For the past three years, I was a substitute teacher in the public schools of Warren County, Virginia. I served both as an aide in classrooms with a regular full-time teacher and as a substitute alone in the classroom.
Warren County schools are probably typical of public schools everywhere: Most teachers love the students and are very frustrated that they can’t actually do what they signed up to do—teach. At the same time, many parents don’t understand why their children are not learning. Here are my insights as to why.
First, there’s no way a parent can know what goes on in the classroom.
Once I was an aide in a fourth grade classroom. It ran perfectly: the teacher teaching, kids working away, me helping the ones with special needs. But next door, in the other fourth grade classroom with the identical curriculum, kids were literally climbing over the seats while the teacher tried in vain to get them to sit down. How are parents to know which classroom their fourth grader is in? And what could they do about it if they knew?
Second, the system makes it very difficult for a parent to help a student.
A computer-based curriculum effectively cuts parents out of the helping process. The school district where I worked issues Chromebook laptops to second graders, and from then on, everything happens on that machine. It’s like that in many schools across the country.
Even the books elementary students are supposed to read for “free reading” are preloaded onto it. The teacher “assesses” their progress by seeing that they clicked pages open. There are expensive illustrated paper readers in lower grades, but those don’t leave the classroom. In one history class in a high school, I saw some textbooks stacked in a corner, but students told me they were never opened. At every level, all classwork is done on the Chromebook and sent to the internet cloud, where an acknowledgment of the work is entered into the teacher’s electronic record book—perhaps the fact that the work was “completed.”
If there is any homework, which there usually isn’t in elementary school, it’s done on the Chromebook. By sixth grade, a parent cannot see homework unless her child logs in while sitting beside the parent—but that only works if the child hasn’t already clicked to submit it to the teacher before mom or dad has found the time to sit down. With this digital system, a parent can’t know what his child doesn’t know—and thus cannot support the teacher by reinforcing or reteaching lessons at home.
Third, computerization hinders, not helps, the learning process.
Neuroscience shows that the effort of writing with the hand intrinsically enhances and reinforces the learning process in the brain. But even in kindergarten, the classroom is dominated by the “smart board.” In the classes where I was an aide or a teacher, kindergartners actually wrote with their hands for about 15 minutes of their six-hour days—not counting filling in worksheets. From second grade on, everything is done on Chromebooks.
When a sixth grade class was struggling with proportions, I urged them to write out the equation on paper and do the multiplication and division by hand. Most of them indicated they didn’t know how to do that, and they all told me they were allowed to use the calculator on their Chromebook to find the answer to 12 divided by 4. This was the sixth grade. What is sad is that probably most of those students had “completed” all their prior work in Chromebook.
What does “completed” mean?
During class, the teacher stays at her computer and projects onto the “smart board” pages that are also in the Chromebook and distributes paper copies of the identical sheets. The students are supposed to fill in a few words as she teaches the material—but there’s no need to pay attention because she fills in the words on the smart board, too. Students can glance at the computer screen and copy the words into their Chromebooks before she turns the page.
With this teaching methodology, students don’t have to interrupt the texting they’re doing on the cellphones in their laps or the web surfing they’re doing on the Chromebook at the same time. If the teacher happens to have an aide, the aide’s job is to stroll the aisles to try to prevent them from doing it.
Fourth, what happens in the classroom is not about learning, it’s about controlling behavior.
As a substitute, I really appreciated any notes the regular teacher would leave for me. Read between the lines, those notes reveal the stress of a middle school teacher’s daily life:
Andy is learning English. Billy is nonverbal but can communicate with his device. Watch the behavior of Cyler, Dancey, and Emlee … If one of them does something he’s not supposed to do multiple times and you give him multiple warnings, just send him to the office. Or, if he refuses to go, call the office and tell them that. Someone from administration should be in shortly.
Here is a teacher who realizes that her job is not to convey knowledge but to control behavior. And what can the administration do when it is called in? Nothing but put the kid alone in a room in front of a Chromebook to amuse and pacify herself.
Before being allowed to substitute teach, I had to take a six-hour virtual information session and pass a test on it. “It’s the developmental job of children to learn where limits are,” we were told. “Therefore, we must expect them to challenge teachers. The only thing we can do is to change their behavior for the next five minutes or the next 10 minutes.” That’s a direct quote. Based on the rest of the six hours, my translation of that would be: Kids are seeking limits, but teachers cannot give them any. Which is exactly what happens in the classroom.
It was recommended that we substitute teachers not tell students our correct names, lest they find us on social media. In other words: Teachers cannot expect good behavior from students in the classroom and yet must accept that students will harass them. Why would anyone want to be a teacher?
The balance of power in the classroom is in favor of the student more than the teacher. I have heard that sometimes parents will take the side of their kid and threaten a lawsuit if an administrator tries to discipline an unruly one. Defiant older kids told me that they could get me fired if they didn’t like me—and they were probably more right than wrong. They know their legal rights better than they know their multiplication tables.
If the virtual information session training I received is a fair representation of the mind of the education establishment, the system seems to be operating out of fear instilled by the ACE, or Adverse Childhood Experiences, Test. The ACE Test was a survey that invited students to consider whether certain things “may have shaped your life or personality”—things like parental divorce, physical assault (spanking or slapping) by a parent, physical assault of a parent, sexual assault, serious illness or injury, or even moving to a new home.
The relevant data point was that 3 out of 10 kids in Virginia, said the trainer, have had four or more adverse childhood experiences—which is the definition of serious trauma.
Therefore, a teacher should assume that 30% of the students in any classroom are, by definition, victims of serious trauma.
Therefore, every student must be handled with extreme caution and gentleness because the existence of trauma makes every student a virtual ticking time bomb. Since behavior is communication, in the words of the trainer, a student’s bad behavior is assumed to be the response to trauma—for which the student cannot be held responsible.
Therefore, we were told that a teacher must not overtly try to correct a student’s behavior. The example was given: A teacher should not say in a stern voice “Sit down and be quiet,” but instead must kindly ask, “Is there something I can do today to help your day go better?”
So, when a seventh grade boy is shouting obscenities at me because I told him to move to a different seat, I’m supposed to dialogue with him and explain the harm he’s doing to his peers by preventing them from paying attention—while the rest of the class watches and nobody learns what I’m supposed to be teaching.
It’s no wonder the school year in my school system here in Virginia started with 70-plus teacher positions vacant. People go into teaching because they want the rewards of teaching students and seeing the spark in the eye when a student “gets it.” The way the system works, though, both the teacher and the student are largely denied that experience.
Some of the problems I observed firsthand may have been intensified because we are on the edge of rural Appalachia, but I believe the rush to computerized learning and the preoccupation with lawsuits and other legal liability that paralyze school administrators and teachers alike are common throughout the country.
We have a national mental health crisis of low self-esteem. Doing well in school used to be a source of self-esteem and a motivation to pay attention and study (skills that then transfer into adulthood and a career). Education used to be an interpersonal, interactive process. But now, students interact with a Chromebook and get a bouncing smiling image on the screen when they get an answer right instead of a “Well done!” from a teacher in front of all the class. For fear of hurting some students’ feelings, all students are deprived of the chance to excel and to earn a sense of accomplishment.
The real losers are the students who actually want to learn.
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