Why Teach and Other Questions

Kids these days! I have heard before the quotes that William Ayers used in the first chapter under Myth 12...Kids today are worse than ever before...they are sloppy and they disrupt, they are selfish and lazy. These are thoughts that we hear a lot of todays students. My husbands company, Hewlett Packard, required all managers to read an article last year entitiled " Motivating the Whats in it for Me Workforce". It described the same youth that Socrates, Shakespeare, and as a matter of fact the Bible describe especially of teenagers. Mr. Ayers suggests that kids are kids and always have been. I remember reading the Little House on the Prairie series and how the boys tormented Laura as a young teacher, playing awful pranks on her due to her youthfulness and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow portrays master Cranes students as just as incorriglible. I have thought of these scenarios many times, especially as a substitute teacher who has fallen prey to pranks like having my trash can filled with water to soak me to the knee while trying to stomp the trash down or seeing a paper airplane flying by me as I demonstrated the quadratic formula. It helps to realize that I am not alone and this is not a reflection of my prowess at classroom discipline. Kids will be kids and a sense of humor and a lot of patience are neccesary comodities when working in the classroom at any age.
Mr. Ayers states that (pg.16) "they need caring and connected adults to engage and encourage them." I have been on a long journey to learn what was the most effective way to relate to students mostly flying by the seat of my pants. I have tried setting boundaries and expectations clearly and enforcing these out of a sense of self respect. I have tried to be fun or funny or professional or fascinating. I have tried using grace. I have tried holding the line. And what I have found is that teaching requires a mix of all strategies. I liked Ayers quote of Greene (1973) that says, "Given what I now know (about the world, aobut this class, about this student before me), what should I do? " That is the truest statement, I have heard about teaching and I like it because it encompasses eras of society and public practice and individual styles and attitudes about education.
In spite of the evidence of "problem" kids throughout the ages, I do think that there are eras in which teaching has been easier and harder due to public attitudes and values. I do think that right now we face a particularly difficult population due to the societal values in regard to authority and respect. We have the drug culture adding fuel to the fire. We have two person working families with parents too tired to be as intimately involved with their kids or the schools. There has been a culture of raising children to see themselves as very valuable and equally as powerful in the classroom relationship as the teacher. No matter what your view of the value of this thinking, whether you perceive it as a positive or negative trend it has had impact on the classroom environment of today. There have always been discipline/respect problems in the classroom. Human nature makes that imperative, but there has been in the past some respect for position from both students and parents that is lacking today. Most teachers I know are highly frustrated by the fact that they cannot count on the parents to help support them in classroom issues where they are seeking to help children succeed.
William Ayers talks about the tool that all teachers have at their disposal, no matter what the era, no matter what the student and that is relationship. He comments that teaching skills should be viewed as the result of concern for the whole person. I have found that discipline or deadlines or cojoling have little impact both as a teacher or a parent without relationship. In my substitute teaching I have little trouble with students that feel I am interested in them as people. As a full time teacher, the kids who made the effort to achieve or came in to try to save their grade rather than giving up were ones that I had been able to invest in, who thought it mattered to me whether they failed or succeeded. They know that I was willing to work with them as long as they put out the effort too. I like what Ayers (p.22) says about looking deeply at students (What went on in their life today? What are their parents attitudes? How do they feel accepted? Do they see themselves as having the capability to succeed?) and see them as creature like ourselves and yet unique in important ways. I need to be reminded of this regularly especially in regard to students that I find particularly difficult in some way.
This week I had a chance to talk to some people from Australia about behaviors and attitudes about school. I thought there were some interesting results. I had an Australian exchange student staying with me for the week. After a couple of days at school I asked the fourteen year old about whether he thought our school seemed very different from his school back home. He responded that it seemed as different as could be in every way. The students have less respect. They wear uniforms and cannot have cell phones on campus. There is no snack machine and you definitly could not eat in class or put your feet on the tables. It sounds from this students perspective like a more controlled atmosphere. I also spoke with one of the trip advisors who is a teacher. She on the other hand said that except for school uniforms, the school and its atmosphere seemed to be very similar. So where does the reality lie? Are kids the same everywhere? Is our society global enough these days that the current social attitudes in regard to education, its perceptions, goals and public attitudes towards it are universal?