Is Teaching Even About Teaching Anymore?

“Teaching isn’t even about teaching anymore.”

When these words flowed from my fellow coworker’s mouth, I felt my heart skip a beat. 

She was absolutely right. 

Although I’m still considered a newbie in this game called teaching, I knew exactly what she was talking about. 

Teaching Has Become a Business

From my limited view, I could still see that teaching had become more of a business than about the students we serve. Teaching has become more of a show and tell than about the students we serve.

Teaching has become more of a show and tell than about the students we serve. Click To Tweet 

Flowing from the top of the food chain to the bottom, where teachers reside, students being a top priority is used as more of a cliche than an actual baseline for financial and district-wide decisions. It’s always good to hear, but at the heart of many districts, students are just used as pawns for new systems and curriculums, while being photographed and used in videos to show the “growth” from these systems being put in place. 

With the vast changes in curriculums, textbooks, and state exams, teachers aren’t able to master methods of teaching the correct level of rigor required for students to barely pass a state exam. Deep down, we hate teaching to the test or trying to view the test requirements beforehand, but it becomes a real challenge when our end-of-year evaluation is based on growth and data from content that our children were never able to master coming in. 

From the Government on Down

What’s even more unfortunate is that those running our country (and others as well) find more value in outsourcing leaders and business owners, whose experience in education doesn’t extend beyond their own time as a student. It’s always funny to me that people from the outside of the classroom take brief snapshots of what’s happening and assume after one or two visits that they’re experts in education. 

Get real. 

It’s sickening to think of what we have to “do” to our students every day as a result of the decisions made by the “experts”. 

I see the frustration on my kid's faces every day when I have to introduce yet another topic for them to “master”, knowing that they weren’t even close to mastering the topic from the week before. I attempt to make it exciting, fun, and applicable to real-life scenarios, but just because I make my room into a Big Top Tent or perform “character trait surgery” on characters doesn’t mean that my kids are mastering anything! It’s just nice to look at and share on my social media accounts with the hashtag #teachersofinstagram. 

But what more can you do when you have to rush through content and don’t want students to get overwhelmed and mentally shut down? 

The question becomes “What can we as educators do to end this constant “educational” abuse that we experience first hand and then have to pass onto our students?”

Our children are suffering. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. 

Now that I think about it, the article should probably be called “Is Teaching About Kids Anymore?”