UGA Research Magazine, Fall, 32-33. http://issuu.com/ugaresearch/docs/ugaresearchmagazine_fall2011/34?mode=window&viewMode=doublePage&utm_source=ugaresearch+magazine&utm_campaign=6b894433fa-ugaresearch_fall2011_11011111_1_2011&utm_medium=email

Viewpoint: School’s Out----Of Touch with Teachers
Peter Smagorinsky

Before entering university life as a teacher educator in 1990, I was a high school English teacher in the Chicago area for 14 years. During this time I experienced the good, the bad, and the ugly of public education. I count the parts that were good as among the most exhilarating, rewarding, and gratifying work I’ve ever done, and when it was good, I loved my job and couldn’t wait to get to school and teach. The bad and ugly made it hard to drag myself in to work some days.

Unfortunately, the political landscape has shifted in the 21 years since I left the classroom in a direction that makes it harder for teachers to get up in the morning and look forward to going to school. As anyone who follows the news knows, teachers are taking a beating on a daily basis over their short work days (after which they often continue teaching kids, grading papers, or working second jobs because the pay is insufficient); over their summer vacations (during which they often teach summer school or work other jobs because the pay….); over the fact that kids who graduate from high school haven’t yet memorized the contents of Wikipedia; and so on. It’s gotten ugly out there, and teachers must be to blame.

I’m continually amazed that, in this bile-bloated environment, at UGA we still draw applications to our English Education program from students with dazzling academic credentials, enough so that we routinely must reject some pretty impressive candidates whom our resource allotment does not provide room for. What makes these talented young people want to teach? And what will keep them in the classroom when the profession seems to be designed to make school a dull, dispirited site where their talents go to waste?

Our teacher candidates think of teaching as a profession in which they have the opportunity to work with kids in life-changing ways. They tend to see young people as having tremendous potential to grow through the educational process into better, more informed, more thoughtful, and more considerate citizens of a complex world. They are motivated by the sense of altruism that follows from making a contribution to their communities, and by a personal feeling that teaching can both change others for the better and also help to fulfill their own intellectual, creative, and emotional possibilities. In the field of English, they see the emphasis on literature, writing, and language as being ideal stimuli for young people to consider their roles in the world, the quality of their relationships, the themes that will guide their lives, the social issues that they will explore in both youth and adulthood, and other possibilities through which they may expand their perspectives and lead happy and productive lives. Of course there are exceptions, but this disposition characterizes most of the teachers I’ve ever known in motivating them to become teachers.

Schools, however, are not presently run to support such careers. Class sizes are growing (behind the urging of Bill Gates and his billions) to the point that in-class relationships are difficult to forge and cultivate; and spending time grading student work thoughtfully is powerfully compromised when you consider that spending 10 minutes grading each of 200 students’ essays takes over 33 hours, assuming that they can be read seamlessly without breaks or interruptions. The standardized testing machinery that preoccupies politicians reduces teachers to functionaries, and removes creativity and inquiry from their work. Because they reduce all achievement to a test score, testing imperatives make attention to all other forms of learning irrelevant and likely to be discouraged by administrators whose performance ratings are driven by test scores. And as the cheating scandals of Atlanta and just about every other system frantically trying to raise scores demonstrates, the testing mandates promote unethical behavior by the school’s most important role models.

If schools are to become provocative sites for intellectual life to flourish, then the conditions of school need to support and reward great teachers who want to be there. Making school a dismal, overcrowded, test-score-producing factory is not the way to encourage the best of teacher candidates to view teaching as a viable, long-term career goal.