I have begun my student teaching here in upstate South Carolina. I have been paired up with a wonderful cooperating teacher who shares my enthusiasm for teaching. The school I’ve been placed in is in the county seat but is probably the school that has the lowest test grades of all the school in the county. Most students won’t go on to college and a large percentage will drop out and either get their GED or go into a job where a high school diploma. Most of the ones who drop out are most likely young girls who have gotten pregnant – if my tenth grade English classes are any indication – during their tenth grade year. The sad truth is that South Carolina education is quickly falling by the way side. Our Governor seems to be too busy jetting off to Argentina on the taxpayers dime to notice. Our Lt. Governor isn’t much better. When speaking about children on the free and reduced lunch program offered in our state he was quoted as saying "My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals," Bauer told a Greenville-area crowd. "You know why? Because they breed." Sounds like something out of ‘A Modest Proposal’, right? The worst part is that I have heard teachers at this school talking about how they agreed with that statement.
*EDIT: Here is the full quote. "My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed! You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better."
Education in this state is rough and it takes teachers who are willing to work with the students to get them to pass even just your class. The best advice I have been given by my cooperating teacher has been to stay out of the teachers’ lounge. Wiser words have rarely been spoken. This does not mean that you never go socialize with other teachers because hearing others’ experiences will help you when you come up against a similar situation; however – and this is a big however – you have to ignore the teachers who have nothing but negative things to say about their jobs and their students. Today was a perfect example of that. I went in to make copies – the first time I have done so on my own and I could not for the life of me figure out how to use the damn thing – and there was a group of about six or seven teachers in the lounge talking about teaching at this school is bringing themselves down as people. One teacher thought her student teacher was talking down to her students by asking them if they knew what the word ambition meant. I happened to know who her student teacher was and also knew that she was teaching Macbeth, a play in which ambition is a key theme. Asking them about ambition did not seem like a stretch to start a discussion about it. There was also a math teacher who was complaining that her students didn’t know how to “enter exponents in their damn calculators.” To be honest I had trouble learning how to use my damn calculator when I graduated from a four function to a TI-83. I don’t know how the teacher taught them t enter it but if I was her I would have another quick crash course on how to do it. I remember it not being that hard but still having to ask fellow students the first few times before it stuck.
Now that I’ve said that I do want to say that at this school I feel like there are more teachers who do like teaching than ones that don’t. This is a comforting thought to be sure.
The students here are very different from the students I went to high school with just thirty minutes down the road. My high school was half university brats – I count myself among them – and half good ole boys and girls who wore shirts with the Confederate flag on them. At this school – the one I am student teaching at – most students where camo everyday either on clothing or backpacks and the Confederate flag on belt buckles. My brother pointed out to me that what we think of as the Confederate flag is actually the Battle Flag of the Army of North Virginia. He told me that next time I saw someone where that to ask them if they were from Northern Virginia and who they were fighting. My brother is also a smart ass, if you hadn’t noticed.
The point of this side story is that these students are different than what I am used and yet still familiar. These are true southern kids. Most people who have heard of this school would say these kids aren’t worth teaching and that it’s a waste of my time to think about teaching in a public school period. I disagree. I have been so surprised by some of the students I have had.
There is one kid, Jake, who is your stereotypical country boys. I had my students write advice poems after reading Neil Gaiman’s poem “Instructions” and like most of the boys in my classes Jake wrote his on hunting. Then when we began our short story unit we read “October in the Chair” by the same author and I had my students write an alternate ending to the story. Jake’s ending blew me away and when the class voted on whose ending was the best Jake’s ending won. He had spent about twenty minutes on an assignment that was only suppose to be ½ to 1 page long. He is not my only student like this. There are at least a few in every class I am teaching right now. These students are the ones who make me realize that teaching in a public is worth it because these kids are not ones who would ever be able to afford – even with vouchers – to go to a private school.
These are just some early thoughts I have had about my student teaching experience. I realize to most I sound like the typical green English teacher who wants to save the world. I don’t want to save the world. All I want is to help my corner of it.
I will leave you with a quote of my own to counter the one from our Lt. Governor.
"We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today." - Stacia Tauscher
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