What is your greatest challenge as an educator?

Answer 1

Just dealing with those kind of kids who won't participate or do what they are asked. Everything else is fairley easy.

Another Perspective:

While it is not popular to say, dealing with difficult parents and administrators is the greatest challenge as an educator.

Consider for a moment that your car breaks down. You obviously take it to a repair shop. When you have done this, you do not hang over the shoulder of the mechanic and direct him as to the best way to proceed. He is the expert.

Follow me a moment longer on the analogy.

Everyone has been to school, K-12 at least (a few drop outs notwithstanding). Having done such, many feel they are experts in education. They certainly know what is best for their children. Little argument there actually. In most situations, they may know what is best for their child.

Most teachers have a plan for teaching. It sort of defeats that plan to share it all out right. No, teachers must share goals and be prepared to explain methods and such as applies to students, but part of the plan is the right of the teacher to keep private. What we do as teachers, although we are the trained experts, is (surprise) guess work. Same as any other profession (go see a doctor for the first time with some odd ailment and see just how much guessing he does). This makes teaching difficult enough, but challenging enough to keep teachers teaching. Add to this challenge a parent who questions every move a teacher makes, and you have a recipe for infinite frustration.

As a communications arts teacher, I was instructing students in areas they hated. the number one fear of every American is public speaking. It is a harmless activity that the teacher of must practically force students to do.

I can best explain with a real world experience:

In my second year as a teacher, I had a student in my class who was terrified of nearly everything, and his parents supported his fear by allowing him to run away from and quit everything. What I saw with him my first day in class was an intelligent young man, a funny person, humorous, who had a gift to share. I also saw someone too terrified to share it.

We started each year with some sort of speaking before the class. The young man refused, preferring to take a zero rather than to face his fear. Throughout the first trimester, I tried everything to encourage him to take a chance and share; he refused, very nearly failing the first trimester. In the second trimester, I was able to convince him to at least stand in front of the room behind a lectern for three minutes. He spoke not one word and trembled through the whole thing. I was able to convince him to join the Wrestling team during this time as well, and used it to help him gain confidence. By the third trimester, he was able to stand in front of the class and read from a script he hid behind.

Through all this, I was visited nearly daily by his mother and sometimes his father, and my principal (once by the superintendent), listening as they complained that I was too tough, it was too hard for their son to speak up in class, that it would scar him. they tried to have him removed to another classroom, but were not able to because of class sizes. They sat in and observed during my classes. In all I devoted probably nearly fifty percent of my time for that class to the student and his parents (time I took away from my family rather than the other students).

The end result: four years later, the young man graduated high school. Through out the next four years, he continued to stretch himself, fighting down the fear. At the end of his senior year, he graduated salutatorian and gave his speech from memory in front of a crowd of more than 3,000 people.

Had I done as his parents pushed me to do, I doubt he would have completed high school at all.

While I had the support of the administration over me, the parents in this situation (and many more I haven't shared) tried time and again to obstruct me in my job, the career I was trained to do. I am certain that had they supported my efforts instead of working to derail them, I and their son still would have been successful. Perhaps though it would not have take an entire year to succeed.

Answer 2

STUDENT DISCIPLINE