The Conditions of Teaching

August 5, 2012

Peter Smagorinsky

I recently read an article published in a scholarly journal that grabbed my attention. The author, Edwin M. Hopkins of the University of Kansas, relies on a just-published study that reported the hours that English teachers must work in order to grade their students’ compositions. He concludes that present work conditions do not enable the careful reading that student writing deserves. Hopkins says:

[I]If good teaching can be done under present conditions, it is passing strange that so few teachers have found out how to do it; that English composition teachers as a class, if judged by criticism that is becoming more and more frequent, are so abnormally inefficient. For every year the complaints become louder that the investment in English teaching yields but a small fraction of the desired returns. Every year teachers resign, break down, perhaps become permanently invalided, having sacrificed ambition, health, and in not a few instances even life, in the struggle to do all the work expected of them. Every year thousands of pupils drift through the schools, half-cared for in English classes where they should have constant and encouraging personal attention, and neglected in other classes where their English should be watched over at least incidentally, to emerge in a more or less damaged linguistic condition, incapable of meeting satisfactorily the simplest practical demand upon their powers of expression. Much money is spent, valuable teachers are worn out at an inhumanly rapid rate, and results are inadequate or wholly lacking. From any point of view—that of taxpayer, teacher, or pupil—such a situation is intolerable. . . . [T]he corresponding maximum number of pupils consonant with efficiency for a single teacher in secondary schools should not exceed eighty [and] the proper average number for average needs and conditions as they exist at present is . . . about fifty. . . . [These facts] show good composition teaching to be impossible under the present conditions; and the more essential of these facts have received, since the preliminary publication of them a few months ago, corroboration that is apparently more than sufficient to place them beyond the possibility of dispute. Yet in time past, when English teachers have stated these facts to educational authorities, they have not infrequently been called incompetent, ignorant, or even untruthful; while more often and perhaps more recently they have been assured that these matters, while possibly true, are after all unimportant and irrelevant; that they have no bearing upon the situation, or that they have nothing to do with the real problems of English teaching. But investigations show that there are few schools in the entire country in which these facts are not directly responsible for admitted lack of efficiency. A large proportion of English composition teachers labor under conditions which make their work a farce if not a tragedy. An occasional administrator who does recognize the nature of the situation may assure them that they are not held responsible for more than is “reasonable under the circumstances”; but public opinion and public criticism enter to this statement an effective denial. The public doesn’t know anything about the circumstances, but it does seem to know that it pays for something that for some reason it is not receiving; and the teacher is not usually in a position to escape either the blame or the penalty.

His themes sound familiar: Teachers are given more work than time allows for them to complete; their health and well-being suffer as they nonetheless try to fit 20 hours of work into 10 hours of real time; more work is expected of them as resources are either denied or cut back; research findings produce good information that policymakers ignore; and the public blames the teachers when they cannot produce the expected miracles.

So, why review this well-worn process, when it’s been so thoroughly aired out in pro-teacher opinion pieces published in the nation’s many blogs and other outlets for educational writing? What’s the point of saying the same thing yet again, when the final statement—that “the teacher is not usually in a position to escape either the blame or the penalty”—has become the most obvious observation that anyone interested in schools could possibly make?

What makes this article’s insights so compelling is that they were published a century ago in the inaugural issue of The English Journal. The National Council of Teachers of English was founded in 1911, and its journal of record first appeared in January 1912. That very first issue included Professor Hopkins’ essay, titled “Can Good Composition Teaching be done under Present Conditions?” His emphatic response to his titular question, in the opening line of his article, is “No,” an answer that he proceeds to state stands as an “indisputable truth.”

Professor Hopkins made these remarks when teaching was a lot easier than it is today. Immigrant students rarely attended school, instead working to keep the family fed and clothed, as my Byelorussian uncles did as pre-teens who immigrated right around the time of Hopkins’ essay. Families in which white collar work was not expected didn’t stay in school for long either. My mother’s father was among a household of children who were run out of the house as pre-teens when their father re-married following his first wife’s death; the new wife wanted no part of his previous brood, and so cleaned house in order to start her own family. My grandfather dropped out of school after his elementary years and became a plumber’s apprentice, an occupation in which he remained for the rest of his working days.

The US at the time was regarded as a melting pot, although the melting was largely done outside school. Southern schools still had over a half-century of segregation ahead of them in 1912, making both Black and White schools more homogeneous in population and presumably less complicated to teach in (although the Black schools had the decided complication of being provided with few resources). Northern schools were less formally segregated, but they were hardly well-integrated, given that housing segregation served as a proxy for school segregation. The US was still, for the most part, a nation written in Black and White, not to mention being essentially Christian in makeup. Jews might have been “White,” but they were segregated from many mainstream institutions and generally feared and loathed by White society.

Educators love to say that we should “celebrate diversity,” but it’s easier to put that slogan on a poster showing adorable kittens of different colors than it is to actually put into practice in a bad economy that exacerbates existing tensions. Professor Hopkins found the conditions of 1912—with homogeneous students, little concern for drop-outs, few students who spoke limited English, no standardized tests, and other factors that make demands on teachers’ time—to be oppressive and tragic.

In today’s more complicated world and schools, a century later, much remains the same. Professor Hopkins wrote that “[P]ublic opinion and public criticism enter to this statement an effective denial. The public doesn’t know anything about the circumstances, but it does seem to know that it pays for something that for some reason it is not receiving; and the teacher is not usually in a position to escape either the blame or the penalty.” Sound familiar?

How about putting 40 students in those classes (the recommendation of Bill Gates, one of the two most influential people in the nation in current educational policy)? How about if half of them would rather be working, like my grandfather, and resist the whole institution of school, much less the English class and its incessant demand for essays?

What if a goodly number speak a language other than English at home and come from cultures that are oriented to behaviors very different from those expected in school? How about if, instead of the occasional essay in a journal or newspaper serving as public discourse, commentary by anonymous critics fills the air around the clock with a negativity that dwarfs any that has ever surrounded public education?

What if elected officials, over and over, appointed people with no experience as educators to oversee educational policy such that teachers’ work conditions are determined and governed by people who don’t “know anything about the circumstances”?

Hopkins’s observations from a century ago are worth attending to. They effectively annihilate the “good old days” rhetoric that surrounds education, demonstrate that the public’s dim view of teachers is nothing new, and show that even under vastly more favorable conditions than teachers face today, teaching well is backbreaking work. Sad to say, that message continues to get lost in the overwhelmingly negative environment in which teachers must do what they set out to do when deciding to become teachers: care for kids enough to invest their working lives in their well-being and futures.