I’ve probably written this in a post before, but it bears repeating. One of the best teaching professors I ever had said, “The goal of any good teacher is to become increasingly unimportant.” To me, that meant teachers are successful when they help students learn how to be independent, critical thinkers–self-starters who can be trusted to troubleshoot and problem solve yet still ask for assistance when needed–people who aren’t afraid of a challenge or obstacles or even failure. My goal was to give my students tools to meet those challenges and overcome obstacles, to learn from failure and become resilient. I wanted to equip students for all of life, not just work.

But here in North Carolina and elsewhere in our country, education has become more of a means to an end. The general attitude seems to be “get those general ed classes out of the way” (I heard that ALL the time). They seemed to say to me, “Those classes, especially English and math, are just annoying steps a person must take to be pumped into “the pipeline” and “enter the workforce.” Gaining an education that helps people live better lives, no matter what they do for a living, or if they choose to stay home and raise children or pursue their art, has been replaced with training for a particular, specific field with a goal of employment, not life-changing education.

So many of the intangibles that occur when students are truly engaged in an educational experience are lost when the emphasis is on training for local, narrowly focused workforce development based on current trends that will shift and change with every economic bubble that bursts. In the last few years of my teaching, I yearned for the days when so many of my students actually enjoyed going to school, who relished simply learning something they never knew about before. They built relationships with their classmates, studied and ate meals together, listened to music, played video games between classes and had spirited discussions in and outside of the classroom. I remember the days when students would work together, pouring hours of work into extra-curricular activities like producing a play, some of them spending hours in rehearsal on top of all of their classes and after school jobs, but they did it because they wanted to–they had a passion for it, even if they had other long-term vocational plans.

There was a time at the college where I taught when all students in the college transfer program were required to take a literature class. There they had a chance to stretch themselves by reading complex texts that are at the foundation of not only ours but the world’s culture and government. Now, a student can get either an Associate of Science or even an Associate of Arts degree without having to take a literature course at all. How can that be?

In addition, more and more in our community colleges, three disturbing trends have taken hold–asynchronous online learning for developmental English students, high school students earning high school and college English credit for the same college-level class, and so-called accelerated classes. I helped to develop some of these courses and taught them, so you would think that I would be a proponent, but in my defense, I was misled in all of these cases into thinking the situations were temporary or that only advanced students would be taking these classes. I feel like a fool. That’s an understatement.

I am mortified.

In my and the college’s defense, the developmental co-requisite English class that I had developed, which was part of North Carolina’s third iteration of developmental education in less than a decade, was not intended to be an online program. The plan was that all developmental classes be taught in the classroom. Then, in March of 2020, when we were soon to roll out our new co-requisite English classes, the pandemic hit. All classes, including the co-requisite English courses, were forced to go online.

It didn’t go well.

Come back soon and I’ll explain.