Tenure
Denied
A reflection
of a teacher’s struggle in high school education
Getting up
in the morning with teachers and students gathering at 7 am is the crux of what
it takes to deliver education to our youth.
Just being there day after day is the experience thrust upon me as an aging
teacher. It is a learning experience that has no tenure.
For four
months this winter, I ventured back to school as a long-tern substitute teacher
at Hampshire High School in Hampshire, Illinois. My goal was to contribute to
the effort of solidifying societal fundamental elements of education and guide
students into progressive futures. It
was a noble goal and a noble calling for me as a retired teacher.
Hampshire High
School is a prime example of our American secondary public education system in
action. Raw emotions and academic
struggles that bond together in an envelope of grit and resoluteness. It is morning in America, and our education
system is burdened with unsettling and disturbing social, economic and
political realities that we face every day.
It is a fact
that teachers evolve with their students.
They deliver academic stimulus and adapt it to changes taking place in
the classroom to survive as instruments of change for young minds. This has
been a learning experience for me, even with 30 years of experience, it has
been hard to deal with behavior management while striving to deliver effective
and imaginative curriculum. It is a
struggle between teachers and students with both advocating for use of technologies
but embracing divergent goals. Phone use is an essential tool for communication
in a modern technological society, but at the same time, it is completely detrimental
to the learning environment in classrooms.
Teachers at Hampshire
are heroic in their efforts to deliver a disciplined and innovative curriculum,
even as students experience soul crushing economic, political and social
unraveling. These cultural realities leave
students angry, anxious and isolated. Teachers
at Hampshire thread a difficult course through this social upheaval and gut-wrenching
economic pressures. School climate and
culture can be viewed as bell-weather indicators reflecting the fulfillment of
progress or the failures of our society.
Right now,
it comes down to mechanics and the process of delivering learning experiences
to students immersed in a sea of futility, lost opportunity and social demise.
This shall now be a rallying time for educators and shareholders in education
institutions to address the vitality of our nation. Our nation’s position as a world power relies
on educating our youth. Is there no
greater need or critical expectation?
Technology in
the classroom is twin-bladed. It
invigorates the learning process in the classroom by teachers, but it also unleashes
immense disruption. Technology helps
teachers deliver curriculum in a more efficient and equal manner. It also can disrupt the fabric of social
order in schools; driving people apart, alienating individuals and instigating hate
toward one another.
Phone use in
the classroom is one of the most disruptive forces that inhibit learning. Phones
distract students from learning and create for them a new set of priorities with
learning, in school, ranked low on the scale of student concerns. Academic
success and indulgence are secondary to students’ efforts toward addressing self-induced
perception of themselves online.
This decline
in learning in the classroom will continue as students’ motivation to
remain engaged in education gives
way to their need to access applications on smart phones and maintain feeds of real-time connections with peers.
There is a
grudge match between teachers and students conflicted between achieving
academic outcomes and remaining immersed in social interactions on phones. A gulf of online interaction with phones in
the classroom has decreased students’
ability to focus for long periods of time working on projects, solving problems
or when they design new ideas dealing with engineering challenges. The immediate rewards of online instant
access are just too seductive for our youth. They are mentally addicted to its use,
and it crowds out their motivation to complete school projects on time and with
quality.
Student reflection
on conceptual understanding or achieving outcomes on projects is a process of
learning that breeds critical thinking and creative thought. It is a process of reinforcing understanding,
and it takes time to develop. Phone use cuts into time needed for this learning
process, while deemphasizes the need for deep thought. This disengagement by students, due to phone access in the classroom, is an immediate stimulant to them, and it leads down an avenue of lost opportunities
and lack of creative critical thought.
Without
education, potential dies a slow death, and prosperity is diminished for
all. It results in a decent into third world nation status.
We are poised as a nation to excel into prosperity or plunge into
despair. It is always up to us. It is our choice. We dictate our future; we live with our decisions,
we live or we die as a nation.
Teaching for me has been
an unending learning experience. For over 30 years, success as an educator has relied upon continued evolution of my teaching pedagogy. It is tenure denied because the final threshold
of teaching students can never be achieved and one can only hope to keep pace with ever
changing situations in life that has impact on us all.
