The good, the bad and the ugly

Yes, there are bad teachers in public schools.

Yes, there are mediocre teachers in public schools.

And, yes, there are amazing teachers in public schools.

Here is what no one seems to realize: they are the exact same people.

Every teacher has students who think they are wonderful, and students who think they’re horrible. I have colleagues whose teaching methods appall me, but who have students who love them. I have colleagues who I know are great teachers, but administrators do not like them. I hear parents complain about teachers who are too hard and about teachers who are too easy.

I have taught for 25 years, most of those years in the same small town. I often run into ex-students and their parents in the stores and offices around town. Usually they talk about how they loved my class, or they loved some aspect of my class. But I also have had them make it clear they did not think I was so great. I had one woman who was working in a day-old bread store attack me. She told me she was warning her daughter, who would be at the high school soon, to make sure she never had me for a teacher. I slunk out of that store trying to remember why she hated me so much. The only thing I actually remembered about her was the time she came to class so stoned that the whole class smelled of weed. I had the school resource officer come and escort her out of class. I guess that would indeed make me a horrible teacher.

Everyone talks about getting rid of the bad teachers, but no one can define what a good teacher is. If good teaching means having high test scores, then I know exactly how to go about being a good teacher:

1.     Only teach in middle class schools

2.     Only teach students who have parents who support education

3.     Only teach students who do not have learning disabilities

4.     Only teach students who have no personal problems

5.     Only teach material that will be on the test

If good teaching means reaching as many kids as possible, and helping them to become thinking citizens, then that is a much harder job to describe. We all have different ideas of what it means to reach a kid, or how to go about doing it. We also have different ideas about what thinking means.

What makes a good teacher is as hard to define as what makes a good book. I love books with strong believable characters while my friend prefers books with layers of symbolism. My husband likes science fiction and my neighbor despises that genre. I won't touch a romance novel, and a colleague owns every book written by Danielle Steele.

So give me a definition of a good teacher.  Go ahead, give it a try. Now get twenty other people to agree with that definition. See what I mean? Not so easy, huh?