Teachers wanted, role models needed

By Mark Costello
Collegian Editor
March 21, 2007

I spent my freshman year here at La Salle as an English/education major. By sophomore year, I was in the liberal arts track instead, leaving the possibility of teaching high school far behind in the wake of my education. The program at La Salle is fabulous, and the faculty and students I was involved with during my brief tenure in it were nothing but supportive, helpful and superbly qualified. Yet, within a few months, I left the program—because teaching high school is for the right kind of person, a person who I am not.

The difficulties of teaching in the modern world are myriad. Our society has become increasingly litigious; say something that could be misconstrued in any number of ways by misunderstanding students in a classroom setting and you, as a teacher, could find yourself embroiled in a nasty, career-ruining legal situation. “Those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach,” is, at best, an outmoded colloquialism that, given the rigors of educational theory and practicum, as well as the extensive testing education students are submitted to (the PRAXIS exams, for example), is downright offensive.

Combine these professional challenges with the personal. My aunt has taught first grade and kindergarten for well over 20 years, working at first for local Christian private schools and then making the transition into the School District of Philadelphia. Recently, a fight broke out at her school that parents were called in to help break up—and the parents joined in. She’s had her kids outside on the playground when drive-by shootings broke out and has seen security guards at her school assaulted by students and then again by parents when they came to pick their kids up.

Still and all, why bother? If the programs are rigorous and spit you out into a system where you’ll be abused, underpaid and subjected to viscous threats to your and your students’ personal well-being, why sit for the PRAXIS? Why go through with student teaching, field placement and endless educational psychological theory?

My aunt told me about seeing the kids come into school hungry and dirty, kids who don’t know who their mother or father are but can name who they live with. These kids must come to school because otherwise, they won’t eat. The breakfast and lunch the school provides through government programs are the only meals they get; over the weekend, they find what they can, or go hungry. The teachers they interact with are the only role models they have, and the friends they make while playing basketball on the playground are united with them through happy socialization, not shared trauma. Kids call her mom because they can’t find their own; kids are violent in school because of problems outside of it.

Don’t flee the School District of Philadelphia. Kids need role models like they need meals, and some of these kids will only find both at school.

costellom4@lasalle.edu