50+ Lifestyles

Back to School

By Mary Schricker Gemberling

“In its highest level, the purpose of teaching is not to teach- it is to inspire the desire for learning.  Once a student’s mind is set on fire, it will find a way to provide its own fuel.”
………Sydney J. Harris

Each year about mid-August, I get this fleeting reminder that for many, summer is about over. As students and teachers head back to the classroom, my thoughts turn to the challenges they face. It has been fifteen years since I retired from teaching and more than a decade since my own two sons graduated, and yet I can still relate with a bit of trepidation to that first day of school. Short of a few isolated recollections of volatile teens, I have fond memories about my days as an educator and know that for the most part I impacted the lives of many students in a positive way.

Having had a variety of other jobs and careers over my lifetime, I know that teaching was the most difficult, exhausting, frustrating, and challenging of them all. A teacher must keep thirty to forty children or young adults (who they barely know) contained, entertained, and engaged in a topic that is probably not high on their student’s list of priorities. They come from varying ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Some have had breakfast, and some do not know where their next meal is coming from. Some hail from an environment of mutual respect with two parents, and some have but one parent they barely see. Several have large extended families to turn to for support, and a few have been in our country a short time and barely speak the language. There are the haves and have nots; the polite and the belligerent; the ambitious and the lazy; the extroverts and the introverts! In short, each young person brings into that classroom unique experiences and circumstances that set them apart and influence how they react to the rules and information with which they are presented.  And a teacher is expected to respond in a positive and constructive way to any and all of those situations, often with little warning, and no matter what personal situations or life challenges she or he might be facing outside the classroom!

There has been much negativism about our education system in recent years. Stories of threats to school safety, low achievement in urban schools, the relevancy of standardized testing and rampant bullying have permeated the headlines and spawned new programs across the country. Making the assumption that all students could learn the same way, at the same rate, regardless of gender, ethnicity, environment, attitude and IQ, the focus of education has been shifted from the individual needs of a student to the needs of the masses with test scores being the primary determination of our schools’ successes and failures. The reality is that it’s impossible to know what role the teacher or school played, for better or worse in the lives of the majority of students. And their successes are limited and rarely celebrated, but their failures are always out there for everyone to see and judge.

Every generation of young people appear a bit more challenging to both parents and teachers, but I’m not sure the difference lies in the actual behaviors or our reluctance to understand or accept change. Over two thousand years ago one of the world’s most famous teachers complained,

“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”
…………Socrates

Good or bad, this year’s class of students will appear a bit different than last years, and there will continue to be new initiatives, changes in curriculums, economic challenges, and threats to our safety. But amid the controversy and disruptions the teachers in classrooms across our country will once again be challenged to inspire in each and every one of their students a desire for lifelong learning and a passion for knowledge, understanding and innovation.

“The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in “Lonesome Dove” and had nightmares about slavery in “Beloved” and walked the streets of Dublin in “Ulysses” and made up a hundred stories in the Arabian nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in “A Prayer for Owen Meany.” I’ve been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me
when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language. ”
………….Pat Conroy

Mary, a former secondary education teacher and Seniors Real Estate Specialist, is the author of two books, The West End Kid and Labor of Love; My Personal Journey  through the World of Caregiving (available on www.Amazon.com).