A startling overlap of events (04/12/06)

Sometimes events overlap with startling intensity.

One day, an old friend recounts in an e-mail his suffering at the hands of an abusive teacher in grade school in the 1950s.

The next day, another friend tells me her husband is retiring early from teaching school. The problems of maintaining discipline are a big factor in his decision.

Two friends. Two sad stories. Different sides of the same coin. Both are evidence that America's public schools haven't found the right balance they need.

The e-mail came from outside Jay County, but the events occurred here, in a building which is still standing, in rooms where kids still attend classes today.

The writer is a grown man now, but he was a kid then, a fourth grader with a bit of a tendency to be a smart aleck. In other words, he wasn't much different from the rest of us; but he was different enough to attract the attention of an overly harsh disciplinarian.

Though there's gray in his hair these days, he still remembers vividly what went on. Forget about paddling; slaps and shaking were commonplace.

He and classmates were hurled over desks. Their heads were smacked against the cloakroom doors.

How do I know? I was a witness, and I still feel a sense of guilt about that.

Of course, no ten-year-old was going to stand up to a bullying adult.

But when you replay those events years later, you can't help but wish someone had yelled, “Stop!”

“How it affected my life you'd probably have to see a shrink about,” the e-mail said. “But honestly I think I turned out OK for it. Everyone has a story. That's part of mine.”

I was still brooding over that when I learned of the retirement of another friend.

The pendulum, it seems, has swung too far the other way.

While horror stories of student mistreatment up through the 1960s still resonate, today there's another kind of story.

Instead of an abusive teacher, it's an abusive environment, an environment where teachers are constrained beyond reason, where every action is weighed in terms of potential litigation, where it's hard to teach at all.

In that environment, teachers are afraid to discipline. They break up fights. They try to calm things down. But they're only nominally in charge.

Clearly, the first scenario — the one described by my old friend in his e-mail — is a nightmare. Just as clearly, the second scenario is a nightmare as well.

Education suffers in both scenarios. Kids are the losers in both.

And so, I find myself thinking of a third friend, a former teacher when I was in high school who I've had the privilege of knowing as an adult.

He's retired now, of course. But years ago he told me why he left the classroom.

The decision came when the parents changed sides.

When he'd started teaching, he told me, parents were any teacher’s best allies. They were on the same team.

But that changed somewhere along the line.

Instead of acting as partners with teachers in educating students, suddenly parents were advocates and activists, lobbying and cajoling and wheedling and pressuring to make sure the path was as smooth as possible, regardless of the educational process.

Maybe some of that was in reaction to teachers described by my old friend's e-mail.

I don't know.

What I do know is that we've lost our sense of equilibrium when good teachers retire early and that we never want to go back to the days when an educated bully could rule over a classroom of “midgets” like a god.

Is it too late for parents and teachers to become partners again?[[In-content Ad]]