How Hard Can It Be to Teach? The Challenges Go Well Beyond the Classroom

David Herszenhorn:

Working with children looks easy. It is not.

In four and a half years on the city schools beat, I have often repeated this anecdote to principals. And typically they chuckle, grateful for the recognition that many people, including the mayor, may underestimate how difficult it is to work in schools on a daily basis, and not just because of the intellectual challenges of teaching.

School professionals are called upon not only to educate children, but also to nurture curiosity and civic values, and even to teach the most basic manners. Once, while waiting to have lunch with my mother, now retired after more than 30 years as a teacher in a city elementary school, I stood in her school’s main entrance and watched a teacher walk by with her class, shouting: “Fingers out of your nose! Fingers out of your nose!”

Not only do professional educators have to know how to deal with children, they have to be clever about soothing an even wackier bunch: parents.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at July 11, 2007 12:50 PM
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