So bear with me. I'm reading To Kill a Mockingbird with my students for the first time since high school. It's fun. However, we just got to this part:
The remainder of my schooldays were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics. What Jem called the Dewey Decimal System was school-wide by the end of my first year, so I had no chance to compare it with other teaching techniques. I could only look around me: Atticus and my uncle, who went to school at home, knew everything- at least, what one didn't know the other did. Furthermore, I couldn't help noticing that my father had served for years in the state legislature, elected each time without opposition, innocent of the adjustments my teachers thought essential to the development of Good Citizenship. Jem, educated on a half-Dewey half-Duncecap basis, seemed to function effectively alone or in a group, but Jem was a poor example: no tutorial system devised by man could have stopped him from getting at books. As for me, I knew nothing except what I gathered from Time magazine and reading everything I could lay hands on at home, but as I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County shcool system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me.
Okay, seriously. How ironic is this? I should back up. TKaM is a "must read" by the district. All students who pass through my class must read this book. Yesterday, for class, we made construction paper tombstones for "dead words" that we were no longer going to use in our formal writing ("I think", "you", etc.). Oh yeah, we did this in pairs. I felt Harper Lee's pitying gaze when we read this part out loud in class.
Truth be told, I feel like I'm a worthless tool in an ineffectual system. My students are struggling with reading this book and they're sophomores. I feel like lots of ninth graders round the country are enjoying this same rite of passage. My students tell me this book is unrealistic because no kid would know the words she's using. I have kids telling me it's not realistic because no likes to read.
How difficult can I make my class? We do vocab, grammar, reading, writing... I have enough kids acing and failing my class, but I struggle. Scout, God bless her, is right. The 12 years of babysitting does not produce the results that I would like an education to allow.
It's the same frustration generations of teachers have felt, but I don't have enough time to expose them to all the things that I want to. There's just too much to teach. And, let's be honest, they're pretty apathetic about it. I have mountains of things to expose them to, to expect them to memorize, to be familiar with and I have to make sure they also don't come out of my class jerks. It's a hard balance.
I guess not much has changed in education since the late 50s. Maybe that's the problem.
