I am reading the book, Substitute : going to school with a thousand children, by Nicholson Baker in which he details 28 days he spent as a substitute teacher in Maine public schools covering all grades, subjects, and teaching roles.
He wrote about applying to obtain a substitute teaching certificate, 5:30AM “on call” requests, covering homeroom, teaching classes, working with leaning-disabled kids, conversations with other teachers, schedules and anything involved with the role.
Although I enjoy his writing style, I am dismayed at both the chaos and rigidity he describes. As a substitute, he relies on the kids to explain each class’s proscribed routines. He attempts to follow the lesson plans, but often fails to do much more than talk to a few kids and try to keep them relatively quiet. There are lots of worksheets and busywork assignments.
He describes a f***ing shitshow.
- Classes full of kids who can barely sit still, much less be quiet and learn anything.
- Schools more focused on following the “rules” and “bell schedules” than teaching.
- Teachers who function primarily as babysitters for classrooms of up to 30 students.
The kids are not monsters. They just want to socialize, play video games, talk and listen to music. The teachers and administrators seem like decent people doing their best to maintain order and meet the State’s educational requirements while treating the students with dignity and respect.
But I am still appalled by many of the conversations, teaching methodologies and classroom discussions he documents. The teaching lessons seem haphazard. It sounds like the “smart students” teach themselves and the “challenged students” mostly guess answers incorrectly and watch stuff on their iPads. Many of the teachers do not sound like the “best and the brightest”.
I was one of the “smart kids” in school. I learned a lot of useless knowledge that I would never use in real life, just like the smart kids in Maine’s school.
I estimate I spent 25% of my time in school learning, 25% waiting for other kids to catch up and 50% of my time reading books I had brought to class to read after I had finished my assignments. And then, of course, we were assigned 2-4 hours of daily homework, as part of my public school systems mandatory homework policy. It makes me want to scream just thinking about the wasted time and inefficiency. I should have been taking college courses or enrolled in a tech school or apprenticing somewhere during high school.
As for the “challenged kids”, perhaps they would be better off in an apprenticeship program than learning about Mendel and his experiments with dominant and recessive genes.
Maybe kids who aren’t good readers could be redirected to other subjects and practical skills that would help them as adults, instead of trying to learn parts of speech and the elements of a story.
Practical skills like how to change a tire, replace a leaky faucet, sand and paint a room, use common household power tools, calculate the real cost of buying using credit cards, personal budgeting, recognize phishing scams and many other real life skills lessons would be more valuable to teach kids.
It is still early in the book, so I’m not sure if Baker concludes with ideas and thoughts on how to improve the situation or if he is simply documenting his experience.
I suspect that many public schools are similar to those in Maine and mine in Pittsburgh.
In other words – a disaster under the guise of education that is really just mass babysitting.
I have more thoughts on the educational system and learning, but I’m going to finish the book first before writing a post about them.
