A good teacher truly makes an enormous difference. My daughter’s fifth-grade teacher is a marked improvement over the one we had last year. She’s the principal’s wife, younger, more dynamic, and very religious.
She gives children breaks to move, run around, and talk to each other throughout the day, when last year’s retirement-age teacher freaked out whenever 9-year-olds acted like 9-year-olds and refused to sit in complete silence for 2 hours in a row. The books she assigns no longer have anything to do with social-justicey themes and instead are about first settlers, resilience, and the American spirit.
The pretense that everybody is the same is finally gone. In spelling, for example, there are different tiers of achievement and everybody knows where they stand. On every assignment, it is announced how everybody ranked on the task. This is very useful because children are learning that it’s impossible to be the best at everything. Sometimes, your friend does better than you, and this is fine. This is a very important life lesson. I think it’s insane that even in college we hide from the students how they rank in relation to others in the class. If you’re such a mental invalid that you fall apart when you find out that you ranked as number 26 out of a class of 35 students, then go into treatment. Do something about yourself. But don’t turn this lack of maturity into a societal foundation.
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