लिखा निष्क्रियता

Periodically googling people is an obsession of mine.  I can’t help but look up people I know–from time to time–to see what they’re up to…and to see if they’ve got more google stardom than me.  One person I googled today was my old English teacher, Ms. Hayward, who recently retired and with whom I’ve been keeping in touch.  She’s headed off to Italy, so I was wondering if she’d foiled any terrorist plots or anything while she was over there–thus the googling ensued.   In the results I found a teacher rating website, www.ratemyteachers.com, which is a clever site that allows students and parents to rate teachers, and even allows teachers to respond to the posts (oddly, none had).  What a delicious recipe for litigation.  Unsurprisingly, students were the only class represented on this site, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that there were positives along with the negative ratings of my old teacher.  Looking at one critical review of my teacher, I responded, defending her.  

As a teacher, I got used to hearing the same old excuses from unmotivated and lazy students about my colleagues; the teacher doesn’t teach well, he/she should do this more, he/she should lighten up, etc.  So I fired back implying that if you did your work and paid attention in class, Ms. Hayward’s class was pretty easy to pass.  And it was.  If you didn’t do your work, or thought your skills of persuasion were a lot better than they actually were, you got burned–and this of course was the teacher’s fault.  Teachers seem to lose sight of the fact that school isn’t supposed to be about work and learning, it’s supposed to be about getting by and making it look like kids are learning.  Teachers really should chill out. I smirked at my reply and thought about how I had modeled my classroom after Ms. Hayward’s; I knew that during her tenure she had been the like the continental divide of Senior English: you did the work and loved her, or you screwed off and hated her.  There really wasn’t any middle ground.  And I know personally as a teacher, I was hard.  I know I worked my students, and I know there was much crying and fist-pounding about my unfairness and meanness at dinner tables all across town, but I took pride in the fact that my way was Ms. Hayward’s way.  

 Your effort is appreciated, but not everyone deserves an A.  Doing the work is expected, not something to be praised.  Don’t cross me or I’ll make you wish you were a freshman.  It was a beautiful system if you just gave yourself to it. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I looked up the high school where I used to teach.  I hadn’t really thought of looking up myself; I had mostly planned to look up colleagues and seeing if my read on them was the same as the students’.  But I did look myself up, and I felt a quiver in lungs.   There were three reviews of me,  (more…)