladder, teachers, were left scrambling to make sense of it all. My wife has had it worse than me. The middle school and elementary levels have had the most little rules added to the game. All of the new little hoops we have to jump through has left many teachers who were already driven, productive professionals with the feeling that there is no time to have real ingenuity in the classroom. In sum, we have been asked to sacrifice our passions for someone else’s program.

I’m sure teaching is not the only profession to see this kind of tarnish on noble endeavors. I know that there is always a level of reality that sets in once you have done anything for a while that you once had romantic feelings towards. Yet, I have heard more than one long-time teacher express a feeling of this being worse than anything they have ever seen. In fact, I have seen some of these same long-time master teachers pulled into the principal’s office for not being cheerleaders for the new regime. Whatever the outcome, I have to find out if there is still room for passion. I don’t feel I have lost mine yet, but others have not been so fortunate. There has to be something that can keep a devoted teacher connected to the reasons he/she started doing this in the first place.

I am writing this blog entry without really writing down a solution…because I am not sure I have one yet. I will return when I have ruminated and observed more thoroughly.