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.