Teaching high school can definitely have challenges. My biggest challenge is something that perhaps you might not think of. The biggest challenge that most people think of is discipline. Believe it or not, discipline is not it. My biggest challenge as an English teacher in the Resource Department is reading. As sad as it is, most of my students can’t read. I find it incredibly sad that I have seniors that can’t read. Most of them do have some reading skills but can only read at about a second grade level.
I hear people all the time blaming different people for this epidemic. Some blame the teachers. Other people blame the students and still others blame the parents. I do not want to get into the blame game. At this point, I don’t really care whose fault it is. What I care about is the fact that they can’t read and can’t make it through life without learning how.
The state says that we have to expose special education students to grade-level standards. I think this exposure is crucial and understand their reasoning. I do, however, think that we teachers need to recognize where our students are at and meet them at that level. If our twelfth grade students are reading at a second grade level, then we should start there and work our way up. We really need to go back to the basics and teach phonics, decoding, and fluency skills.
The same concept holds true for writing. I covered a class the other day during my prep. It was a special education history class for sophomores. The class was working on research papers. Now, knowing these students as I do, I knew that working on research papers was a lost cause. These students could barely write a complete sentence. They were so lost during the whole process they honestly had no idea what was going on. When I asked the teacher about it, he said that he was just teaching the standards. That is the frustrating part. These students need to work on how to write a complete paragraph before they can learn to write an essay.
All in all, I think it is important to go back to the basics making sure that these students at least have basic reading and writing skills. We can spend all day wishing they were at a higher level but in the end, it is our job to give them the skills they will need to make it in the world. Spending all day teaching at a level that they can’t even comprehend is not doing them any justice.
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