LET TEACHERS TEACH

...I am referring to chores...

...No teacher can serve two purposes, however holy...

...The business of teachers is children, the flesh and blood sitting in their classrooms, the minds and spirits entrusted to them...

...if it was all the bus driver's fault he was 2-t...

...These facts prove nothing and are no justification for the waste of the children who more urgently need their teachers...

...She has others—so many that they succeed in keeping her from doing much teaching...

...Let's say that my years in a private school had made all this seem unduly arduous...

...It is easier to write out neat lists than it is to teach...

...I was getting so efficient that I scared myself...

...That would be true, though progress was apparent and properly commended...

...What they contained hardly bears thinking about...

...That would be true, too, though after the first shocks I accepted the dullness with a cheerfulness beyond reproach...

...They enter the best colleges...

...If the little wretch was deliberately tardy he was 1-t...

...A blue card will be used to schedule a filmstrip projector and four blue cards may be scheduled for any period...

...That they are also seeing to it that she has no time to teach seems not to have occurred to them...

...No matter how cheerfully she accepts these chores or to what level of efficiency she attains, no teacher can devote hours to these pursuits and at the same time teach as well or as much as she ought to...

...After all this has been said, the ineluctable fact remains: there was too much clerical work and not enough teaching...

...Only one thing was wrong...

...Wedged tightly in the teachers' boxes in the office, these Duties and Directives appeared twice daily, along with the morning bulletin, the special bulletins, the instruction sheets, the local, county, and state handbooks...

...The fact that some students in public schools such as the one I have described do remarkably well is not to be gainsaid...

...Doing the chores essential to the administrative operation of a school are the vestigial remains of the floor-sweeping and fire-building which communities at one time required of their school marms and masters...

...Requisitions to be turned in (audio and visual aids, library material, art supplies...

...The white cards will now be used for all other equipment and the librarian knows how many are available in this classification...

...When I say clerical duties, I mean just that...

...Not only the Duties and Directives but the Please-Note-Changes in them occupied much of our time...

...They are known as Duties and Directives...

...Let's say that I was slower at the bookkeeping than I should have been...

...At the end of the first paragraph of the latest magazine article on the plight of the schools I yawn...

...Suspicious that he might be over-proud of his intellectual attainments or might lead a life easier or different from their own, the district patrons kept the schoolmaster neatly in his place with the menial tasks which were their own lot...

...Today teachers do not have to build fires or "board 'round...

...But though they do not have to chop the firewood or fill the water buckets, other quaint folkways have succeeded such chores...

...But teachers need a third freedom: freedom to teach...

...I knew, after the first weeks, that I could master the rituals sacred to Big Schools...

...They need the right to perform with undivided minds and hearts the work they have chosen and are allegedly engaged in...

...Directives (what, when, and how to teach, assuming, with an unwarranted optimism, that there will be time for some of that...

...Flyers and notices to be distributed, collected the following day, alphabetized, and returned to the office (Federal aid questionnaires, County Diabetes Detection Week, adult education classes...

...That was before I went back to help meet the crisis...

...If not permitted to do so, they may end by performing none at all...

...Whatever time is given to non-teaching duties is subtracted from educating children...

...The teacher shortage prevails DOROTHY DeZOUCHE has been teaching for three decades in public and private schools and adult education in many parts of the country...

...During the first week of school I had carefully learned such instructions as, "A blue card is used to requisition a film...

...Nothing is wrong with any of the duties I have described...

...They get paid, after a fashion, and can have their own establishments, however modest...

...Three pink cards may be inserted in any slot on library requisition board for first, second, and sixth periods...

...She thought a minute...

...Permits to be issued (library, nurse's office, counseler's office...

...These un-embellished symbols no longer served...

...To be able to distribute and collect with aplomb and to keep accounts tidy did not give me the satisfaction that had made teaching a good profession...

...Teaching is a delicate and exacting profession, laying heavy demands upon the bodies, minds, and spirits of those engaged in it...

...That an unjustifiable proportion of their time is being siphoned off into non-teaching duties is a fact which has been overlooked by even the most deeply concerned...

...That teachers are too good to carry out these assignments is of course not true and is beside the point...

...I listened sympathetically to radio commentators and the League of Women Voters as they dramatized the distressing facts...

...I, too, once worried...

...They were a legitimate part of my work...

...I am not referring to the bookkeeping essential to the smooth operation of any classroom...

...They become leaders and highly useful members of society...

...Either she will come to honor efficiency and despise teaching, or she will honor teaching and reject the irrelevancies that impinge upon it...

...Have them report to the cafeteria at once...

...They have no time to do so...

...She does deplore the ones gathered for their own sake, in time taken from her teaching, and accumulated in such magnitude that she has no time to use them because she is so busy alphabetizing and inventorying and turning in funds and writing out receipts and testing for new statistics to be filed...

...Fearful that she may take advantage of her easy lot (short hours, you know, and those long vacations), still not content to let the teacher devote herself to the business of teaching, the makers and planners of education see to it that the classroom teacher has no time to waste...

...Not only are these atavistic holdovers at fault...

...I left because what I had believed to be a teacher shortage now appeared to me to be largely a clerical shortage and I did not feel the obligation to help meet it...

...It is not only because more children are entering the schools and fewer teachers the profession that a shortage exists...

...Impending deadlines shaped my life...

...They are not factories...

...It is only good sense to accept these and to make of them whatever we can...

...They may come to believe that the more efficiently they turn in financial reports, the better teachers they are...

...Not one of them was difficult...

...Tucked in among these were small bits of paper bearing in longhand someone's before or afterthoughts...

...They should not be operated according to the methods of any of them...

...I was recording data and filing facts with a speed that astonished me...

...It should not be cluttered with trivia unrelated to it...

...Accounting for those notices is one of her chores...

...No one is too "good" to do anything essential to the smooth running of society...

...Conference with Mrs-Peters at 3:30 . . . those are your Scholastics with Miss Home's name on them . . . call Betty Martin's mother at 12:15 . . . drop Jim Jackson . . . short meeting in the Counselor's office at 12:20 . . .) During my four months' service I removed and carried to my room pounds of these directives...

...I found the immediacy of most of these directives positively frightening...

...It is true that teachers need deliverance from social and economic limitations and their resulting frustrations and anxieties...

...To whatever extent teachers are absorbed in mere chores—the commerce of locker fees and bus schedules and school insurance—to that extent are they withdrawn from the teacher supply...

...They are not offices...

...clerical duties...

...Two pink cards may be scheduled during third, fourth, and fifth periods...

...The New Look in bookkeeping was also disquieting...

...Clerical duties have now become the first concern of teachers...

...also because those supposed to teach are required increasingly to devote their time to much that has little to do with education...

...No teacher decries statistics that can be used...

...But in my heart I repudiated them...

...How did it all get started...

...13 girls with long hair, preferably blonde, are needed to ride in the parade tomorrow night...

...To believe that she can is to rob children of what is rightfully theirs and to make a travesty of teaching...

...The problems of television, the inter-ballistic missile, the disturbed world, all of which are reputedly undermining the stability of our children and making the task of education increasingly difficult—these teachers cannot solve...

...I should have felt more honest if we had talked about the sacredness of the filing system and the uniqueness of the printed report...

...Peters or removing Jim from my class register or being summoned to meetings...

...When some good citizen explains to me about the crop of postwar babies who are now entering high school, I walk rapidly in the opposite direction...

...If you are seeing a film in your room use a blue card...

...Possibly it would have strengthened my character if I had remained in the fray...

...Now, a child was 1-a if sick, 2-a if healthy but excused by parent, 3-a if healthy but mislaid by mother or at least unaccounted for by her...

...There is the danger, a subtle one, that after a few years, or even months, the real purpose of teaching begins to fade in teachers' minds...

...The ever-growing national passion for statistics which has infected education accounts for much of the wasted time of teachers...

...They may find in these tasks a certain escape from the ardors of teaching, the, rigorous exactions of working with human material...

...It goes way back...

...The terms are not synonymous and to confuse them constitutes a danger to education...

...For be not deceived...

...But children are too good and their education too important to have their teachers' time diverted from teaching...

...That this is so should neither render us blind nor paralyze us with indifference to lesser evils which lie within our power to alter...

...Notify vice-principal immediately if you have pupils whose parents reside outside the county . . . Check your home room immediately to see if any Thorndike dictionaries are there and send to the library at once . . . Get trip permission and money for Book Fair Exhibit to office before 3 p.m...

...Doesn't anyone ever point out to the administration that these non-teaching assignments interfere seriously with teaching...

...Let's say that I found it, at the beginning, stupefyingly dull, and that my state of mind may have had something to do with my inglorious accomplishments...

...If you are showing a filmstrip use a white card only...

...I didn't mind seeing Mrs...

...Lip-service to the importance of education, the sacredness of personality, the uniqueness of the individual, made me uncomfortable when I saw those utterances persistently betrayed by a more dominating concern...

...Despite their vast increase, they bore a marked resemblance to children I had known...

...In a few weeks I was sorting questionnaires and alphabetizing lists and counting money as rapidly as my more accomplished colleagues...

...I suppose, too, that if I had been a young teacher, unsure of my own values and with a reputation to establish, I might have stayed on...

...Community organizations, the PTA, the state board, the county board, the local board, the principals, all good men and true, ask for and expect prompt and efficient service from the classroom teacher not only in after-school hours but during the school day when she should be concerned only with children...

...I could remember when a modest little a or t in my class register had indicated that a child was absent or tardy...

...Efficiency may, indeed if it not already has, become strangely synonymous with competence...

...It is not surprising that so few teachers grow professionally...

...Schools are not big business...

...She has written stories, poetry and articles for a number of publications, including the tadies' Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post, Parents Magazine, and The Bduca-tional Forum...

...If she expects to preserve untarnished her professional honor, your child's teacher has to give a reckoning of that little piece of paper, probably by serial number...

...What I found when I went back to teach was shocking indeed, but not in the way the worried citizens meant...

...I had a pleasant room, a good salary, a principal who was not only exceptionally friendly and helpful, but who sincerely wanted his school to be one in which children are well taught...

...Administrators, selecting teachers on that basis (since "the office must run smoothly"), may unwittingly create a new species of teacher, those with a talent for bookkeeping but none for the art of teaching...

...I did not have time to teach...

...I think I used to," she said, "but after a while you're so beaten down by it all that you don't have the will to protest, and you forget...

...Reports to be prepared (attendance, health data, supplementary health data, three kinds of reports concerning "unsatisfactory" work to be mailed to parents, three kinds of analyses sheets to interpret these for the counseler's files, textbook inventories, textbook cards, census cards (with 20 items including mother's maiden name), permanent records, school bus data, complete with driver's name, all of these alphabetized...

...They required only time, meticulous care, and the capacity to turn off one's conscience...

...It seemed to me that my character did not need that kind of strengthening...

...She cannot do both...

...Schools are unique institutions, meant to perform a unique service, comparable to no other...

...I was turning in reports, stacks of them, on time, along with my more gifted friends...

...Our schools may come to be staffed by people who like figures and filing jobs more than they like children...

...today...

...But I minded very much making my teaching incidental to inventories, fund-collecting, and information-gathering...

...If the school becomes the convenient means for taking surveys, completing questionnaires, and collecting funds, it will do so at the expense of education...

...Teachers may find themselves devising work to keep children busy, planning assignments for ease of checkability without regard to the larger needs of the pupils or the essential rightness of the lesson...

...If you are seeing it in the auditorium use a pink card...

...Parents and PTA's and administrators can do something about the distractions and excessive demands which keep the classroom teacher from giving to children as much and as rich teaching as they are able to receive in this televised and disturbed world...

...The chores are not wrong, but the wrong persons are doing them...

...In all the millions of spoken and written words, no one had pointed out that the shortage could be partially met by the simple expedient of allowing teachers who are now in the classrooms to devote themselves to teaching...

...I had supposed that the large number of pupils in the classes would constitute my problem when I returned to the public schools...

...The growing public awareness of this is heartening...

...The next time your progeny brings home a little yellow slip informing you that you can buy school insurance for a pittance, or learn to play the piccolo at the school on Tuesday evenings, or have your entire family's blood sugar tested on February 8, don't toss the notice into the trash can...

...From the most intellectually impoverished and dreary schools throughout our history have emerged a percentage of students who, in spite of their environment and teachers, have excelled...

...As it turned out, I hardly had time to notice the children...

...I asked a friend...

...The Duties and Directives, on the other hand, resembled nothing I had ever before encountered...

...My conscience was uneasy...

...if Mother had telephoned and said that he was tardy with permission, it was 3-t...

...The immediate waste of teaching time is not the only consequence...

...It seemed to me that teachers should teach, and that glorified babysitting in the classroom constituted dishonesty...

...But Success did me in...

...A proportion of school children have always done well...

...Some conditions we cannot, with all our willing and striving, do much to alter...

...Two weeks later this notice appeared: "A pink card will now be used to schedule a film in any room...

...From no profession other than teaching do we expect both professional services and chores...

...They fall into the following categories: • Funds to be collected (locker fees, fees for lost and damaged books, fees for school photographs, and so on, for which a written receipt is issued to each child, bearing name of pupil, kind of deposit, and amount received, and requiring a trip to the treasurer's office, with often a long wait in line, to deposit the money...

...I minded giving children "busy work" while I did these chores...

...I read the magazine articles pointing out the Shocking Situation...

...You do not want your surgeon to run down to the steel foundry to turn out a few scalpels just to prove he's a good fellow and can cooperate...

...You want him to perfect himself in the skill of surgery so that he may better serve you...