Not Enough Butter

The below vignette is merely one of dozens that have impacted public education and student achievement, and the identification of one small part of a multi-year trend in public education.

A teacher friend posted a message to me recently on the difficulties surrounding the teaching profession. She expressed it by loosely quoting the famous burglar Bilbo Baggins in his confidential conversation with Gandalf: "I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean, like butter that has been scraped over too much bread."* The stretched-thin metaphor my friend referred to results from the numerous additional tasks of late laid upon public school teachers.

At our school we are instituting some new strategies to improve student academic performance and make the place a better, safer one for students and teachers, and guide low-performing students through their individual difficulties. The objectives of the new programs are necessary and worthy, with much to recommend them, though the process and outcome of these new programs and tasks are coming at a cost. The costs as described here relate to the overextension of teacher's ability to devote more time to the extra programs in relation to the task load required to adequately fulfill their obligations, preparing and delivering instruction meeting the standards of the other stakeholders in public education.
At the moment, the jobs and requirements and duties related to the teaching profession constitute what I call the task load.** The responsibilities making up our actual school day (and not our "professional day") make it difficult to add yet more. I would like to devote a great deal of time to more of the difficult problems/topics/social issues that continually crop up or are newly being identified because they are deserving of my effort, but the time I spend or must expend on these new "issues" will have to come at the expense of something else; some other task or job or requirement related to classroom instruction must go to the back of the bus so the time once spent on previous tasks can be diverted or re-tasked to the new regime.

This little essay is designed to be neither an acid comment on my part aimed at administration nor some sort of teacher’s union activist flatulence, but the identification of a continuing trend in public education: A great deal of not only teacher and administrator “on the clock” time is being spent on more and varied tasks unrelated to classroom academic instruction, but more time off-campus gets subsumed into the dynamic of evaluating, preparing, planning, designing instruction, and focusing on the duties related to instructional topics. This is so because more on-campus time is being tasked to broader and more varied topics and issues outside of student academic instruction, requiring more off-the-clock time to take up the slack; the "flipped" nomenclature made popular recently.

When you take an issue or difficulty inherent in the education dynamic, for instance: bullying/sexual harassment, teachers are many times limited in their ability to affect change in student behavior when students come to us with attitudes and behaviors formed outside the scope and purview of our ability to interfere constructively.

When students come to school and act out their aggression on others, either students or teachers or staff, our response typically is reaction in the aftermath of some fracas because we are for the most part unaware of each individual personal dysfunction before the fact. Our intervention tends to happen post rather than pre when dealing with a kid's predisposition to acting on his or her animosity.
What the kid really needs is family intervention on a scale beyond what we are capable of providing. We can put the education and direction out there to both students and "caregivers" and confirm and reaffirm that which we hold dear, but change must come from internal transformation, a place we cannot usually reach without sometimes divine intervention.

Behaviorist training on our part glosses over the real issues. What thirteen-year-old who gets pushed about at home emotionally or physically and walks around with an inflamed mind can compartmentalize his/her affect and be Joe Social in the classroom without blowing off once in a while?

These are real issues that negatively affect student behavior and performance at school and must be addressed, but the cost in time takes away from instruction in other, necessary areas. Not to address them gives us more Columbine. Addressing them means less instruction in the three R's. The third way requires a ratio of more adults per student, a political decision again outside the purview of educators.

On the secondary level, the fifty-five or so minutes of class time we devote to these issues, or the minutes here and there as part of some other topic, must come at the expense of other instruction that we are currently required or were formerly required to teach. If we do one hundred eighty instructional days a year, and devote one class period per quarter or an equal number of instructional minutes to this kind of instruction, (for instance, anti-bullying) we have lost another four hours or so of instructional time when we additionally expect to lose perhaps five to ten instructional and preparation days for training in new programs like NGSS, Common Core, Whatever.

The state testing regimen will not change, but the instructional minutes devoted to prepare students for these ever-rising benchmarks are decreasing, and we swerve closer to meeting up with the diminished returns from having to address the non-academic topics. This is the blunt reality: we’ll get a safer school but a less-educated kid as a result. Personally? I like my pink body, so I might take the safer school and if I'm the really crass out-for-my-ownesome get-it-while-you-can less-work-but-give-me-more-money type of teacher (and there are more than a few out there), I might be so overloaded I could feel justified in putting my feet on the desk and let parents educate their kids on their own time with their own dime.

My role is to be an example at every opportunity that teaches, trains, coaches, admonishes, and then creating an environment where these opportunities happen repeatedly and predictably. Repercussions or discipline or punitive response is part of the due diligence we must be a part of, but usually manifests itself only after action on the part of the student demands it. In an issue like bullying, for instance, the data collection tasks and public narratives that require reflection, feedback, and sometimes follow-up action tend to expand to fill up more and more time; time that, as stated above, must be diverted from other necessary instructional tasks or other direct classroom instruction.
On the other hand, how can I not take action when action is mandated by the terms of our employment contract with the State of California as mandatory reporters of child abuse, or merely as a human being? We are stuck between doing necessary diligence, acting humanely to this issue, and providing useful instructional time in the academic areas where student learning can actually be demonstrated.

The threshold for entry to the classroom is high- a lotta education, lots of hoops to jump through to get the credentials and then student teaching or fieldwork, and the job afterward can sometimes really suck depending on the facility, the staff, the administration, the demographics of the students and the surrounding community. Opinion thus; we will begin to see people signing on because they have ulterior motives or don't have other prospects in the job market. That there are teachers who will stick around because this is the only gig they have ever known, or they haven't the ability or skill set to do anything else is another topic entirely. It's been said that "you don't have to be a rocket scientist to be a teacher, just willing," and I agree, though it's a difficult thing to say out loud or in such a public forum as this. Sometimes the most general kinds of intelligence and knowledge base make the best and most effective teachers, turning students into outstanding learners and motivating them to outstanding achievement. It's counter-intuitive, but in the literature on teaching and learning, many times those teachers with the most knowledge of a subject are not necessarily the best teachers of that subject.***

The really bright people who put up with the hoop-jumping still sign on for it because they think they have something to contribute that evolves from a heart of compassion, believing firmly that one person can still make a difference in the world. Others though have differing agendas to promote further their social or political worldview; still a motivation to jump the hurdles in order to access the young people in the classroom.

Something's gonna give, and I think you will begin to see fewer young people sign on for the teaching gig because the task load is incommensurate with the education, the pay, the perqs, the prestige, and the sense that one person can still make a difference.

***

* The Fellowship of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien, © 1954, Ballantine Books, Random House Inc. N.Y. p. 34.

** Military pilots use the term "task load" to identify, categorize, assign significance to, and prioritize the execution of tasks performed during a specific time frame while flying an aircraft.
A more ominous term is "task saturation," the point at which there is a drastic decrease in performance while judgement errors increase due to the inability to perform the needed tasks within the time alloted, a many times fatal circumstance when piloting aircraft.

*** http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:PXdEQwIO5EcJ:ncrtl.msu.edu/http/rreports/html/pdf/rr882.pdf+research+teachers+mathematics+necessarily&hl=en&gl=us&sig=AHIEtbSSyO21zgqWYKZHsWG3NzXU9oxrWw

*** http://resources.topschooljobs.org/tsj/articles/2004/10/13/07mathteach.h24.html