May 10, 2007 3:43 PM
Dermot Smyth teaches social studies and is the chapter leader at IS 5 in Queens.
Having been a classroom teacher these last several years, I find myself more and more puzzled about what exactly is going on with those who make up the rules for us to follow in this job. Some of the requirements that come down from Tweed are so ridiculous that as teachers you cannot help but shake your head and wonder what they have to do with educating students at all.
So bizarre is this world where we now teach that it reminded me of a time when, as a five-year-old, my friends and I would take down a board game from my father’s closet and set it up without having any clue as to how it was really supposed to be played. It never entered our heads to even try to read the rules, nor to ask for advice from those we had seen playing the game in the past. We decided instead that we would just figure it out for ourselves and make up the rules as we went along. One game in particular I remember was Monopoly.
At no point did our rules even resemble the real thing. The chance cards, for example, were used for building walls and castles, the little doggy counter was set to guarding the jail and the racing car could go twice as fast as the bicycle. The few times a grown up, like my father, stopped by and saw what it was we were doing they would just shake their heads and smile.
To us it seemed only right that when you landed in jail, the monopoly doggy bit you, then chased you forward 10 places. And it seemed only right that you had to then pay the owner of the dog $50. The dog was called Monopoly, and the whole point of the game was to avoid landing on the same square he was on. It had absolutely nothing to do with buying property. And yet to us it all made perfect sense. But only to us. We were young children who didn’t know any better.
Today’s rules from Tweed seem to resemble those of my childhood Monopoly game. For example, there was a time when we teachers corrected and wrote our comments on a student’s paper using a red pen if we so chose, without fear that we were forever traumatizing these children. The red pen was mostly used so that the contrasting color could be easily picked out by the students and they could see where things might need to be changed, or where comments were made about what an excellent response they may have given. Not all comments, you see, were negative in nature, but all were visible.
Not only are we as teachers not to use red pens anymore, we also cannot write our critiques on the actual student paper. We must instead write our notes on post-its, using any color ink we want except red, and then we can stick that post-it anywhere on the paper we like. What the difference is, I have no idea, nor does anyone I ask. Like the rules we as children used to make up, no one else but the rule makers understand their purpose.
As the years passed, my friends and I grew up a little at a time and we all eventually understood how things were done in the real world. We learned, for example, that the world was bigger than our backyard and that man had walked on the moon. We knew too that pilots flew airplanes, bus drivers drove buses, teachers taught — and in Monopoly, the bicycle and the racing car moved only as fast as the dice allowed.
I guess all this got me to thinking that there must be a room up in Tweed where a small group of young children are all sitting around a very large table, their legs not yet reaching the floor. With their Crayola markers and post-it notes in hand, they have set out making up rules for how they feel a classroom should function. I hope the years pass quickly for them and I hope too that their legs soon reach the floor.