Voices

Student Voice: My Take on Teachers By Andrew Yager

Andrew Yager is the kind of all-American kid any high school would be happy to claim. Student Council president, National Merit finalist, all-conference track star, and state speech and debate champion, Andrew entered the United States Naval Academy this fall. The son of a cattle rancher and stay-at-home mom in a Montana town where livestock outnumber people, Andrew has strong opinions about what makes a good teacher and about his own education at 120-student Joliet High School. He shared his views with Northwest Education Editor Rhonda Barton at the No Child Left Behind Rural Conference in Billings, Montana, last spring where Andrew and a group of his peers participated in a roundtable discussion:

You can tell the difference between teachers who are excited about their job and willing to work at it, and those who aren't. Most teachers aren't. There are different things that will tell you that: Teachers who wear a tie to school, they take their job seriously. I think a lot of people, if they really saw what was going on in classrooms, would be shocked and appalled. I've had teachers who don't even come to class for days at a time. They just don't do their job.

The problem is there's no incentive for them to do their job. If they're in the union and they're tenured, it's practically impossible to get rid of them. There's a lot of apathy from administrators and state-level officials. If you're going to have a good qualified teacher, it's going to have to be a self-motivated teacher.

Instead of focusing on teaching educators to be educators, we need to teach educators to be scientists and mathematicians and they'll impart that knowledge to the kids. All the teachers who taught me something, who kept their class disciplined, were knowledgeable about their subject. I think the big solution there is money. Not just higher salaries, but pay that's based on merit, too. We should pay teachers what they're worth because you get what you pay for. When you pay $23,000 a year, you're going to get—in most cases—a $23,000-a-year educator.

The good teachers give you a lecture on the subject, explain how it works—relating it to your own experience, work with you personally on the subject, and then test based on that. I think a lot of teachers—partly because they're lazy, partly because they don't know their subject matter—are content just to give you paperwork out of the book. And that's not what teaches kids.

I think teachers can err on the other side of it, too. We're from the MTV generation but that doesn't mean we need to have MTV at school with hands-on projects and multi-media all the time. With a lot of hands-on education, teachers focus on the hands-on and forget the education. So, I think the teacher who can strike a balance between engaging kids and teaching kids something based on their knowledge of the subject matter is an effective teacher.

What can large urban high schools learn from small ones like Joliet? Never having been to a large urban high school, much less gone there for school, I guess I'd have to focus on the positive side of our school. I think one of the big things is the sense of community: teachers taking an interest in their students, students taking an interest in each other, and teachers and parents cooperating with each other. And, I think one of the things a lot of rural high schools have shown is that money isn't the issue. My school isn't rolling in money, but we use our resources well.

You ask whether I think I'm prepared for the Naval Academy. To be honest, I'm pretty concerned about the curriculum requirements compared to the knowledge base I have now, especially in the sciences and math. At a school like Joliet, we don't have the opportunity to take honors courses. That's one of the reasons why it's extremely important that our teachers not teach to the lowest common denominator but teach to the higher-level kids. They should expect everyone to rise to the occasion and if you can't, go for extra help.

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