Hawaii Teacher: Let’s Stop Violating The Sanctity Of The Classroom
Maybe it was just my own sense of childish drama, an emotional state in which every event seemed to have universal significance. But as I remember it from my school days, the phone would ring in a classroom and there would be a sudden breath-taking pause in the room.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, ever called in the middle of a class unless there was an emergency. And when the teacher picked up the receiver, every ear in the room perked up and strained to hear the muffled voice squeaking out of the earpiece.
And when someone knocked on the door, oh boy! It felt as if they were in mortal peril if they didn鈥檛 have an excellent reason to be there. I remember one time when the teacher, with a stern look and a stiff lip, raised her voice with righteous annoyance, as if to ask how anyone would dare to interrupt their classroom and distract their attention for such a petty reason.
I鈥檓 not someone who believes that my own experiences hark back to the good old days of education when teachers taught, students listened, and parents were always supportive. Every generation has its struggles. My grandma never graduated high school, and neither did my mother. In their experience, school was harsh, rote, and alienating. I鈥檓 glad that we are conscious that those are not the right experiences for students, and that it is our responsibility to put an end to unnecessary heavy-handedness.
But there are things about the ideal of honoring instructional time, and about treating classrooms as sacred, that have died off in modern times. We need to restore and cherish those values.
Classroom instructional time today often seems to be interchangeable with the completion of a gaggle of surveys and forms, random phone calls, daily interruptions, and a plethora of various standardized tests and one-off assessments.
Right now, even the way we decide when grades are due devalues instructional time.
At the end of this school year, grades were due on the very last day of school, and teachers were expected to be entirely cleared and signed out of their classrooms. This created a situation in which final exams and papers needed to be collected several days or even a week earlier, so that they could be graded in accordance with standards-based practices. This means that the whole last week of school was, in instructional terms, useless — and this was reflected in student attitudes.
I would wager that if we subtract reported instructional time from all of the standardized testing days, time taken for non-subject matter related responsibilities, and minutes wasted on distractions from phone calls and visitors, many schools might report two weeks fewer instructional days than the DOE requires.
This problem is mostly a matter of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. The hole was created by the Hawaii State Teachers Association, and the peg created by the DOE.
The HSTA, although it should be responsible for sticking up for teachers and their classrooms by addressing issues like this, has yet to assert itself in any way that might fix these problems. They say that the onus for protecting instructional time falls on school administrations. Meanwhile, due to low salaries, the union has bargained for as little accountable work time as possible for teachers, forcing the Department of Education and administrations to interrupt classes to squeeze in the duties and responsibilities handed down to them by the DOE.
If this were a smart system that actually valued first-to-last day, bell-to-bell instruction, it would pay teachers a decent professional wage and, in turn, permit them to be there for the week after school let out to finish scoring and to post grades. In addition, administrations would seek ways for classrooms to focus singularly and without interruption on subject-matter instruction by screening phone calls and implementing homerooms to handle the endless surveying and collecting of forms from students. And the DOE would create transparent public reporting systems that would reveal every minute taken out of a teacher鈥檚 instructional time, as well as the number of classroom interruptions. If teaching were treated in a truly professional manner, the state would start to see truly professional results.
Unfortunately, as things stand, the onslaught on instructional time — not to mention the unrealistic loading up on teacher responsibilities and duties — continues.
I am a true believer that when it comes to creating standards for student achievement and improving education, our biggest weakness right now is the complete absence of any initiative to improve educational culture within schools. We must tackle this if we truly want to succeed.
Michael Wooten is a former sergeant in the U.S. Army and University of California Berkeley graduate who came to Hawaii as a Teach For America teacher in 2008. He earned his masters degree in education from the University of Hawaii and currently teaches English and film at James Campbell High School in Ewa Beach.
