Education Nation.

Here I stand on my soapbox. Once again. I'm going to try not to rant too much here. My apologies ahead of time.

NBC news has done a feature on all their programs this week called Education Nation. Basically, it has focused on the state of education in our country (crappy) and we ALL need to do to fix it. There are lots of issues I could address here but the one that strikes me as the most important at the time is the fact that a teacher can not be held solely accountable for a child's education. I am a teacher. A pretty darn good one at that. I love my job. I love my kids and I will fight to give them my best. I am also a human. A human that realizes I can only do so much. I can't walk all my kids home everyday and make sure they have a balanced dinner or go to bed at a decent time or practice their spelling words every night or read a book before bedtime. I have these smiling faces in my classroom for 7 hours a day. I can take those 7 hours and shove as much reading, writing, and arithmetic down their throats as possible for a 7 year old to handle. The other 17 hours in a day are out of my control.

Unfortunately, the other 17 hours of the day are where most of the breakdown in a child's life comes from. Bad home lives dramatically affect a child's performance at school. That has nothing to do with their intelligence.

Here's what I want:

• I want to be held accountable for what I am doing in the classroom. I am not afraid of accountability.
• I want families to also be held accountable for what they are doing at home. It takes a village to raise a child, right??
• I want people to stop thinking of teachers as superhuman individuals who can solve all the world's problems with one flick of their wrist. Although we may try to do this (and some believe they actually can), above all we are humans who have lives outside of our classrooms. We can only do so much.
• I want to see this documentary:

Like I said, there are so many things wrong with education in this country right now. They can't all be solved by teachers. Yes, we are the center of the issues because we are the ones that are the easiest to blame. I will admit, there are teachers out there (plenty of them) who should not be in the classroom. They don't have the heart for their kids. They need to retire. However, I would wager that for every one ineffective teacher there are ten that are willing to do whatever it takes to help their kids succeed.

It takes a village to raise a child. The End.