You know what's missing today in the teaching profession? Trust.
Teachers have to fill out so many forms, it's unreal. If a kid needs some help, extra tutoring say, there are forms to fill out, permissions to secure, asses to cover. No person-helping-person ethic, it's a service documented and delivered.
Sure frameworks are important, articulated curricula and scope and sequence exist for good reasons, but then come the tests, the checklists, the assessments of matrices and standards exposure and understanding. Check the line next to 'Above', 'At', or 'Below' grade level. For each kid. For all subjects. Teach to the goddamn standards. Make sure you have documentation that you've exposed all students to the standards. Guess what standards will be emphasized on the tests, lots of folks try to impart the kernel of it. That's as far as we're trusted, it seems. To assess.
I used to teach math art, line design, tesselation, budgeting... I used to teach exponential notation while teaching astronomy, my kids built orreries and separated out the salt from a mixture of salt and sand. They drew the moon nightly for a month, figured out long it would take to fly to Pluto in a 747. They wrote papers for me on their discoveries and conclusions, and we talked about reasoning, and thought processes, observation and reporting and how to support your conclusions with data. Heh. Somehow I don't feel trusted with the whole child anymore. I have to deal with my sector, hone in on key points and drive them home. That's the main goal, beauty can come after that's done.
So is it me, or is it the swing of the philosophical pendulum? Am I now no more now than a delivery mechanism? I can check the boxes that say student x knows the Pythagorean Theorem, but can I check the box that says they care? Does it matter to the data collectors? I'd like to find the upbeat here, but until the day comes that I'm trusted to teach a child to grow and learn as best they are able, I just won't feel like I matter much in the mix.
Electric Sheep.