New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
State’s teachers walking increasingly fraught path
Meet the Teacher night had a special resonance this year. For the first time since 2019, we could meet the teachers.
There’s nothing wrong with a video conference, the technology that helped keep the world running through the worst of the pandemic. But there’s also something missing when it comes to teachers, who spend more time with your children than anyone outside the home. Getting to see the inside of the classroom and sitting in the same seat as your child for a minute are just a few of the countless small things we missed out on for two and a half years.
My kids are getting older. One is in middle school, the other in his last year of elementary school. They’re long past the age when we would get up-to-theminute reports on how their day is going, and getting after-school recaps from the kids themselves is no more likely now than why I was in their shoes decades ago.
Hearing directly from the teachers is a big help. Even a glimpse is better than nothing.
And it’s enough to see signs of trouble around every corner.
For starters, one of my younger son’s teachers announced that he had started his career in a Connecticut city, but left that job when the prospect of raises looked impossible. That served as a decent summation of all the problems Connecticut public education faces today.
Beyond that, teachers are under fire for all sorts of things. They can get in trouble if they teach history as it really happened, because not everything in this nation’s past looks good in retrospect. They are told they should only be worried about the basics of knowledge, and leave emotional support and anything outside of textbooks to the parents. At the same time, they are dealing with children who have been through a lot.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that more children are reporting mental health challenges than in the past. We call children resilient, and they are, but the message that there’s a deadly contagion in the air has an undeniable impact. It’s no wonder worries are greater now than they were prepandemic.
Many concerns, however, focus on curriculum. Vague fears of indoctrination have been around as long as there have been public schools, but they’ve only been magnified in recent years, driven by cable news and Facebook. We hear, sometimes in letters on this page, the idea that children, especially white children, are being taught that they are oppressors, that they are responsible for sins of the past, that our nation’s history is one long catalog of evil. This kind of thinking popped up constantly in the “critical race theory” panic and continues to fester.
Evidence that it’s happening is harder to come by, but that doesn’t stop the outrage.
Teachers I met this year were very much aware of walking a tightrope. They don’t want to provoke the conspiracy-minded among the parents. But they also want to be honest, as well as age appropriate. There’s nothing easy about it.
Because the concerns about teaching history go both ways. Telling the story of how our country got where it is requires some hard truths, and there are many parents (including me) who don’t want teachers intimidated into glossing over the uglier aspects of our history. That means pointing out the ways that our leaders of the past have stood for self-interest rather than lofty goals like freedom and liberty.
We are, in short, a lot like most other countries. If teaching that to young people means it comes across as bashing our history, better to be honest than perpetuate a self-congratulatory myth of national greatness for its own sake.
The latter is pretty much what I heard as a student in Connecticut public schools in the 1980s and ’90s. It wasn’t until later that I started reading more on my own that a more nuanced portrait emerged.
Math teachers might have caught a break in the current education furor. There’s not as much nuance in prealgebra, where the answer is either correct or not. When it comes to history and social studies, it is harder to please everyone and ensure that children get a good education.
What we want from our teachers, then, is support. We want them to help get our kids through some difficult years and develop an interest in learning for its own sake. They can’t learn everything there is to know on a given subject, so instilling a desire to know more has more value than any set of facts that could be memorized.
Teachers do all this while balancing daily worries they’ll be the subject of a Facebook rant from an irate parent and dealing with rightfully traumatized young people. It’s a wonder the system works as well as it does.