The First Rule of Teaching: Do No Harm

It wasn't until I went on a field trip with my son and his eighth grade teacher that I started pondering the recent debates about how a teacher's performance in the classroom should be evaluated.
My son and his teacher, Jennifer, were deep in conversation about some machine that my son had built at home out of spare parts. Jennifer listened, asked questions, then listened some more. She's a former engineer, so she has lots of high-powered technical knowledge she might have sprinkled onto my son's head like falling leaves. Instead, she focused on getting my son to ask the right questions, inserting facts only where she had to, until at last he said, “Oh! I know what I could try next. Thanks!”
I couldn't follow their conversation in detail – I barely passed high school physics – but it was suddenly clear that I was in the presence of one of those brilliant teachers who we hope like hell our children have at least a few times in their lives.
What makes a teacher brilliant? It's not easy for me to say, despite the fact that I've ushered three children and two stepchildren through school and into college. Along the way, I've attended countless parent-teacher conferences and PTO meetings. I've been a school volunteer.
But it was only at that moment, with Jennifer and my son, that I really considered what makes a teacher brilliant and not just okay, or downright evil. While we've never had a teacher as evil as Miss Trunchbull in Roald Dahl's brilliant book, Matilda – the one who locked children in a tiny room with spikes on the walls – we've certainly had our share of scary teachers.
There was, for instance, the elementary school teacher who made fun of my youngest son because he was anxious and had facial tics. When he told her that he wanted to be a mathematician, she laughed and said, “You'll never be a mathematician if you keep making those faces!” He also had a teacher who, when it was time to make gingerbread houses for Christmas, called him “defiant” because he didn't follow her A-frame plan and created his own design. The very next year, a teacher told my son that he would “grow up to be another Unibomber” because he had drawn a sketch of a gun he'd seen on YouTube.
Most teachers, thankfully, have not been so woefully ignorant or mean. Among the many teachers in the lives of our five children, most have simply followed their hearts in an effort to do good in the world. They get up every morning, balancing family life with work like most of us – only their work involves the emotional and exhausting rigors of caring for other people's children. They fight for what their students need, and sometimes, like the rest of us, they are irritable or too exhausted to be kind. They snap at the kids, or even, in the case of one math teacher at our junior high who, after being pushed to the limit by a wayward kid taunting him from the doorway, chase kids down the hall while waving chairs over their heads. Really.
Burnout isn't their fault, or at least not entirely. The educational system is overburdened – we all know that – and often more of a premium is placed on crowd control and compliance among students than on anything else. Students come to class unprepared or are confrontational, and parents are equally so. It's no wonder that our teachers are stressed and overwhelmed. If they'd wanted to be cops, they would have signed up for the police academy.
Yet, a few rare teachers continue to do their jobs well, or even brilliantly. My oldest daughter, always fearful of writing, became an avid writer because her sixth grade English teacher made her believe that she could do it – even as that teacher was battling breast cancer. My oldest son's first social studies teacher inspired in him a lifelong love of politics. A French teacher's encouragement led our younger daughter to study in Paris.
What sets those teachers apart? Brilliance in the classroom isn't about a teacher's education, training, or classroom experience. No, the kind of teacher who inspires students to learn because they want to, instead of because they have to, has more to do with elusive qualities, like being willing to meet a child where he is, having a keen and sturdy sense of humor, respecting every child's strengths, and bravely setting forth every day ready to try something new.
There has been a lot of debate about how best to test our teachers, such as asking whether we should use standardized student test scores to evaluate a teacher's performance. But the most important things to measure in a teacher are things you can't test for, like the willingness to trust that, within every child, there is a better person who just needs to be coaxed to come out. How do you test for that?
While we figure that out, the first rule to follow when evaluating teachers should be the same one we use in medicine. Teachers, like doctors, should First, do no harm.

Now that School is Out, What Did They Really Learn?

“So what do they teach at that new school, anyway?” my friend Donna asked recently. “Does Aidan still learn math and science? Will he be ready for high school?”
School has been out for a week now, and the kids have moved on to whatever they're doing this summer, notebooks and backpacks happily abandoned in whatever closet they'll live in until we dust them off in September. So Donna's question took me by surprise.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Of course he learned math.”
“I thought it was an alternative school,” she pressed. “What kind of education is it?”
Last fall, my son Aidan started seventh grade at the public junior high school. It was a disaster; my son hated it so much that I had to crowbar him out of the house.
What didn't he like?
Everything. Mostly, Aidan was bored. In his view: There were too many classes. The homework was stupid. The bus ride was too long.
“What a complainer,” my mother sniffed. “Just make him get up and go. Everyone goes to school. You did.”
I did, it was true. And I hated school too. Especially junior high. I was bored. In my view: There were too many classes. The homework was stupid. The bus ride was too long.
Whoops.
Our four older children went to the public high school and did well. All got into good colleges. This caboose of a child is a different story. Aidan isn't the type to sit still when bored. No, he's the kind of kid who, when he wants excitement, will make his own, like the day he got busted in elementary school for running a casino at his desk. His favorite times in seventh grade were when he got sent to the principal's office.
“At least then I'm not sitting in some boring class,” he said.
I had to do something before trouble became Aidan's favorite pastime. I met with his teachers, who just said he had to learn to sit still and control his impulsive behavior. They whispered about ADHD.
I already knew that Aidan had attention and organization problems. I also knew that, under certain circumstances, he could focus better than anyone.
After visiting several private schools in our area, I stumbled across a small Montessori school. Amazingly, they had an opening mid-fall in their seventh grade. Even more amazingly, when I described Aidan's progress, or lack of it, they were up to the challenge.
I knew nothing about Montessori. But I was at the end of my rope: Aidan had to go somewhere that wasn't the school he was in, and nobody else had any openings. I took a deep breath and made the switch.
For a long time, I worried, as Donna did, that Aidan might be missing out by not being in the public school. I quizzed my friends whose children were in seventh grade about what their kids were doing in math, social studies, English, and science to see if I could pinpoint anything that Aidan was missing. I worried, too, that by “letting” him act out in school instead of making him “sit up and fly right,” as my father would have put it, I might be doing Aidan a disservice. We all have to go to school, learn how to get along with others, and put up with supervisors who bore us. Was I spoiling Aidan by pulling him out of the public school? Would he emerge uneducated and unprepared for the so-called “real world?” because he was now going to a crazy school where the kids call the teachers by their first names, wear slippers to class, and can eat snack whenever they want?
Fast forward six months. It is nearly summer, and for their culminating event, Aidan and his classmates at the Montessori School are performing Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. On a real stage, with real costumes and lights. I'm sitting in the audience, and there is Aidan on stage as Lysander, holding hands with Hermia. Aidan is wearing a tunic and tights. He is saying his lines. He is not the best actor on stage, but he's into it, waving his hands around and managing to lie still with his eyes closed while Puck dances wildly around his head.
If you had asked me what I wanted Aidan to learn during his first year of middle school, I would have said math, science, social studies, and maybe how to write a book review. I would never have predicted that Aidan would create, as he did at this school, a model of a half-size camel, which he presented while spouting facts about the desert biome. I never would have predicted how much Aidan loved volunteering with senior citizens, as his middle school does once each week. And I certainly never could have imagined the stories I heard about how, during the middle school field trip backpacking in the White Mountains, Aidan stood up as the moon was rising and started reciting lines from Midsummer Night's Dream.
Did my son learn math at his new school, Donna? Oh yes. He studied language arts and geography, current events and science, too.
But what Aidan really learned was much more important than any of that: His new Montessori school gave Aidan the confidence to be creative and joyful, to ask questions and seek the answers himself. As his teacher wrote in her final progress report, Aidan “embraced learning to understand, rather than studying to get a specific grade on a test.”
And that, to me, is a real education.

"Teachers Don't Like Boys, Mom"

A couple of weeks ago, I was volunteering at my son Aidan's elementary school after hours. The building was empty but for a knot of teachers clustered in the hallway. As we entered his classroom, Aidan leaped up to touch the door frame. Immediately, one of the teachers scolded him about safety.
Aidan apologized. As soon as we were alone, though, he rolled his eyes at me. “Teachers don't like boys, Mom. If I was a girl, she never would have said anything.”
“They're just trying to keep you safe,” I said.
Still, I couldn't help wishing, as I do so often, that we had better schools for boys.
I say this with resignation as another school year draws to a close. Now that Aidan, the youngest of our five children, is in sixth grade, I have little hope that the system will change. Our public school curriculum in Massachusetts, as in so many states, is designed to help students conquer basic skills and prepare for the state-administered MCAS exam. Not a bad goal. Just one problem: our teachers now scramble to teach to the tests. This means lots of worksheets get handed out and there's little time left for creative, hands-on projects.
This is a tragedy, especially for boys. Research tells us what most parents know: boys are apt to be “kinesthetic learners.” That's educatorspeak for the fact that most boys learn best while they're in motion. Boys want to get their feet wet and their hands dirty. They want to build things and take them apart, trap small animals and climb tall trees. Or jump up and touch whatever they can.
As Aidan observed once, after spending an entire science class watching a movie about the life cycle of frogs, “We'd learn a lot more if the teacher just brought tadpoles and frogs into the classroom and we could look at them.”
Students in our public schools are rewarded for being quiet and respectful, for scoring well on tests, for coloring inside the lines, for collaborating instead of competing, for writing about their feelings, and for civilized classroom behaviors that don't include farting or burping. All fine skills. The thing is, most girls – I'm basing this on our own family of three boys and two girls, plus the children of friends – seem to want to please their teachers and be praised. That's why so many more school valedictorians are girls. The boys, not so much. Until you show them why something matters in the outside world, they mostly don't see the point of doing something that bores them silly. And I mean silly.
It doesn't help matters that most teachers are hard-working, well-meaning women who are already overwhelmed with the responsibilities heaped on them by school administrators, inclusive classrooms, parents, needy kids and the threat, always, of losing their jobs or having their pay cut. Would things be different if more men populated our classrooms? I have no idea. I only know that, as it stands now, boys are more likely to fail in school and to be three times more likely to be labeled as ADHD than girls because of their activity level (http://www.healthcentral.com/adhd/c/1443/13716/addadhd-statistics/). Aidan earns A's and B's in school, yet I'm constantly fighting battles like this one: When he misbehaves, his teachers take away recess. Please. Are they out of their Vulcan minds?
Recently, I was walking with a few friends and listening to their lamentations about next year's teachers and class sizes. When they asked my opinion, they were shocked when I shrugged and said, “Maybe it doesn't matter. It's just school.”
But I can't help seeing school as a necessary evil instead of an inspiration. It's great that Aidan has learned how to do algebra, read a map, write an essay and navigate social situations without a black eye. Outside of school, though, is where Aidan does most of his real learning. He pursues his interests with passion: rock climbing, coin collecting, fishing, engineering, snowboarding. Our house is one big science lab; in recent months Aidan has built a hovercraft in the driveway, figured out that you could shrink potato chip bags in the microwave oven, and erected a K'nex roller coaster taller than he is. He has memorized the periodic table and taken apart an old computer. He surprised me in the kitchen by saying, “Here's a cool invention for kids, Mom,” and pushing a cup of milk onto the ice dispenser of our freezer. Instead of dispensing ice, cereal came pouring out of the freezer and fell into his cup of milk. Messy, but way cool.
What would a perfect school for boys be like? Classes would be small and held outside half the time. Boys of all abilities and temperaments would build, paint, draw, take things apart, play computer games and listen to music while reading if they felt like it. If they wanted to write about volcanoes instead of the weather, or study the Civil War in January instead of September, why not let them choose? And, if they wanted to do math standing up or run a few laps between exams, why not?
Oh, wait. Our boys couldn't do that. That would be breaking the rules.