By Michelle Pitcher
Editor-in-Chief

I get chills as Todd Anderson and his classmates climb onto their desks, exclaiming, “Oh Captain, My Captain!” as Mr. Keating bids them farewell. I watch in envy as the rag-tag group of elementary students board their magic school bus, waiting eagerly for their teacher to reveal their next destination. I cry when Mr. Feeny sends his students into the world with the words, “Believe in yourselves. Dream. Try. Do good.”

And all the while I wonder why my teachers have never inspired me as much as these fictional teachers do.

It is the fatal flaw of a mandatory education system that there must be rules and standardization. It is this simple fact that is slowly degrading teachers, turning them from mentors to instructors – and, most depressingly, to “facilitators.”

I have had teachers who have seemed so unhappy with their lives that I wonder why they haven’t just quit their jobs and started over. I have had teachers who do the same thing every year, paying no heed to the changing needs of their students. I have had teachers who put more effort into pleasing the administration than into doing what is in the students’ best interests.

And I wonder if this is where they wanted to be when they began teaching.

I have had teachers with so much pride and fear of the administration that they refused to listen to the needs of their students. The fear of not covering all of the TEKS seems to run deeper than the fear of watching a student fail.

But I want to know what you fear more: getting in trouble with your boss, or neglecting to fulfill the promise you made when you became a teacher? The promise to change lives, to impart wisdom, and to make our learning experience just a little bit better than yours was.

I have had some phenomenal teachers, ones whose brilliance was awe-inspiring, but they have never been allowed to reach their full potential. This is not fair to them, and it is certainly not fair to me. Why should my education and personal growth suffer because teachers are forbidden to deviate from a prescribed list of lessons? Where in this process do I learn about life?

I have come to the point in my column where I have to decide where to point my finger and assign blame. Truth be told, no one is faultless. The state, in its perpetual desperation to effectively measure the potential of the future working class, is stultifying education with its overbearing requirements and testing. But this column will not affect the legislation. It can only affect those teachers who read it and care enough to pay mind to it.

It would be all too easy to teach the TEKS, the whole TEKS and nothing but the TEKS, but that is not what students want, and it is not what students need.

I just ask this of every teacher who reads this column: take a step back and look at your lesson plan. Look at the students’ faces as they’re “learning” and think about how much good you could do them if you added “life” into your syllabus.