Quality Education for Latinos and Latinas: Print and Oral Skills for All Students, K–College

10. Teachers and Students in the Classroom

Chapter 10 Teachers and students in the classroom What is the nature of the recommended relationship between teachers and students? In Emile (1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau expressed the belief that a carefully selected mentor should ideally instruct only one pupil at a time, but public and private school budgets today require teachers simultaneously to teach as many students as legislators and supervisors deem reasonable. Budgets, to be sure, often establish most of the parameters for education , but our view is that the education of the young deserves the highest priority in any enlightened society. Why? Because the social and economic future welfare of a society largely depends on how well the young are educated in the schools, as we earlier said. Administrators, we believe , should strive to allow and to encourage teachers to use their best energies to develop an enthusiasm and an appreciation for continuing to learn the subject or subjects they teach. Since learning ought to be both an enjoyable and serious experience instead of a chore, students who dislike a discipline they are taking or their teachers should not be allowed to continue with instructors who cannot stimulate their curiosity and imagination. Intellectually stimulating the students, after all, is central to teaching. Too many students in today’s schools feel indifferent toward their teachers or do not like them. Also, for a great variety of reasons that ought to be examined by individual school districts, many teachers do not see having a good, healthy relationship with their students as a prerequisite for quality education to occur. Teachers, as we have stated, are not often provided with enough time to work on improving their teacherstudent ties. These circumstances help explain why many mentorpupil relationships ironically end up being detrimental instead of helpful to the education of youngsters. Some teachers, particularly new ones, daily suffer from not knowing how to approach and work with students in positive, constructive ways. This is especially the case when teach- ers themselves have not been properly shown how to create a healthy learning atmosphere. Creating such an environment is one of the most important tasks that good teachers shape from the first day they begin teaching. Knowing how or learning how to facilitate student learning is an essential component of teaching. Students’ attitudes can be harmed by teachers who communicate indifference, for students who discern lack of interest in them will immediately mirror back that same attitude. In such cases, students usually reciprocate by showing indifference not only to their teachers but to everyone else around them, often baffling many well-intentioned educators. In Maggie’s American Dream: The Life and Times of a Black Family (1988), psychiatrist James P. Comer writes the following assessment about the recent history of the American education process: One of the reasons that school staffs are ill prepared for children outside of the average expected, or mainstream, experience is that educational reform in the 1930s and 1940s focused on academic standards and content rather than on child development and relationship issues. “Sputnik” in the fifties, or interest in high technology, exacerbated the problem. All of the educational reform talk and reports of the past few years ignore child development and relationship issues. And yet when you ask school teachers and administrators what is wrong they say “A lack of respect, discipline, and motivation”—all relationship issues. When you ask high school students why they didn’t do well in school, or left, the most often heard complaint is: “The teachers don’t care”—a relationship issue. The question I most often hear from school staff about parents is: “How do you get parents to participate in the school program?”—an issue suggesting we have to work out a proper relationship.1 Academic standards and the emphasis on content are no doubt important , but when these components of education become the one and only purpose of education, then all the students who are not in the top 2, 5, and 10 percent of their classes understandably feel significantly less important. It is difficult to encourage students who may develop later to enter the top echelons of their classes when such students have been effectively discouraged from challenging themselves academically by categorizing percentages. In schools where such practices are in place, the nature of the relationships that education systems need to establish and promote between teachers and students in the classroom 117 118 how...