Posted by
William D. Dannenmaier on Tuesday, March 15, 2011 5:51:50 PM
Several years ago, observing unfilled or poorly patched holes in our asphalt covered roads, I didn’t blame the men driving the trucks with fresh asphalt in them. Neither did I blame the men with shovels, supposedly patching the holes. I blamed the man we had elected as road supervisor. Apparently, others felt as I did. Following the next election, we had a new road commissioner.
It is not just watching political offices that I have seen that. As a youth I worked in clothing stores, first as a stock boy, later as a part-time salesman. When a salesman was absent from the floor too often or when business was slack and the sales clerks spent their time standing and talking to each other rather than straightening the shelves and hanging suits, the store supervisor talked to the department head – and the sales clerks behavior changed.
This is what I don’t understand about the countless articles blaming the lack of progress on the teachers. Where are the administrators?
When one of my sons was in an algebra course under a first year teacher, it disturbed me that his teacher never checked his homework, she simply entered a checkmark that he had turned in his homework. She didn’t know if he had made mistakes or done it properly. I finally lost my temper completely when he told me that during class she would assign problems and then turn on the room television to watch her favorite soap opera. I created enough of a fuss, that a meeting I had with the teacher included the principal and the assistant director of education. During the meeting I brought both subjects up without contradiction from the teacher. Nothing changed. I spent weekends teaching algebra to the boy. What happened to the teacher? She was re-hired the next year.
Principals are supposed to oversee teaching. If teachers aren’t teaching, why blame them. Why not put the fault where it belongs, with the administrators?
As a beginning teacher, I worked for a tyrant named Ben Milster. Ben came to school early to do his paperwork – with twenty-six teachers and thirteen hundred children I suspect there was a lot. But then he spent his day wandering the halls. I promise you, that he didn’t like to see a teacher sitting behind his or desk. In his opinion, a teacher should be standing up teaching or walking the aisles checking on the children’s work as they did desk assignments. We teachers didn’t “like” Ben, but we respected him. With more experience, my respect for Ben has only grown. Incidentally, our slum school students who came from the poorest of neighborhoods in our high school’s area, were routinely placed in top classes when they left us and went to high school.
During the years that I supervised student teachers, I was in and out of many schools. I saw principals who worked at doing their jobs, they knew their teachers and they knew their students – at least the problem ones. They also knew my student teachers and could give accurate descriptions of their work. I also visited schools where the principal always seemed too “busy” to talk and knew little about my students. I suspect they knew equally little about their teachers.
Taken in mass, it is my belief that in any occupation, from ditch digger to doctor, there will be people who will work as little as possible and that their work will be done as poorly as it can be done without being fired or sued. That is why, or should be one reason, for having supervisors and administrators.
Let us stop blaming teachers from not doing their jobs, let’s begin blaming the administrators who don’t do theirs: who fail to supervise and, even as in the case of my algebra teacher, when a teacher has been proven to neglect her teaching and ignore her students, keep employing them to the point when they receive tenure.