By Alexander Tillman
VALDOSTA, Ga. | In May 2022, I will be retiring after 30 years as a public school teacher. It has been a wonderful career, but it is time to go. Retirement sneaks up on you. One day you feel relevant and the next day you are a dinosaur.
Tillman
As I strike off the days on my calendar, I find myself being reflective. I started teaching with a set of textbooks, a box of chalk, and a black grade book. The film projector was 30 mm and the overhead projector was considered high tech.
I am often asked if the kids have changed. I think the person inquiring expects the answer to be yes. They usually want me to characterize students today as lazy and entitled. Let’s be fair. Every generation believes the next generation is doomed to fail.
What has changed in the course of my career is the over-use of statistical data. There is a place for data, but it has become overemphasized in education. Colleges of Education teach future teachers that everything must be measurable. I disagree with that statement.
I prefer the subjective. I am a social studies teacher. We ask questions with no clear, singular answer. Data does not measure maturity, character, or work ethic. These traits cannot be translated into sound bites to be released to further someone’s career. Test scores can be.
Our expectations of young people have been tainted by our obsession with statistics. As parents there is nothing we are more vain about than our children. It is unavoidable. Statistics give us the sound bites we need to measure our children’s success and to compare them to others.
In the last 30 years schools and parents have slowly lost sight of the subjective and replaced it with scores. We measure children by SAT and ACT scores, and GPAs.
When was the last time you heard a parent brag about their child’s character and work ethic?
Our expectations of young people have changed over the years to fit statistical goals. For the most part, the young people are the same. Because of laws such as “No Child Left Behind,” we expect all children to graduate from high school. We will never achieve that expectation.
We expect all students to be proficient in all subject areas as measured by standardized tests. Does anyone really expect that to happen? Most adults will admit that they struggled in at least one subject area in school. That builds character, but that is not measurable.
As a teacher I like what I call “The good old kid.” He had good manners. She was pleasant to be around. His word was his bond. She was present, on time, and completed her work. He made A’s, B’s and a few hard earned C’s.
The kids have not changed. Our value system has. As a society we need to stop relying only on data and give character, maturity, and work ethic its rightful place in the value system.
Give me a team full of good old kids. That is who I would build my organization around.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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