I have the privilege of being a public school teacher. Or maybe I should use the word “cursed”. It is no easy thing to be a teacher in the modern world. Regressive State governments like Texas mandate that teachers do more with less. We have to have bigger classes. We have to show higher gains on State tests. We have to do more for special populations based on race, disability, language-learner status, and socio-economic status. Of course, we give money to private schools to be “fair” to all, so a majority of the well-funded and advantaged students are removed from the public school system, even though studies show that their presence in classes benefits everyone. When the majority of students are low-income in a single classroom, even the gifted minority perform less well. When higher-income students are at least fifty per-cent of the class, then even the low-income and learning disabled make higher gains than the minority gifted in the first example class. So, there’s my triple-downer bummer for this post. You might think that I would agree with Republicans in this State that the lower classes are not worth investing in. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The fact is, my fondest memories from thirty-one years as a public school teacher come from the downtrodden masses, the poor, the oddballs, the disadvantaged, and even the truly weird.
Okay, so here’s the funny and heart-warming part. I have a Hispanic English Language Learner right now who looks at the beard I have grown and calls me, “my friend Jesus”. I have to constantly remind him that, “If I were the son of God, my son, then I would be using lightning bolts for discipline a little more often.” He grins at me and answers, “Yes, my Jesus.” He’s a sneaky sort, more dedicated to games and messages on his i-phone than learning. He is more into working with the girls in small groups so that he can come out appearing much smarter without putting out very much actual work.
I remember one particularly challenged boy who didn’t talk in class at all. He could make sounds, however. Constantly during classes with this student in them, there would be numerous “meows” and birdcalls. Grunts and groans and whistles would fill the air. Most of the noises came from him. The ones that didn’t, came from those who imitated him. It reached a point that I was having to teach a classroom full of Harpo Marxes . When asked about it, he claimed he had a sore throat all the time and just couldn’t talk. Many of his teachers thought he was merely sabotaging class so he wouldn’t have to do any work. But just like when you put a harp in front of Harpo, this boy had hidden talents, and just was not being engaged on his own level. He was really quite bright if you could learn to communicate with him in Harpo Marxian.
I had another student who read all the existing Harry Potter books forward and backwards, and inside out. He even looked like the actor who played Harry in the movies, glasses and all. He was treated like a radioactive being by his classmates, and although he was charming and funny and had a natural talent for manga-style drawings of people, nobody seemed to treat him like a friend. (The paffooney picture I drew for this post was inspired by him.) He was a jovial loner. I was able to tap into his natural abilities for the Odyssey of the Mind creativity contests we participated in during the early 2000’s. I helped him find nerd friends who also knew all the words to the Spongebob Squarepants theme.
I have a Chinese girl in class who shared the Spongebob boy’s fascination with manga-style art. She’s a different bird all together. She gets my jokes and thinks I am funny. But she never laughs. She never even cracks a smile. She is so careful and complete in every assignment that it is very nearly painful to watch. Grades are serious matters to her. If her grade drops from 100 to 98, she wants to audit the teacher’s grade book to find out why. She does everything in class in beautifully crafted Chinese writing, and then translates it all word-for-word into English.
I owe my teaching career to kids like these. When I started my career in 1981 for $11,000 per year, I was employed by a school that had total disciplinary meltdown the year before. I had to deal with hostility, impossible behavior-modification tasks, fire crackers in the classroom, student fights, bullying, and a language/cultural gap wider than the Grand Canyon. That first year, I was planning to resign at the end of the year and try to figure out what else I could do with my life when a small Hispanic boy with a Scottish family name came up beside me on the playground one March day and said, “Mr. Beyer, I hope you know you are my favorite teacher. You are the reason I liked school this year.”
I didn’t let him see that there were tears in my eyes. I told him something about him being my favorite student. And I gave up thoughts about giving up. I lived the next thirty years of my career for him.
Catch a Falling Star 
Why School Should Be Cool
I was a school teacher for thirty-one years, and in spite of the immense amount of brain damage that builds up over time, especially as a middle-school teacher, I think I know what we’ve been doing wrong.
We need to take a look at an education system where things are working better than they are here.
Now, I know you probably didn’t click on the boring video about school. Heck, you probably aren’t even reading this sentence. But I can summarize it and put it in easy-to-understand words. Finland does not have to educate as many poor and disadvantaged kids as this country does. The video gives five ways that Finland does it better, but all of them boil down to the basic notion that the country is more homogeneous and uniformly middle-class than ours is. Still, we can learn things from them.
The first of the five ways that Finland does it better is a difference in government. While U.S. governmental safety-net programs blame people who need food stamps for being lazy (even though some of them work 40-hour work weeks in minimum-wage jobs), Finland gives a huge package to parents of everything they might need as soon as their child is born. As long as the child is in school, the government does many things to support the family’s efforts to educate them. Imagine what we could accomplish here if we invested some of the vast fortune we give to corporations in subsidies into educating poor black and Hispanic children instead. Children have a hard time learning in school when they come to school hungry. If we could only feed them better, the way the Fins do, we would revolutionize our classrooms.
The second point the video makes is the biggest suds-maker every time I get on my teacher’s soap box. They don’t give kids homework and they only give them one standardized test when they leave high school. I have recently covered this topic more thoroughly in a post in which I was able to ridicule Florida governor Rick “Skeletor” Scott. (Boy, did I enjoy doing that.) But I won’t go into all of that again here.
The third thing is respecting teachers. In Finland they treat teachers with the kind of respect that they give to doctors and lawyers. How cool is that? In Texas, calling someone a teacher is an epithet. If a teacher is liked or even loved by their students, administrators are encouraged to keep a closer eye on them to figure out what’s wrong. Students are supposed to hate their teachers and sit all day filling out mind-numbing test-preparation worksheets. Imagine what it could be like if teachers weren’t the scum of the earth. They might actually have students convinced that learning goes on in their classrooms.
The fourth point is that Finland does not try to cram more and more memorized details into young brains so they can spit it all back out on a test. They take students thoroughly into the subject of study, and at a slower, easier pace. They dive deep into the river of learning instead of wade through the wide and shallow parts. All questions get answered. And by that, I mean, student questions, not teacher questions. The learning is student-centered.
Finally, the video states that Finland simply has fewer social ills in their country to get in the way of good quality education. But even though the work is harder in this country, the potential is really there to go far beyond what Finland is capable of. We have a natural resource that is totally untapped in this nation. We don’t develop the minds of a majority of our children in any meaningful way. And I can tell you from having done it, you can teach a poor or disadvantaged child to think. You can give them the tools for academic, economic, and personal success. You can make them into valuable human beings. But you should never forget, they are already precious beyond measure. We just ignore and trash that inherent value. So, the information is out there about how to do a better job of educating our children. We need to follow through.
Here endeth the lesson.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, education, humor, insight, teaching
Tagged as education, Finland's education system, humor, lessons learned, teaching, teaching better