Comparing Teachers

A long, long, time ago I wrote a pretty incoherent post about how kids coming from middle school (aka annoying frosh) have totally different criteria for evaluating and describing their teachers than I now do. (In a nutshell: they want the nice teachers who will be easy, I want the teachers who will make me laugh, teach me a lot, but probably not be 'nice')

Over the past couple of days, I've been thinking about two teachers. They both started at my school this fall, and came from public schools in cities (one from Newark, one from NYC). A note: the one from NYC taught at Bronx Science, not some inner-city school that has 50% of its students drop out. I think my arguments will still be true.

Both of them, at the beginning of the year, were clearly not used to my school (MS, for magnet school, from now on) and its hyper-competitive, fairly affluent environment.

One of them, Ms. B, was my teacher for an required interdisciplinary project first trimester. When she heard our conversations about how we needed this grade in that class to get an A, she was shocked. She told us that in Newark where she had last taught, she would never get kids who had B's coming to her begging for A's. rather, the kids who were failing would approach her and try to get her to at least give them D's so they would pass.

My math teacher, Mr. C, last taught at Bronx Science. What I've noticed about him is that he seems to have been trained to an essentially "us vs. them" attitude.

I finished a test about ten minutes early one day, and I immediately started to pack up my stuff so I would have a couple of extra minutes before my next class to decomp from the test. He looked at me and said "What are you doing?"

I was completely taken aback. I said something along the lines of "I'm not allowed to leave?!?" and sat back down. He came over to me and started lecturing me about how he would get sued if I a) did something dumb or b) did something clumsy while I was technically supposed to be in his class, under his supervision. I told him what another teacher had told me last year, that since we have oodles of free time and are unsupervised during that time, it's not as much of a liability issue as it is at schools where the hallways are deserted during classes. He shook his head. I sat at stared at the clock, going back and overthinking all the test questions.

I wrote this post intending to show the difference between city teachers, who are used to dealing with problem kids, and everyone else. Now that I think of it, though, there are three real classifications. I like writing about this, though, so I may (or may not) add to the thought tomorrow.

Speaking of tomorrow, wish me luck!