The View on the Ground: A Teacher’s Perspective
I’ve been teaching general studies in early elementary grades for eighteen years. Most of the time, I like being a teacher, but this past year was a rough one. My second-grade classroom, in a co-ed Orthodox Jewish day school in a small community, was like a game of Whac-a-Mole. One child would call out, and we would deal with them, then three more, each reacting to the other. One child had his shoes off, one was wandering around, another child took a book off the shelf to read, and one child had to draw while listening. There were lots of fidgets in the classroom, but they weren’t helping anyone focus; they were just distracting toys. It was a lot to manage at once.
I’m lucky to have a co-teacher. We usually split up and work with small groups, but someone had to be dedicated to the students who have a real diagnosis. They process things more slowly and just need more time to get it. So for math lessons, I worked with three groups and my co-teacher had one group. There was a very wide range of needs in terms of both learning and focus: By April, some kids hadn’t finished Unit Three, and others had completed the entire curriculum.
A lot of students have tutors or therapists during the school day. Last year, we had one student seeing a tutor twice a week; two met with social workers; one met with an occupational therapist; and two met with a speech language pathologist twice a week. We reached out and proactively asked to be connected with them to check in, so learning can be smooth and continuous for the child.
There is not enough time in a dual curriculum day for struggling readers to get what they need. It’s not a lack of tools; it’s a lack of time. Some parents think there can be individual learning plans for each child. We can’t make that happen, but we still try as much as we can.
We do an intake conference at the beginning of every year, meeting with each set of parents. If a student has had an official evaluation, the school gives that to us. Some parents will tell us their child is starting medication and ask us to communicate with them regularly on how the child is doing. Some parents are not interested in medication, regardless of what the evaluation recommends. And there are other children who have no evaluation, and the parents tell us their child has had trouble in class but that it’s because last year’s teacher didn’t like them.
This past year, we had a student who spent the year trying to escape the classroom or hiding under a table. He didn’t want to do things that were hard for him, and he was very distracted. Our conversations with his parents didn’t help. We can’t tell parents what to do, we can only observe and suggest. They eventually did get him evaluated, but by the end of the school year they still hadn’t made an appointment with their pediatrician to discuss his diagnosis. The school had to decide what to do with a child like this, who didn’t learn anything all year. Repeating the grade isn’t helpful—it will be the same material and environment he couldn’t handle the first time around—but he isn’t prepared for the next grade either.
The school administration often has unrealistic expectations of us. They want to make everyone happy to keep kids in school. We teachers know we can’t accommodate, but they say we will, anyway. And on a day-to-day basis, there is not much internal school support. For example, if I’m calling for help, but so are the first-grade teacher and the third-grade teacher, what happens? What if my student running screaming down the hallway isn’t as terrible as what’s going on in third grade right now? I just have to deal with it myself.
In This Section
A Matter of Focus: Inside the Mind of a Teen with ADHD by Leah B.
What to Do When Your Child Is Struggling by Amian Frost Kelemer
The View on the Ground: A teacher’s perspective, as told to Rachel Schwartzberg