Social Responsibility?

If you are a first year teacher, especially for those in a one-year internship/fellowship program, you are likely busy planning lessons, grading, and trying to maintain some sort of life outside of school. On top of that, before you know it, you need to start thinking about your plans for next year. This generally entails a mountain of cover letters, job applications, and most importantly, self-reflective questions about where you want your career to go and what type of school you want to commit to.

No longer is a teacher's decision simply Private School vs. Public School. Nowadays, there is an incredibly wide spectrum of schools available to work at, ranging from elite private schools (think Phillips Exeter) to underachieving public schools (think urban, minority, impoverished) to everything in between (charter schools, magnet schools, Waldorf schools, and other really unique school models like this one). At this point in my nascent career, I'm going to commit to the school that provides the best opportunity for me to develop as an educator over the next few years. However, determining what type of school this might be is nontrivial.

When I write my cover letters for elite private schools, I get extremely excited about the prospect of having Promethean boards in my classrooms, for example, and I really think my teaching would benefit from having so much technology readily available to me. Plus, in the classroom, I would enjoy the curricular freedom that a private school generally allows (for example, next semester at Chinquapin I am teaching a 5 week course on current events in Biology).

On the other hand, when I write my cover letters for urban charter schools, I get extremely excited about the prospect of helping close the achievement gap and building relationships with students who may not be getting a lot of educational support elsewhere. While it is true that every student can benefit from a good teacher, students from urban, minority backgrounds need good teachers, while students from affluent families that attend elite prep schools will likely be 'fine' either way.

So my question becomes: To what extent do I, as an educated, compassionate member of society, have a social responsibility to work where good teachers are needed most and where I could have the greatest positive effect on society?

While my main concern is teaching, this question easily applies to all professions, most notably medicine. To what extent do doctors have the responsibility of working in Africa, for instance, where they could save hundreds of lives, instead of America, for instance, where the same amount of effort may only save one?

Thoughts?

Owl Pellet Dissection

Preparing experiments for science class can often be a time-consuming and stressful experience for me.

Time-consuming because I have to gather the materials (which sometimes requires going out and buying them), prepare the lab and report sheets, and sometimes do a practice run of the experiment to make sure it works. Stressful because I have 21 sixth graders, many of whom have short attention spans and issues with listening and following directions, and only one of me to watch over everything. I essentially have to design the lab so that only I handle the expensive/harmful materials, which means when I am working with one group of three students, 18 others are more or less unsupervised...

The upside to all of this, however, is that the students absolutely love working with their hands and doing actual experiments. Today, for instance, we dissected owl pellets and identified the bones that we discovered. Except for one or two students, everyone was engrossed in the oddity of the owl pellets and the meticulousness required to separate the tiny bones.

The nice thing about doing experiments like this one in class is that it fulfills two of the most difficult requirements of a successful lesson plan:

1. It engages a students curiosity and keeps them interested in the lesson.

2. It meets each individual student at their particular intellectual level.

In every class you will have students that are at different intellectual levels - particularly in the sixth grade at Chinquapin where students come from a wide range of educational backgrounds. One of the marks of a successful lesson is that each individual student can engage with the material at the appropriate level for him or her so that it is challenging enough to help them learn, but not so challenging that they are discouraged. Labs and experiments are so nuanced that they have many layers of intellectual rigor. For example, some of the students were simply intrigued by the sight of rodent bones, tried their best to identify them, and made basic connections between their findings and the food webs we have been discussing in class. Other students, however, were able to study the differences between the teeth patterns of mice and moles, consider the population dynamics of the meadow ecosystem, and even try to reconstruct complete skeletons.

I think these labs are really the embodiment of a question that all teachers ask themselves on a daily basis: Would I spend a few extra hours working on a lesson if I knew it could make a class even marginally better for the students? Those that can honestly answer in the affirmative are meant to be teachers, and I think too often we as educators lose sight of the direct correlation between our effort and our students' learning. It is days like this that remind me how much of my own time I would actually sacrifice so my students have an interesting, educational, successful class.