Feeling like Crap

Today my wife feels like crap. She had a couple of students drop out of one of her classes and she feels like it's her fault; now she's feeling terrible about herself as a teacher (as if she needed to feel like that more often!!)

I can't stand the pressure that the schools put on teachers to pump out kids with great grades. There's so much pressure on teachers... what about the STUDENTS? In my day, if you got lousy grades it was your own bloody fault. The teacher might be a dud (and I had some, let me tell you) but if I got 55% as a final mark, it was MY responsibility.

Today... NOOOO!!!! It's the responsibility of the teachers to make sure that little Mikey get a good grade. We wouldn't want him to fail, even if he skips lots of classes and doesn't even turn in assignments, because we don't want to bruise his precious self esteem.

Today if you want to be able to teach the top level subjects you have to be turn out students who get honors... no matter what. Otherwise it's on your head and you feel like a lousy teacher.

I'm tired of watching my wife work her ass off week after week, working hours and hours making exams and marking and creating assignments only to end up feeling like crap because little mary jane hardly does any work in class and then wonders why she's not getting honors!

I don't think that kids are simply entitled to get good grades; and I don't think that we should expect that every kid is going to get great grades. I was lousy at math in school. I got really average grades in math and guess what: I didn't snivel about it and blame it on my teacher. I'm not good at math. Plain and simple. Not everybody is good at math!

So here's a novel idea: let's evaluate teachers through observing their classes and factoring in ALL the student evaluations, rather than simply looking at the specific grades themselves. Let's have some balance between responsibility on the teacher AND responsibility on the students.

Maybe then we'll have less days like today.