A non comprehensive list of fixes for the american education system.
Okay. I've said dozens of times, how if I was Empress Of the Earth, I'd fix education.
Only, I couldn't figure out what needed to be done. I spent sixteen years as an educator, librarian and teacher, full time and substitute, and it's complicated, hard work.
I was just writing âđź today in Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way : it's a word dump to clear your head among other things. Found myself writing about my memory of working in schools...
Figured out Three Things That Would Help:
Feed the Staff as well as the Students
Hire Data Entry Clerks to take some of the grind-work of grading off Teachers.
Cancel homework.
Maybe some teachers can easily juggle those first two tasks on their own... in addition to all the lesson design, research, modifying lessons to meet the needs of a diverse student body, classroom management and promotion/leadership that brings a healthy emotional support environment for the students and staff... Plus the 47 million other things that being a modern educator requires...
But I doubt it. Every teacher I know sounds overwhelmed and has for YEARS. And also talk about eating way too much junk food and frozen meals
But.
If meals are provided, say, breakfast, lunch, and a snack. And I mean healthy brain food! Not just "lowest common denominator" swill. As a teacher, you could spend a little more time just doing the damn job, not worrying about fuel.
As a student, they wouldn't have to worry about being hungry, because that's a place of emotional and physical fragility, which is never and has never been conducive to learning. Or any kind of working.
And the clerk to help get grades posted? That's just good sense. Especially if you're going to be at all generous with accepting late work from students. Maybe at a high school level, every department could have a clerk. My last teaching position had 2000 kids in the school? And that's a middling large California high school. So many assignments, so much grading. God. So many hours after school, trying to get on top of the workload and the physical piles of paper.
Cancelling homework isn't just a pipe dream. The homework culture is just a grind on kids (and their grown-ups) and there have been MANY many studies that assigning hours of homework don't actually help students learn. (Caveat: I know that Band and Drama and some other elective classes need more out-of-class practice)
What do y'all think? There are a million different ways to "reform education" but these are things that would have definitely helped me as a new classroom teacher back in the early Aughts.
