“15. Keep a file of IEP and 504 plans you’re given on students. Highlight the things that you’re obligated to do. Be sure that you implement them enough to justify compliance if the student still fails or if a parent complains. This isn’t meant to be derogatory to those students or parents, but most of these accommodations, in my experience, are unnecessary and ultimately counterproductive. Most of the useful ones are things that, as a good teacher, you do anyway. However, some parents demand IEP’s and 504’s as ways of “insuring” that their children pass classes, and if they don’t, the parents will come for your head. Since you can expect no sympathy from the staff at your school (these are, after all, legally binding documents) be ready to defend yourself. If you can’t explain how you’ve complied with the requirements of a student’s accommodations, you’ll be hot water, and you don’t need that kind of grief.”

Um, fooling an IEP in not about keeping you the teacher out of hot water but truly serving the student. Implementing them enough might be enough to get a child a C, but if you implement the differentiated instruction to its fullest that might mean a higher grade. A parent can demand an IEP all they want, but the actual document is constructed by a team of educators who are trying to serve the student.

I also have a child that some teachers can’t/wont teach.

Teachers, both new and old, draw a paycheck to teach the children in their class. When they decide to only teach to the middle of the bell curve, they are not doing what they are paid to do, and kids like mine get thrown under the bus.

I understand that having a wildly mixed achievement level classroom may not be their choice, but they choose to draw a paycheck from an insitution that has that made that policy decision. Deciding to take a job from a school that has mixed achievement level classes and then deciding to teach only some of the students is at least lazy and also dishonest.

I think Margo/Mom and Granny are over-analyzing the list and being unfair to its author. It seems contradictory to say I’ve no objection at all to a teacher’s saying there are certain children he or she cannot teach. What I do object to is the idea that these children can be ignored by the teacher. Children that refuse to learn, look for fights, soil the atmosphere with foul language and sexual innuendo, and whose bent for derailing the education of entire classrooms is their raison d’être should not only be ignored but kicked the hell out of school. (Unfortunately, we all know they are not.) This raises the possibility that we may be talking about two totally different kinds of unteachable students.

Does Margo/Mom believe that, given the mindset of students teachers must deal with in today’s crude and uncivil hip-hop society, and given the mounds of paperwork, the lack of support by and outright hostility of administrators, and the exhaustion that coping with all this entails, new teachers should be able to reach every kid in their classrooms and that, if they don’t, they are not doing their jobs?

When I began teaching (as a GTA at a division 1 university in the midwest), I had three days of “orientation,” none of which gave me any practical idea of what to do in the classroom. The three-hour, once-a-week, seminar class was a complete waste of time.

The only thing that helped me succeed as a teacher was a desire to teach, and memories of what I’d seen my favorite teachers do that was effective in a college classroom. I would have cheerfully given a limb for advice like this.

There’s a lot that makes sense. There’s some that an experienced teacher, one who’s been at it a while longer, could safely ignore, but this seems to be advice for *new* teachers, primarily those who have had a lot of theory crammed down their throats with little to no practical experience (student teaching only goes so far) to back it up.

Where the new teacher is concerned, this advice could mean the difference between staying with the career they’ve chosen, or leaving after a year–or possibly less.

I did read through your entire list and noted that in addition to specifying your lack of responsibility for reaching the unreachable you also are pretty plain about only following IEPs enough to CYA.

I have a son who may graduate this school year–the jury is still out. But the attitudes that you express about students “making a choice” with regard to engagement and learning didn’t just show up in high school. They were first expressed by experts at the kindergarten level. The first request for testing got me a psych intern who opined that there was nothing really wrong–he just didn’t want to learn. It was a full year later, in another school (and after an outside evaluation), before I could get confirmation of actual learning difficulties–and there was still a heavy preference for focusing on the behavioral ramifications (mainly because with that label they could move him on to yet another school) rather than learning disabilities.

It has been a long, long road, and I have encountered many teachers who would accept your belief that some kids (including mine) are just unreachable. This also helps them to define me as “part of the problem” because I am “in denial” that this is so. None would say out loud (and I wonder if you are writing under a pseudonym to publish this) where a parent can hear that they really believe that most of the things in an IEP are just silly and that the ones that make sense they would do anyway. It is very frustrating, as a parent, to see this kind of duplicity in action.

I have to go back to Granny’s suggestion. Why not just be honest that you accept no responsibility for the education of certain students in your class–and believe that they cannot be reached (for whatever reason). Write that into the IEP. Parents would love it. There are consequences. The district would have to pay for an appropriate education elsewhere, but hey, wouldn’t that be better all around?

The point about pandering to a warped view of the world relates specifically to that school of educator who continually cripples students by only teaching them what he or she believes is relevant to their lives.

Imagine being a student in an inner city school and having everything related back to the street because that’s all your teacher thinks you know. How would you feel about yourself, and your lot in life, if you were treated like that?

You’re right that human beings learn. All their lives, in fact. The only thing I’d add is that children learn in school, until their taught not to. When educators confine children to intellectual closets in the name of “relevance”, those children learn that school isn’t worth it, and start looking for another way out.