Who Needs a Makeover?

I was so happy to read this piece, recently published in the Washington Post. As a former elementary classroom teacher and mother of two young boys, I have experienced a great deal of frustration over schools that are not built for kids. Instead, we keep trying to makeover kids in school’s image, medicating and punishing and demeaning them into compliance.

The idea that a well-managed classroom means all students (even the youngest, at 3 or 4 or 5) are sitting in a chair, studiously bent over their papers and working for hours on end goes against everything we know from child development, academic achievement, growth, maturity, and health. Even in the workplace, we’re realizing that people (of any age) can’t just sit and work and work and work without moving. This article in the New York Times outlines why people “hate” work and steps that can improve one’s health and happiness in the workplace. If we’re recommending adults at the office get up every single hour and spend time walking/moving, why would we do any less for children? If we’re pushing for standing and walking desks at the office, how can we be forcing quiet sitting time for our kids?

My favorite teaching moments happened when kids were moving and smiling and (yes) making noise. When I was teaching second grade, my students had to learn about the concepts of predator and prey in their science lesson. The bulk of the lesson was outside, with some students acting as predators (making their eyes look straight ahead) and others as prey (moving their heads side to side to get as much of a 360 degree view of their surroundings as they could). We commenced a form of freeze tag in which the predators tried to freeze tag the prey, and the prey tried to keep away. Years later, those children are nearly finished with their bachelor’s degrees, but I still use that as an example of one of my most effective lessons ever.

Lip service is paid to the underperformance of boys in school, but can we really be surprised that boys (in particular) are struggling to conform to an institution in which they are not allowed to move and explore and demonstrate curiosity? My oldest son spent five days in Kindergarten before we gave up and enrolled in a distance learning/homeschooling program. Each of those five days, the teacher’s lesson centered around forcing the children to sit in quiet and still circle on the floor while she stood off to the side and created a tiny origami crane that she’d give to the student who demonstrated the most quiet and still behavior. Could you win that prize? Could you sit still, on the floor with no cushion/padding, without moving or squirming at all? Even for 5 minutes? How about 20? 30? That’s what she was demanding of 20 five-year-olds every day during the first week of their first year of school.

It’s about time we made school for kids, rather than trying to remake our kids for school.

Teachers Bully, Too

Bullying and anti-bullying campaigns are everywhere. The U.S. government has declared October Bullying Prevention Awareness Month. Wikipedia has an entire category devoted to pages about a host of anti-bullying initiatives. The national teachers’ unions, NEA and AFT, have efforts to raise awareness about bullying. Most of these organizations spend energy, time, and money to address situations where children are bullying other children. While there is evidence that these efforts may be counterproductive, they also miss what might be an even more serious issue: teachers as the bullies.

While not as prevalent as the news proclaiming all of the anti-bullying initiatives, there are media reports of teacher bullying. In one, a teacher was caught on video joining with child bullies to attack a 13-year-old boy. This post highlights several other instances of teacher bullying. Parenting and medical sites offer advice to parents who suspect their children are being bullied by teachers. My own son, at his first experience in a formal school setting, experienced five days of bullying at the hands of two Kindergarten teachers. Other children physically attacked him as well, with the tacit and outright approval of these teachers. Needless to say, the fifth day of this was his last in the school.

Dr. Stuart Tremlow researches this phenomenon. In one study, he found a correlation between prevalence of bullying teachers in a school and the rates of behavioral problems among children in that school. In another, he found that teachers who were victims of bullying during their youth were more likely to engage in bullying behavior as adults. Other teachers serve in the role of bystander, witnessing bullying but doing nothing.

Perhaps instead of raising awareness of bullying, or declaring a bullying prevention month, we demand that teachers stop being bullies and bystanders. Perhaps we expect teachers’ dispositions include active support of all students rather than than victimizing children.