A teacher pretends to be a student and sits in on several classes. There is boredom, routine, apathy, manipulation and discouragement in the typical class. Why do classes often seem to be more about killing time than about learning?
Many students lied to their teachers. But Ellen Glanz was a twenty-eight-year-old high school social studies teacher who was a student for six months to improve her teaching by gaining a fresh perspective of her school.
She found out that many students have little power and responsibility for their own education, but she did the same things!
There was the day when Glanz wanted to join her husband in helping friends, but she had homework for a math class. For the First time, she knew how teenagers feel when they think something is more important than homework. And she told her teacher a lie and everybody supported her.
As a result, the teacher, thinking that the assignment had to have been difficult, went over each question at the board while students copied the problems at their seats.
Glanz said that the system encouraged incredible passivity, and in most classes one sat and listened. A teacher, whose role is activity, simply cannot understand the passivity of the student’s role, because when she taught, her mind was going constantly—figuring out how to best present an idea.
Glanz believed that class methods promoted the feeling that students had little control over or responsibility for their own education because the agenda, was the teacher's and the teacher was convinced the subject matter was worth knowing but the student might not agree.
Students thought that primary responsibility for their achievement rested with the teacher because it was his or her responsibility to teach well rather than their responsibility to learn well.
And the sad reality, Glanz said, is the failure of teachers to recognize their tremendous communications gap with students.
Some students, believe that efforuhas little value. Glanz said she had encountered students who felt no remorse about cheating but were annoyed that a teacher had confronted them on their actions.
Now she said they were responsible for learning everything but a crackdown was only a small part of the solution.
She said the larger issue, was that educators had to recognize that teachers and students, though physically in the same school, were in separate worlds and had an on-going power struggle and they had to be sure, ourselves, that what they were teaching was worth knowing.