New appreciation

My daughter has gained a new appreciation for the sort of things that teachers have to put up with on a daily basis My daughter Beth is in college studying to become a teacher. As part of one of her education courses, Beth had to design a lesson around a young adult novel. The novel in question was one of those dystopian fantasies where the people in charge convince the population that an evil monster lurks in the woods and that they must make sacrifices to it to continue to be safe. Anyone who has read Animal Farm, 1984 or The New York Times, will recognize the plot of using a vaguely-defined common enemy for corrupt officials to consolidate and keep power. Fortunately, for the plot of the book, a plucky group of protagonists disrupts the system, brings about change and everyone lives happily ever after under a new political regime.

Beth’s assignment was to summarize the book, prepare a lesson plan and then use that plan to teach about the book to her classmates as she would in an elementary classroom. Her activities included having groups of students work together to come up with what stories would be on the front page of the capital’s newspapers the day after the evil dictators were overthrown. Her other activity had class members acting as specific main characters and being interviewed by their classmates about how they saw their actions in the book. She even provided a bank of sample questions for the students to ask each character.

As should come as no surprise to anyone, this is the type of assignment I would have loved to have had in elementary school. It beats the boring book reports I remember writing in fourth grade.

What Beth did not take into account is that people in her group didn’t do their homework.

“We split into the groups and I was like ‘so everyone read the book right’ and they all went ‘oh yeah... totally...,’” Beth messaged me after her class, expressing her frustration that no one was prepared for class or had even opened the book. Instead she said they were scrambling on their cellphones looking up each character in order to answer the interview questions.

“I worked hard to think of those activities and they didn’t work because none of [my class] worked,” Beth stated, echoing every teacher on the planet who have been met with blank looks and excuses from students who weren’t prepared for class.

It got me to thinking that perhaps this was the unintended side lesson of her professor all along. A capable teacher is only one half of the education equation, students, and by extension families, who are prepared and engaged in the learning process are the other half. Teachers put a lot of time and effort in coming up with creative ways to connect with their students. It is like using a flint and steel to start a camp fire, you can create lots of sparks, but unless the tinder is prepared to catch the sparks it will be a cold night at camp.

I suggested to Beth that with her new-found empathy toward a frustration common to all teachers, she might want to apologize to her former teachers at Holy Rosary and the Medford Area Public School District for the times she was not fully prepared for class when she was a student there.

At the very least she has gained a renewed appreciation for what teachers go through every day.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.