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Teaching at Parks Elementary
It is shortly after 1:00 p.m., and Ms. R. is preparing to teach mathematics. Two
children labeled ‘‘BD’’ (behaviorally disordered) have arrived for this subject.
One boy, bright eyed and interested, persists in loudly repeating everything
the teacher says until he is gently reminded that this is distracting.
The teacher has prepared a lesson on number lines. Across the board, she has
written in capital letters increments from one to a million.
The children read the words in unison.
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Teacher: Remember, where do you place the commas? In hundreds and
thousands . . . . so after every three numbers put a comma. Why do we put
a comma?
Student: So we won’t get mixed up.
Teacher: That’s a good answer.
Student: So we can read the numbers.
Teacher: It makes it easier to read.
The teacher then asks a child to read at the top of page 18. She asks the chil-
dren to look at the place value chart and calls on individual children to say
how many ones, tens there are in a given number. A number of children have
their hands in the air, but most give the wrong answer or no response when
called on. At one point, the teacher remembers that two children (visiting
from the special education class) have to go to the library.
Someone then comes to the door. After conversing for 2 minutes or so, she
returns to her desk, then checks to see if the children know their multiplica-
tion tables. She goes to a chart by the door and calls on four or five students:
‘Leticia, 2 x 6.’ The student stands and smiles but does not try to answer. ‘You
need to work on your twos,’ the teacher reminds her. Only one child provides
the correct answer. He is immediately given a harder one, and he gets it
wrong. The teacher tells these children that they must write their ‘‘times ta-
bles’’ for homework.
She returns to her desk and begins to organize the number line activity. She
tells the children to put their books away and pull out their envelopes. Each
envelope holds a sheet of 8 1/2 x 11-inch paper and the numbers 1 to 10 writ-
ten on blue construction paper. In the process of looking for the envelopes,
some children pull all the books out of their desks. During this time, 3 chil-
dren who speak Spanish as their first language arrive from a session with a
bilingual teacher, thus raising the number of children present to 28. Ms. R.
realizes that these children were not present when the class made what is
needed for the number line activity. As she begins to collect materials to help
them, children become restless. About half still have books on their desks. The
teacher calls out a number and tells the children to place their numbers in
the appropriate folds. However, the number she calls out requires two threes,
and the children have only made one of each number. When several children
raise their hands and shout this out to her, she writes a different number on
the board. As she begins to walk back to help the students without materials,
one boy cries out excitedly, ‘‘I got it!’’
In this snapshot in time, this teacher appears disorganized; her timing is off; the
activity is not well planned, and little gets accomplished over the course of nearly
an hour.
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Examination of the context in which this teacher taught and listening to how she
makes sense of the situation yields quite a different picture. First, she has taught
four different grade levels in her 4 years of teaching. She is overwhelmed at hav-
ing yet a new set of books—and a different grade level of children to teach. Sec-
ondly, she feels she has little control over the curriculum, and she has no one
to speak with about what she is doing: ‘‘I don’t know if this is what I should
be teaching. Is it too hard for them? Is it too easy? I have never taught children
this age before.’’ In this district, both the principal and teachers can be fired if
they do not perform well, a decision based on the students’ performance on state-
mandated tests. This teacher expressed her resentment of the fact that everyone
was poised to blame her when things went wrong, but no one was there to help
her to do a better job.
Perhaps most disconcerting is the fact that she felt she was being held account-
able for circumstances she was powerless to affect. Increasingly, the teacher was
the implementor of all district, state, and federal policies, and it was assumed that
the teacher is incompetent if students failed to perform well. Yet the sum total
of policy mandates can have exponential effect. This teacher’s class was relatively
large, and, with a budget deficit in the district, she had an aide only 2 hours a
week. In support of ‘‘inclusion,’’ several children who exhibited learning or emo-
tional difficulties visited her class each day without a special education teacher
to assist them. Because of the ethnic and language diversity in the neighborhood,
children left the classroom throughout the day to work with special teachers in
their native languages, yet this seriously curtailed the amount of time when the
entire class was together for instruction in their major subjects. Moreover, district
policy required that she ‘‘build a case’’ for each child who needed to be tested
for special education placement. She had to create a paper trail of the child’s
work over time. Similarly, she described how she had to keep meticulous records
as part of the district’s efforts to decrease truancy. The sum total of these proce-
dures created a large bookkeeping problem for a teacher already trying to keep
track of many things. Ms. R.’s records showed one child absent seven times, while
the teacher who pulled him out of class for special instruction had him listed as
absent nine times. It was thus incumbent upon Ms. R. to reconcile the discrep-
ancy. This overworked, highly stressed teacher was bitter:
There’s a pattern there, so I’m responsible. I’m supposed to send notes if a
child is failing and have the parents sign them. I sent eight, and none have
returned them. I’m supposed to send progress reports every 2 weeks and keep
track of homework assignments. All the tests are supposed to be signed at the
bottom, but I’m responsible if all of this is not done.
And yet, with 28 children, her responsibilities for meeting state guidelines and for
processing individual children through layers of bureaucracy had grown over time.
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For this teacher, the problem was not one of content (she did well on the teacher
competency test); rather, she needed time, resources, and support in translating
what she knew into a form useful to the students she taught. The context, in
which she functioned, however, had become largely inimical to her development
as a teacher.
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