Totally agree, Frank. School is all that... Or at least it should be. Sadly, I don't think schools really know what they want to be. Or teachers. I saw the crisis written all over my colleague's face this morning. I'm new this year with working in an alternative education setting for two hours per day with an 8th grade English teacher (same school district I've been in, different role for this year at least). I was looking over her plans for a lesson she was going to teach about writing an extended response. (This is school-speak, of course, and not related to anything much in the real world, but I digress).

I had to ask, because I'm new here but also to get at her morals as an educator and what she's been instructed to do, if the purpose of writing instruction at this school was test preparation or to help students find their voices. She looked strained and a bit flustered at the question. She hemmed and hawed her way through a response that amounted to most of the kids in this program are just trying to finish it and get out, and very few will go on to college. I then asked her if she thought most of our students could express themselves coherently on any topic in a much shorter paragraph response. She admitted no, probably not (glancing furtively at the clock). She knew where I was headed, however, and she quickly added that she didn't have the "band-width" to revise the writing curriculum at this point, so she's going to plunge ahead with it. Then she gathered her things and got the hell away from me. Fast.

I didn't mean to cause her distress. But this is normal school life, and it is so subtle and normalized that to question it seems...almost insulting. But she's about to teach something that she knows her kids can't handle and then later, when she sees the kids didn't handle it, will probably rationalize to me that school attendance, parental support, and the need to "keep up" were the confounding factors. This is teaching content...not teaching kids with content. And it's the norm.

(I want to be fair to her, though, because she seems like a bright, intelligent, passionate teacher who cares a lot about the kids. It's not her fault. Who actually knows the very best way to teach kids writing? I don't, I've had successes but also failures, and I've devoted ENORMOUS bandwidth to this problem for years. It's just that this scenario is so typical for the average classroom teacher: so much time and energy spent on the minutia; not nearly enough to the philosophy of it all.)

Thanks for reading this response and thanks for writing another thoughtful piece.