Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
I’m a middle school teacher. The endurance required by my vocation not uncommonly impresses women who have borne children, just as the prospect of a roomful of adolescents frequently strikes fear in the hearts of able-bodied carpenters. That said, I did choose this line of work, and I’ve been so engaged for over 30 years. I’m not looking for sympathy.
Thirty years means I’ve known a lot of students, and I’ve been fortunate to be visited by many while they’re in high school. I was also once a student myself, and my memories of high school, and of high school me, are clear.
I genuinely enjoy my students’ company. I recognize that they’re people, and that their desires, hopes and fears are to them as compelling as mine are to me. While there’s no doubt in their minds that I’m the adult in the room, I learned years ago that one key to managing a classroom is to not impose my will when I don’t have to. I allow students to make choices I think they can handle, within the bounds of a sound education and good order.
Student “empowerment” hadn’t yet become fashionable when I was in school. I went off to college, however, among flocks of 1968 freshmen demanding a “relevant” education and the right to determine for themselves what was relevant. I didn’t consider that reading Hermann Hesse for the first time while you were sleeping on sheets your mother bought at Bloomingdale’s necessarily made you a better judge of relevance than an English professor. Mine was a minority opinion.
I’m not talking about knowing for sure what you want to be when you grow up or about infallibly choosing the right college subject to major in. I spent 14 years unloading trucks and building houses before I landed in the classroom, and the people who’ve spent their lives working in fields they didn’t major in are legion. Changing your mind is part of life, and eventually the prerogative to make those choices belongs to each of us, whether we make the right choices or not.
Education experts, however, preach that the key to success is greater voice and choice for ever younger students. Personal learning plans, for example, empower students as young as kindergarten to map out their education itineraries. The fact is, though, that even at the high school level, schools exist to prepare students for informed citizenship, and either the workforce via technical and vocational training, or further study in college. Choice is overrated. When I was in seventh grade, and when I was 17, whether I wanted to be a doctor, a lawyer, or an English professor, I still needed to take the same basic courses and master the same body of general knowledge and skill.
By the way, between seventh grade and high school graduation, I intended at various times to be all three.
Despite the obvious value of addressing the common fundamentals, and the painfully obvious reality that many graduates haven’t mastered them, a recent nationwide study of 2,000 high school students catalogs “what teens want from their schools” and endorses “customizing” every student’s high school experience. The report’s authors contend that students have gone beyond “typical teenage whining” and “are actually disengaging” from education.
Anybody who thinks that “disengagement” from education is a new phenomenon among middle and high school students should have spent more time in schools over the past 30 years, which by definition education experts haven’t since the chief qualification to be an education expert is you can’t be a teacher.
Anybody who thinks that today’s students are the first to complain that “they don’t see the value in the schoolwork they are asked to do” needs to travel back in time to my freshman dorm and my eighth grade math class.
Anybody who thinks that “disengagement” from education is a new phenomenon among middle and high school students should have spent more time in schools over the past 30 years, which by definition education experts haven’t since the chief qualification to be an education expert is you can’t be a teacher.
Anybody who believes “most high school students” when they report being “intrinsically motivated to learn,” or that “83 to 95 percent” spend their school days “thinking deeply, listening carefully, and completing assignments” doesn’t know enough students.
Despite adolescents’ claims to the contrary, and the study’s findings, the vast majority of students I’ve known don’t ask themselves questions, don’t exert themselves to figure out where they went wrong, and don’t go back over things they don’t understand. Many of my students are conscientious, and I’m sure my classes aren’t unique. But most adolescents aren’t modern-day Platos sitting at the feet of Socrates.
The study concludes that “the vast majority of American high school students say they are trying hard and want to do their best in school.” Even assuming this self-appraisal is sincere, it’s sincerely inaccurate. Most Americans, and I include myself, are so accustomed to comfort that we’ve forgotten what really working hard feels like. As for what qualifies as “our best,” decades of self-esteem indoctrination have left us unduly complacent and self-satisfied.
Awesome!
The authors reason that since “engaged” students are more likely to be successful, and since “engagement and choice go hand in hand,” high schools should “offer choices at multiple levels that are genuinely different.” These “customizing” options include personalizing curricula, as well as choices among “teachers,” “instructional strategies,” and “schools within schools” that address students’ individual preferences.
A public school isn’t a collection of individual students being privately tutored. Public school students learn in a classroom, not their father’s study. Education experts, owing to their lack of classroom experience, and students, owing to their lack of life experience, typically aren’t in the best position to appreciate this and exercise sound judgment.
It’s worth noting that A Nation at Risk’s landmark critique of public education’s “rising tide of mediocrity” spotlighted “excessive student choice” in its bill of indictment.
By eighth grade, and certainly by high school, it’s sometimes appropriate to offer students choices. The purported need for more “choice” and “customizing” is worrisome, though. First, students today aren’t any wiser than I was, and much of the time I didn’t know what I was talking about. Second, and more crucially, life doesn’t always afford us a menu of choices. Students, like the rest of us, need to learn to live with that unaccommodating reality.
The last thing we need to do is reinforce our societal bent toward narcissism.
We use the pronoun “my” to convey our 21st century sense of personalization, as in My Google, My Facebook, My Verizon, and my just about everything else. The trouble is we think of “my” like a monarch’s “my kingdom,” meaning it belongs to me, more than like a citizen’s “my country,” meaning I belong to it.
“My high school” is a step in that same wrong direction.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Poor Elijah’s Almanack: Student voice and choice.