Help understanding the current state of education: a classroom teacher’s on-the-ground view
Last Tuesday, I sat across from Lila’s mom at my after-school conference table, the one that’s still wobbly from when a 3rd grader ran into it with a wheeled backpack last fall. She’d brought a lukewarm lemonade from the school vending machine, and Lila had left a half-colored unicorn drawing tucked under my stack of grading. “I need help,” she said, twisting the cap off and on again. “When I was in 4th grade, we had spelling tests every Friday, memorized our multiplication tables, and did worksheets out of a textbook. Now Lila comes home talking about ‘student-led projects’ and ‘collaborative problem-solving,’ and I can’t even figure out what to help her with. Is this just another education fad that’ll be gone in two years? What’s actually going on right now?”
I told her I get that question at least three times a month—from parents, from friends with elementary-aged kids, even from my own mom, who was a teacher for 30 years. I get it, because 12 years ago when I started teaching, I asked the same thing. My first year, the district dumped a new reading curriculum on us two weeks before school started, told us we were moving away from whole-class novels to independent reading, and I stayed up until 1 a.m. one night panicking that I was going to let all my kids fail because I didn’t make them memorize vocabulary lists from a textbook anymore.
Two years ago, I had a student named Javi who hated reading. He’d sit with his book under his desk and draw race cars the entire reading block, and he’d failed his reading comprehension tests three semesters in a row. Then we started letting kids pick their own books for independent reading, and Javi checked out a tattered graphic novel about heavy construction equipment from the library. He took it home every night for two weeks, and when it was time to do his end-of-unit project, he wrote four pages (plus half a page of detailed drawings) explaining how different cranes work, and connected it to his dad’s job building new houses in the neighborhood. That was the first time he’d ever turned in a project that long. He still struggles with some comprehension skills, but now he actually picks up a book when he’s done with his work early. That’s the core of the shift happening right now: we’re trying to get kids to care about what they’re learning, instead of just memorizing stuff to pass a test.
But I didn’t sugarcoat it for Lila’s mom. It’s messy. We don’t have enough money for all the supplies we need for these projects. Last month, we did a unit on ecosystems, and I had 28 kids split into 7 groups, but only 4 poster boards. I sent out a request for extra cardboard on ClassDojo, three parents brought in old Amazon boxes, and we made it work, but it’s not the smooth, polished system the district brochures make it out to be. Half the teachers in my building didn’t get the full training they were promised for the new curriculum, so we’re figuring it out as we go, trading tips in the teacher’s lounge during lunch. There are real flaws, too. Last week, I watched a quiet kid named Mia get a lower participation grade because she doesn’t like talking in large group discussions, even though she does all her work and aces her quizzes. The current system rewards outgoing kids, and it leaves some quiet kids behind, and we’re still tweaking how to fix that.
I gave Lila’s mom three concrete things she can do to make sense of it all, no fancy parenting tricks required. First: if your kid brings home an open-ended project that doesn’t look like the homework you remember, you don’t have to know the “right” answer to help. Instead of jumping in to draw the diagram or write the outline for them, just say, “Walk me through what your teacher said you need to do, and tell me what part you’re most excited about.” Nine times out of 10, that’s all they need from you—they don’t need you to do it for them. Second: if you’re confused about grades or testing or what your kid is actually learning, send your teacher a short email asking for one specific example, not a whole explanation. Instead of “Can you explain your new grading system?” say “Can you tell me one thing my kid is working on right now that I can support at home?” Most of us have two minutes between classes to answer that, and it’ll give you a clearer picture than any 10-page handbook. Third: if you’re worried we’re not teaching the basics anymore, just ask your kid to show you one math fact or one new word they learned that week. It takes 30 seconds, and more often than not, they can do it. We still teach the basics—we just don’t stop there anymore.
After the conference, I locked my classroom door and headed to the parking lot, and I saw a dad yelling at his 5th grader because the kid had gotten a “developing” mark on his group project. “You didn’t do anything!” he said, and the kid just stared at his shoes. I wanted to go over and explain that group projects are messy, that sometimes kids don’t speak up as much as others, that the whole thing is still a work in progress. But I just got in my car and drove home to my own 10-year-old, who was sitting at the kitchen table working on his own project: he has to design a plan to add more bee habitats to our school yard.
I leaned over his shoulder to see what he was doing, and I immediately started telling him he should put the bee hotel by the garden, where it’s out of the way. He shook his head and said, “No, I want it by the playground, so the little kids can stop and look at the bees when they go out for recess. That way they can learn about them too.” I stepped back, and let him draw it his way.
That’s the current state of education, isn’t it? It’s messy, it’s underfunded, it’s full of teachers and parents figuring it out as we go. Some days it works better than others. Some days I worry we’re skipping something important, and some days I see a kid light up about something they’re learning that they actually care about, and I know the shift is worth it. There’s no neat answer to what’s going on right now. It’s not all good, it’s not all bad. It’s just a bunch of people trying to do better than we did before, one wobbly table, one tattered graphic novel, one slightly lopsided bee hotel plan at a time.
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