[walledstance]

Anecdotal, yet lived experience collected from 150+ people across my district and state while at different training and seminar events. I am a teacher with 10 years in elementary, middle school and college classrooms. I have teacher friends from across the district and state I live in who resonate these ideas displayed below. 1. Behavior is a major obstacle for any classroom 2. More Tech and AI tools than I could want 3. Education is controlled by the wider community and home environments

1. Behavior:

From my experiences and in speaking to others, teaching any subject varies not because of the material, but the behavior. When behavior is a problem no teaching, no matter who or what is doing it will get done. Behaviors can range from sleeping in class because dad made you work at his out of home construction company till 2 or 3 am to get a project complete, or it could be your mom is tired of you going to school and instead wants you to “go hit up them streets because that’s where the real motion (money) at.” These two might sound like isolated cases, but they aren’t. There are many kids who live out of cars, sell themselves to get buy and other atrocious life circumstances. Learning usually can’t happen when you’re preoccupied with keeping yourself alive or afloat. Combining AI into the educational landscape can’t and won’t fix this disinterest in learning. You will have to fix home life first. The problems arise because behaviors, in the classroom, work on a spectrum. They are better some days and others not at all. This is because behavior follows home life. It is usually modeled from home and then is acted out away from home. When Nathan (name changed) see his brother and brothers friends carrying around guns, drugs, insert something other activity not safe for most students, he will naturally mirror the act. When these behaviors present in class, a good teacher can maneuver a class back into an educational focus. But being a good teacher requires many exhausting abilities such as knowing the current generations lingo, figuring out who is a natural leader in class, who are the other kids afraid of or respect, knowing their material and presenting it to the students in a way that fits their life circumstances. Being good at teaching is a multi-headed venture across multiple disciplines. This makes managing behaviors in class a challenging and exhaustive time sink, which tends to be the main issue with teaching being interrupted or difficult in a class. One child from a difficult place can make learning a challenge for a class full of goody-two-shoes. Teachers are unnecessarily pulled away because we have no other recourse but to handle and teach children who need more support than what can be offered in a class. Behavior is one of the main issues that many people overlook.

2. More Tech and AI tools than I could want:

When I sign into my Microsoft portal I am presented with more 3rd party teaching tools than I could ever want. I use none of them because they are yet another tool to learn and be trained on, they help mostly in presenting educational material, but have nothing to do with the flow and behavior management of class, they have their own technical problems that I don’t have time to deal with because behind my back Timothy has begun passing his shoe around the room for others to sniff, and the applications are gamified learning that trivializes or simplifies the educational materials. There are many more reasons I and most of the teachers I know and have met don’t use these systems. Work with teachers to learn how much teaching environments vary and how we can implement tech tools into that classroom in a way that prioritizes education. But know many teacher’s priorities will not be for VC attention, but because we want to educate student into society. Listening to us gives you the opportunity to hear and see what educating people is actually like rather than the inert surveys and data points collected on students that are disconnected from their lives experiences. Listening to the people with boots on the classroom means possibly making a system that actually does something for classes than just become another novelty the principal and the district can feel good about.

3. Education is controlled by the wider community and home environments:

Diane Ravitch, a leading thinker in the education realm, writes about all the changes she has been a part of and seen occur. In the end, her response to these failed reforms in school is that much of what happens in communities controls what occurs in schools. If you have a society that is splintered into social groups then that will typically be reflected in the classroom. First we must adjust society standards which will then alleviate the malignant issues in our schools. But as many teachers have said to principles and school officials, “Hey, what do I know, I’m just a teacher.”