I’m all for teaching SEL and helping students name emotions and navigate problem solving skills. That’s fine and all. But at a certain point, it starts to feel like we’re raising these kids.
As a third grade teacher, I need to cover a lot of academic content. In a given year I’m usually lucky if I get to 2/3 of the content I’m supposed to touch on and on top of that, the time I’m expected to spend teaching kids to be decent humans is becoming more and more. I can teach them about amygdala hijack and can give students vocabulary to use when expressing their feelings, but I think the responsibility of teaching a kid to be empathetic, to have integrity, and to not be a jerk should fall on the adults at home.
I’m here to teach kids, not to raise them. /endrant
When I was in my credential program, we were asked in one of my classes to rank the priorities in our job. I got lambasted by the teacher and the other student teachers for not putting “teaching” last on the list, because we—not the school, but individual teachers—needed to make sure the students are fed and clothed, parented, etc.
If this pandemic taught me anything, it’s that we aren’t expected to educate anymore. School is for socialization. Figure out how to not be a piece of shit, and we’re expected to be that guiding light more than actually teaching them anything.
During the (still ongoing) pandemic it seemed like many parents simply gave up on the notion that they need to check in on their kid’s learning. How else can you explain the number of no-show and no-work-attempted students?
I’m still worn out from all the parent contact I did last year. A tremendous waste of energy, as it seems like I was the only person who cared.
I can’t be the only person in a student’s life who has a plan. I do my best for my students, but they are after all strangers who are briefly in my life for 9 months.
Even in the most progressive parts of the country, it feels like everything is free-falling into Idiocracy-like decay. I’m over a decade past finishing graduate school and am experiencing the nightmare of a job market that’s pretty much lost its mind vis-a-vis putting educated candidates in proper work situations. At this point, the only reason some people hire college graduates is because earning degrees serves as a signal for both a person’s socioeconomic status and discipline, i.e. finishing a degree usually means that you’re from the ‘right side of the tracks’ and that you’re willing to make huge sacrifices in the name of authority. Nobody in an interview wants to know about how school helped you hone your critical-thinking skills, reading/writing abilities, etc.. Because of how prevalent the whole student-as-consumer model has become, there are now tons of degree-holding people out there who, twenty years ago, would have probably failed out of their programs in their first or second years.
For me it’s that parents are willing to buy kids shoes they cannot tie and assume that the schools will teach their children how to tie their own shoes.