Insight: Class is in session

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Teachers are the heart and soul of the American educational system, but it took me marrying one to fully appreciate all they do for us.

Here are a few examples of things that I have observed in the 20 years I have been married to a grade-school teacher:

At the elementary school she taught at in Florida when we first met, she had 22 students in her class. The school had a copy machine exclusively for teachers but to hold down expenses, it would limit teachers to 10 copies made per day. If my wife had to give a test that day, she’d have to plan for it three days ahead based upon her daily copy limitation.

The same thing applied for student handouts or anything else needing to be copied, therefore, to create more flexibility, some teachers would have to negotiate with other teachers who were not making copies that school day. More often it resulted in teachers purchasing a copier for their homes and meant the teacher paid the additional expense of buying copier ink, paper and the copier itself.

Weekends were supposed to be days off for teachers, but a good portion of that is spent grading a mountain of papers or preparing lesson plans for the coming week. Contrary to what I thought previously, most teachers don’t just stand before their students and wing it, they have a plan for everything they want to instruct and developing those plans takes hours of work.

Record-keeping for teachers is also time-consuming. It used to be grades were entered into a teacher’s notebook, but these days grades are kept digitally and navigating that process is not always easy. One year, while adjusting to a new record-keeping software system, all the additional comments my wife entered for student report cards were published twice for some inexplicable reason. The double comments were flagged by the school principal and all her report cards had to be redone at the last minute before being sent home with the students.

One year my wife was assigned to a classroom without a bathroom. Her students had to leave the classroom and walk several doors down to use the restroom. On the first day students had returned to school after two weeks off for the Christmas holidays, a student asked if he could use the restroom, and my wife allowed him to. She asked him to return to the classroom as soon as he was done. It happened to be the lunch period for some other classes at the school and after a few minutes had elapsed, the principal showed up at the classroom door with the student who had left for the restroom.

It seems the student had entered an unlocked classroom of students who were gone for lunch, and he was caught going through the purse of the teacher in that classroom. When asked, he said he was told his teacher wanted to wish the teacher whose purse he was rifling through a “Happy New Year.” That student wasn’t allowed to leave for the restroom unaccompanied again that school year, giving plenty of work to an ed tech assigned to my wife’s classroom.

No matter how hard she tried to help him, that student’s grades never improved and by the end of the school year, he failed to meet the minimum standards to advance to the next grade. My wife recommended to his mother that having him repeat that grade might give him a better grasp of reading and math. However, the student’s mother chose not to hold him back and instead pulled him out of public school and entered him in the next grade at a nearby charter school.

One story that left me scratching my head was about a reading coach at the school. This woman had been a classroom teacher at one time but over the years had been promoted to a position overseeing reading activities and lessons at the school. To help her, the school district gave her volumes of books and instructional materials to share with the teachers to help them boost student reading.

But the reading coach refused to share any of the books with the teachers. She insisted the best way to instruct reading was to read to students attending the school. To get her to visit their classrooms, teachers had to make an appointment and when she was available, she would come in and read to students.

During another school year, my wife was assigned a student who was represented by an attorney. That same class had a defiant student who refused to do his assignment. When my wife asked him to try, he said, “No.” When asked again, he said, “What am I speaking Spanish? I said no.”

My wife’s teaching career included many moments of triumph and success for her students and recently a student she taught in the 1990s reached out to thank her for inspiring her. That student is now a psychologist in Ohio. Many of my wife’s past students are now parents of their own with kids in school themselves.

Teaching is a noble profession that shapes the future, and in my opinion is greatly unappreciated. <