Teachers Should Take Note

If I have any advice worth giving to fellow students it is this: Never, EVER be so foolish as to take six college classes during the summer session! I barely escaped with my sanity intact and thankfully, with my GPA enhanced. For the most part the two rounds of six week long semesters were challenging but not utterly horrible. That is until two weeks into my Algebra course the college switched instructors on us. That in itself would not have been a problem had it not been that the newly inserted adjunct instructor was utterly and in every way a complete incompetent. Interestingly enough this instructor teaches at a county high school. Even more interesting is the fact that the instructor in question managed to get several problems wrong while trying to work them out on the board in our class. One problem she got wrong three times in a row, until finally giving up and exclaiming that she had no idea how to teach us what was in our text book and if we knew she sure wished we would tell her.

No. I am not kidding.

Needless to say our class went into a state of veritable mutiny and after a great many of us complained to the college administration and even went so far as to lend our names to a formal letter of concern regarding the new instructors capacity to teach at the college level, she was unceremoniously removed from her teaching post; at least in our class.

Thankfully our short six week course was salvaged by the quick action and great talent of one of the college faculty instructors, who even though it meant extremely long work days for her, as our class met at night and she already taught all day, took pity on us and took over our class. Her commitment and effort prevented a great many students from failing the class, or dropping the class because they risked failure.

What is really disturbing about the incompetent adjunct instructor is that the high school students who are stuck with her as a teacher are really being short changed. The high school where she teaches is one that is notorious for underperforming on standardized state assessment tests. If that teacher is representative of the quality of educator there, then it is little wonder as to why.

I am sure that most teachers take pride in how their class performs. The majority of educators surely must have gone into the profession with the intention of helping students succeed. The school district's teacher shortage has however left it vulnerable to the kind of incompetence witnessed by every member of my Algebra class. Thankfully ours is a college that took the student complaints seriously and acted upon them. But what about the students in the public high school where this teacher is employed? Who speaks for them? Make no mistake that even one bad teacher who manages to retain a teaching post (because the district cannot afford to lose even those teachers who are clearly underqualified) can lead to a culture of failure, a complacency toward underperformance and an expectancy and acceptance of mediocrity.

What a staggering blow it must be to the confidence of a young student when they fail a class for no other reason than they are stuck with a substandard instructor. A student who otherwise may have done well might go through life thinking that they do not have an aptitude to learn a subject, such as math simply because their teacher wasn't qualified.

Apparently, having a teaching certification does not necessarily make one an educator. The students in my class were fortunate. We endured only a bump, a wrinkle in our education and a temporary inconvenience to our schedule due to our encounter with incompetence. But for high school students I cannot help but wonder how often such a wrinkle gives way to an academic chasm from which they never emerge.

Teachers should take note.