In the Trenches of My Mind

My brother-in-law John finally returned my copy of Christopher Moore's Lamb this year for Christmas. He'd had it for months, thoroughly enjoyed it (as YOU would) and had all his friends read it. It was nice to get back, but books are like friends: I tend to introduce them to as many people as possible in hopes of enlarging my circle of "friends." This happens because, invariably, other peole introduce me to their book "friends" and I learn something. Convenient, isn't it?
Johnny B also included a book titled In the Trenches by Dennis Fermoyle who has been a teacher in Minnesota public schools for 30+ years.
I warily approach education-themed books because most of them are written far from "real" teaching and expound on ideas that are great in theory but lack practicality...No Child Left Behind comes to mind (sorry, Mr. President). Anyway, the more I read this book, the more spooky it began to sound: it was as if someone had jumped inside my brain and wrote down everything I'd thought for the last five years minus the diatribes against Coke. As an interesting aside, the University of Michigan joined the list of colleges cancelling deals with Coke based on ecological and human rights violations committed by the company in its overseas operations.
Fermoyle decries concerned parental involvement, overburdened administrators, teachers' unions enabling ineffective teachers to continue to be employed and a host of other ills we face daily. He also touched on an area that many of the so-called experts refuse to touch: student involvement. He maintains, as do I, that if a student comes prepared to learn, he/she WILL learn, and the opposite is also true. We've all heard how attitude makes us more effective workers...and we've all sat through day-long seminars designed to get us to feel positively about our careers...the same should be said about students. Instead, we derive a whole host of reasons why the teaching profession is keeping students from learning...we excuse lazy habits and poor attitudes and blame the educators.
There's no doubt that the social climate for kids today is a tough one and school is, at times, a tough place to exist socially; the classroom, however, should be one place in which a student can use the enthusiasm of youth to achieve.
In time when we will all be judged by the performance on standardized test scores for ALL of our students, the issue of what a child brings to the classroom is one that cannot be ignored. Do we have ineffective teachers who continue to work because a union makes it too hard to terminate them? yes; do we have poor administrators who are overworked? yes; do school boards know everything that goes on in school when they make decisions? no, how could they? Do we have family units so dysfunctional that kids have no chance to begin with? maybe more than we know.
Do we also have dedicated students, administrators, board members and parents? YES! positive attitudes are hard to maintain sometimes in light of all the difficulties, but it's up to all of us, including the general public, to keep working.
Seeing "my" ideas book without actually writing one (and no royalties, either)was an interesting experience to start the new year.
I just hope Fermoyle didn't take any other random thoughts from my unconscious while he was in there!