American school teachers

Uncovering Challenges in the Classroom

In Horace's Compromise, Theodor Sizer presents a comparative study of high schools across America in the 1980s. In Tales Out of School, Patrick Welsh renders an insider's view of daily activities at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia. In Among Schoolchildren, Tracy Kidder records his meticulous year-long observation of Chris Zajac's fifth-grade class at the Kelly School in Holyoke, Massachusetts. These three accounts offer inspirational yet balanced appraisals of how diverse selves can be seen struggling daily to excel as contemporary American schoolteachers. Read collectively, these works offer a how-to manual for superior teaching, suggesting which educational strategies are the most successful and which mistakes the most common. This essay will explore the contributions of a teacher's personality, humor, dedication, passion, and ability to compromise within the classroom, comparing and contrasting the styles of such teachers as Sizer's Horace and Sister Michael, Kidder's Chris Zajac, and Patrick Welsh's autobiographical account. Sizer, Welsh, and Kidder dramatize selective schoolteachers as participants within the continuing American quest to ameliorate society and to surpass the status quo, despite the occasional faltering step.

Great teaching demands that a synergy develop between the teacher and the student. Coaching students, prompting them to be tough questioners, offering them

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ative within good teaching is the ability to foster and to maintain a self-critical stance and willingness to grow. As Sizer (1985) observes in Horace's Compromise, "A good teacher is self-confident. Teaching is being on show" (p. 181). Kidder observes that Mrs. Zajac's "physicality" itself is altered when she enters her classroom with her confidence seeming unlimited. This charismatic presence in front of a class is evidenced throughout Welsh's Tales Out of School, cleverly and tellingly subtitled A Teacher's Candid Account from the Front Lines of the American High School Today. He reminisces about his first classroom lecturing experience (approximately 150,000 classes earlier!), recalling a young woman's snickering comment, "This guy will be a pushover" (Welsh, 1987, p. 18). Yet Patrick Welsh has proved to be anything but a pushover in his more than 13 years of classroom teaching. Welsh's meditations suggest that the best of teachers represent a continuum, operating as if one great educational chain-of-being. Welsh was propelled into the classroom by his grandfather's quirky dedication to poetry, seeking to discover why he was so delighted in its quirkish sounds. Additionally, he was inspired by his father, who as a d

Category: Psychology - A