Show Me the Love

Well, for those keeping track of such things, love was in the air yesterday. But that was then and this is now. Now, we have pushed past cupid and moved right on to President’s Day. I seem to remember a time when we actually celebrated the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln. School children colored pictures and heard the stories of their lives and their rise to the highest elected position in the United States. That was before we lived in a fast food society and classrooms are common cored to death with students having little time for lunch and recess, little alone stories about guys that are long, long gone. Now it is all about the testing and we see how well that went last week. Perhaps if we would just let our teachers do what they do best, which is teach, we would have time for a little learning between testing.

There was a time, not so very many years ago, when people believed that educators knew more about educating than the government knew about education. There was also a time when third grade math was not so convoluted that the average parent couldn’t help with homework. That is not the case today. In today’s classrooms, math has become a foreign language thanks to decisions made by people who should not be making decisions. We test our teachers and we test our students, putting enormous pressure on both, and for what? Accountability is a wonderful thing and certainly there must be some measure of progress in education. However, teaching is about more than just math and reading. Teaching is about knowing your students, caring about them and trying to prepare them for life, not just advancing them to the next grade and the next round of tests. For some students, teachers are their only contact with an adult that is interested in their future, where they will end up in life. In a perfect world, they are partners with parents and in the real world, for most of the daylight hours, they are the adults having influence on our children. Do we need our children to have a strong educational foundation? Yes. But we also need them to play well with others, understand structure and be able to take direction. We need them to be confident, imaginative, creative and socially conscious. We need them to be great leaders or involved, thoughtful followers. Teachers have produced wonderful, progressive leaders for our nation. Teachers have produced artists, writers and musicians that inspire us and the workforce that is the backbone of who and what we are.

Education is important. Teaching is imperative. Perhaps you are wondering why an editorial on President’s Day became an article about the importance that Teacher’s play in our world. I suppose it is because there is no more time for coloring pictures of cherry trees or reading the Gettysburg Address. Unless it is a part of the curriculum that will be the structure for testing, there is no time for anything and that is sad. It is not on our Teachers, believe me, they want to teach, not test. They know if a child had a bad night or is sick or ate breakfast that morning or will eat dinner that night. They know if a child is shy or has trouble making friends or is the class clown because he needs attention. They know if he has a coat or an odd bruise or her dog died. They know if he got the winning touchdown or she made the dance team or their parents just had another baby. They are privy to the good and the bad. That knowledge, that window into the lives of their students, is both the blessing and the curse of being a teacher. Wouldn’t it be nice to return to a time when they could just do what they do best? Maybe that time has gone the way of the Uniform Holiday Act, where we shove everything into a neat little package and designate 24 hours to remember its worth, as long as we do it on a Monday so we can have a long weekend, because that’s what’s really important. Maybe educational pressure is the right way to go and fast paced first to the finish line is the philosophy that we need to embrace. After all, it has worked well in many of the Asian countries that we simply must compete with, hasn’t it? All work and no play, pressure cooker societies go hand in hand with the American Dream. Or has that, too, been become a part of the past we just don’t have time for? Tell me again, where is the love?