Teaching 'Standard Kids'

Should the best teachers be assigned the best students, as a reward for good work and encouragement to do more of it? No doubt there are teachers who would prefer to work with the gifted and talented, but I was never among them. When I taught, my classes for over a decade were made up mostly of the "standard kids" -- and that was largely by my choice.

Yes, I sometimes taught higher-level classes, but those weren't the students who brought out what I saw as the best of me. They kept me on my toes intellectually but never really challenged my spirit or my belief that they could learn. It was the kids who had no confidence and often no learning skills who beckoned me to the classroom on those gray winter mornings at 7:30 and back to the computer at 3 a.m., when I'd sometimes awaken with the thought, "If I tweak tomorrow's lesson in such and such a way, I think I can reach Charlie," the boy who just didn't get it.

My kids were needy -- many really needy. They came before school to tell me of the parent who had abused them the night before, after which, by law, I'd file a social services report, often sitting tethered to the phone line for an hour or more. After school, other students would follow, mostly just for conversation.

My work reaped many rewards: kids who finally believed in themselves, a girl whose face beamed after receiving a hard-earned B, a lonely boy who won a creative writing contest, a student who finally came to understand paragraph structure, another who fought his way out of despair after his family abandoned him. Repeatedly they forced me to meet them on their territory and bring them a piece of mine. And most days I did. I was one of the lucky ones. In a second career, my children grown, I was free to spend hour after hour on my work.

What can we do for the teachers who believe in the "standard kid"?

First, the practical: Make the pace and content of education both reasonable and rigorous to instill a sense of hope and achievement, not of drudgery. Give these students their own books so that they can learn to read actively, writing in margins, underlining, adding comments as we do, thereby converting minds overdosed by television, which provides immediate visual answers, into minds that question, imagine -- and that possibly can develop a true love of learning. These gifts set the stage for rigor.

Starkly modify standardized tests so that there is time to move and grow in a lesson. Good teachers know instinctively, or soon learn, where a class needs to go. Many of my best lessons were taught when students' curiosity took them in a new direction and I was free to flow with it. Today we curtail students' interests and frustrate teachers' insight because we teach to the test. No, this is not a plea to go back to the '70s, just a call for moderation and mindfulness.

Reduce class size. It takes a good English teacher up to five minutes to carefully assess extended compositions, and at least 10 for a term paper. Consider that in semester classes, students are assigned roughly six extended compositions and a term paper. Consider, too, that most teachers have 90 to 100 students. And then add on the time spent grading homework, tests, class work, journals, projects or makeup work provided sick or traveling students. Address the unnecessary by finding someone other than teachers to stand at the copy machine, fetch the books from the book room and monitor the cafeteria, hallways and bathrooms.

Then there are the little things that could be done to tend to the spirit of teachers. Extend their lunchtime from 30 minutes to 45 to provide a bit of down time and adult conversation. Teachers do not expect even an occasional Wednesday on the golf course, but that 15 minutes added to a lunch often eaten at some unseemly hour would make a world of difference. Moreover, wouldn't it be nice if a teacher could call in from the classroom on arriving each morning, as I did to my secretary in an earlier life, rather than walk the hallways to sign in? How about having a work-study student deliver teachers' mail to the classroom instead of the teachers having to retrieve it from the office themselves?

We can provide academic and societal relief by hiring reliable and responsible adults to support, not coddle, these kids so that they may find their way out of emotional poverty and isolation. A few jurisdictions employ such personnel but not enough. Guidance counselors can't do it; their plates are too often filled with college applications and the business of keeping good kids on track. And it's too much for a needy kid to do alone, or for the good academic teacher, who has already taken on the challenge of reaching these kids in the classroom.

Barbara Bachur is a former high school English teacher who writes from Baltimore.