The Traditional Classroom Vs. Today’s Classroom

I recently returned to a teaching position at a junior high school after two years of retirement from a 34 year secondary teaching and counseling career. The opportunity enabled me to observe first hand changes that have occurred in the educational environment in only the 5 years since my retirement. I was not totally surprised since I had witnessed the beginning of the changing educational trends in my latter years of teaching. The fact that I love teaching and that I missed the interaction with and instruction of students was the catalyst for my return.

I had 5 classes of 7th grade ‘regular’ English students with 32-35 students per class. The area from which these students were drawn was middle to upper middle class. My student roll was made up of mixed ethnicity and about the same number of males and females. Just as many 7th graders, these students were prone to short attention spans and many distractions. This did not surprise me because I am very aware that being a preteen is not easy time for many.

What did bother me, however, was students reluctance to participate in the learning environment except to challenge my instructions. They questioned everything. They wanted to know why they should have to take notes in my class when other teachers gave them the notes in the form of handouts; why they had to sit at their desks and couldn’t work in groups like they do in other classes; why their work had to be handwritten and not typed on the computer; why they had to have home work; why they had to sit straight in their seats and not slouch over or sit to the side in their desks. The list of whys went on forever.

I discovered that almost all of my students had no idea of how to use cursive and that their printing was scrawled in such a haphazard manner that it would make it easier for any teacher to have students type rather than write. There was no knowledge of sentence structure, grammar, punctuation or paragraphing. The students simply wrote with no idea of the tools necessary for writing.

After I was hired, I was told by the principal of the school and other teachers that I was not to be observed teaching grammar lessons. Students, I was informed, learn by the writing process and not by the teaching of grammar and mechanics. My unappreciated response to that was that it was like telling a mechanic to fix a car without the understanding of the parts of a car and how they function.