A teacher’s view

By DAVID HULSE

GLEN SPEY — The lawyers and the bureaucrats have created a mess, the students have become more sophisticated and people have come to expect schools to play a big part in parenting, but Marion Swope still sees public education on a positive track.

Swope, a veteran teacher who retired from Eldred Central School last summer has seen a lot of changes in the last 31 years, but seldom had a chance to talk about it. The teacher’s eye view of the situation is one not often publicly aired, since teachers do most of their communicating with students and parents on one side and administrators on the other. Teachers’ opinions usually stay in-house. “Faculty meetings are the place our concerns should be addressed,” she said.

Swope said the job and people have changed during her career, and teaching today is a challenge. “You have to roll with the punches, but if you don’t maintain your original standards and values, you might as well get out,” she said.

Swope says a teacher’s success and survival in the modern system depends on preparation and control of a classroom situation. “Proper prior planning prevents poor performance,” she said quoting a teacher’s mantra. “My worst days were when I went in unprepared,” she recalled.

The rule is more pertinent today, when a more savvy, often litigious, student waits in the classroom. Parents and students readily make threats of legal action. “[Students] know the rules and regulations and the legal system,” she said.

Concern about legal issues has dampened classroom discussion of families, family values and religion. “Years ago you could bring up any topic…Now you almost have to avoid some areas. You have to wonder, what will the child take home?” she said.

But if some areas are taboo, others that in past were parental responsibilities have become required. Teachers must document instruction in basics of life, death, drugs, alcohol and fire safety, to name a few. With more waking hours spent in class than with parents, she agreed that the schools are being asked to raise kids and she said “education has bitten off more than it can chew,” in trying to do so.

Some people feel parental standards have changed but, “the parent who tells the school ‘I provide food, clothing and shelter; you do the rest,’ is one who is neglecting their responsibility to the child,” she said.

As big a problem as changing parental obligations has been the state’s inability to decide curriculum directives, she said. When she began teaching, the state provided a syllabus for instruction that gave week-to-week targets. “A student could transfer from any school in the state and know they would pick up the work in the same place,” she said.

The syllabus was dropped during education reform in the 1970’s, replaced by an ambiguous “overview,” and “all the standards went down the tubes…Now the media says teachers aren’t teaching and asks why testing shows so many variables in performance from district to district…The state has to make up its mind what it’s doing instead of changing the program every three to five years,” she said.

Swope would like to see an end to “social grade promotions” and a return to basics in elementary instruction. “We need to get away from happy, creative curriculums with teachers as entertainers,” she said.

Despite her reservations about the past, Swope is optimistic about the future of public education and sees new Regents standards, not as tough and unreasonable, but as “getting back to what it used to be.”