The Post I Never Wanted to Write
I can believe in my students as much as I want, but when I’m ill equipped with the tools to be successful, when administration uses veiled threats about non-contract renewals, when I note that half of my students struggle to read but am answered with “but our graduation rates” we have lost point. Robert Pondiscio wrote that “we nod in earnest agreement that every child must be held to high expectations and deserve to feel safe… but our practices often reveal something less than a warm embrace of those ideals”. This is my experience. When you work with people who think so little of the students you teach, when those students look like and come from the same neighborhood as you, it can almost feel like they might have thought the same were you a student in their class 10 years ago. It’s demoralizing, but I can have standards only to the point that the school culture tolerates my standards. Otherwise I’m the proverbial adversary for administration concerned with graduation rates instead of proficiency and growth, and of students that are used to just getting by. I have felt the crushing weight of mediocrity in a sad and intimate way.
